CHAPTER 151: Her Name

POV: Selene Castellano

She told Maya on the phone as they were waking home.

Maya screamed again.

“Elena,” Maya said when she could speak.

“Elena,” Selene confirmed.

A long silence.

“Lena,” Maya said. Her voice had changed completely. “Our Elena.”

“Our Elena,” Selene said.

Avalon was looking at the pavement.

She reached over and took his hand.

They told Margaret in person.

When they told her the name she sat very still.

Then she opened her desk drawer and took something out.

A photograph.

Old and small.

Nene, young, holding a baby Selene didn’t recognize.

“Avalon’s father,” Margaret said. “First week home.” She set it on the desk. “She used to say the first week was when you understood what you’d been building toward your whole life.” She looked at them. “She’d say the same thing now.”

Selene looked at the photograph.

She understood it completely.

Amara’s response when Selene told her the next morning was characteristically Amara.

“Good,” she said. “Strong name.” She turned back to her screen. “The land trust meeting is at ten. Grace Kim has questions about the property assessment timeline.”

Selene sat down.

“That’s all you’re going to say,” she said.

“What else would I say,” Amara said, not looking up. “You’re naming her after someone who mattered. It’s right. The meeting is at ten.”

Selene looked at her for a moment.

Then opened her laptop.

“The property assessment timeline,” she said. “Tell me.”

K

James said: “Good. She’ll have something to live up to. That’s useful.”

Kevin Walsh said: “My mother is going to cry when I tell her.”

Dr. Ruth said nothing for a long moment.

Then: “You’re giving her a name that holds something real. That’s the best thing you can give anyone.”

That evening Selene sat in what would eventually be the baby’s room.

Currently a spare room that held boxes and a chair and the specific neutrality of a space that hadn’t decided what it was yet.

She sat in the chair.

Put her hand on her stomach.

“Elena,” she said.

The name out loud in an empty room.

It sat differently than it ever had.

Her daughter’s name.

A name that said: someone who came before you mattered enough to be remembered forward.

“You’re not her,” Selene said quietly. “You’re entirely yourself. But you carry her name because she was real and she was here and she deserved to be remembered by someone who is going to live a long, full, noisy life.”

She paused.

“I’m told that’s what children do,” she said. “Noisy lives. I’m counting on it.”

Avalon found her there at nine.

He stood in the doorway looking at her in the chair in the empty room.

“What are you doing,” he said.

“Introducing them,” she said.

He came and sat on the floor beside the chair.

Leaned his back against it.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

“We need to paint it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And furniture.”

“Yes.”

“Maya will have opinions.”

“Maya has opinions about everything,” Selene said. “That’s why we keep her.”

He smiled at the wall.

“Elena Pierce,” he said. Trying the full name.

“Elena Castellano Pierce,” she said.

He looked up at her.

“Both,” he said.

“He settled back against the chair.

She kept her hand on his shoulder.

The room around them, empty, waiting, the patience of a space about to become something it had never been before.

Everything about to become something it had never been before.