CHAPTER 184: The Speech

POV: Selene Castellano

She wrote it at three in the morning while Elena slept.

She wrote seven drafts.

Deleted six and the seventh was four pages and said everything.

Avalon found her at four, sitting at the kitchen counter with the pages in front of her and a cold coffee she’d forgotten to drink. He  looked at her face and said nothing, just went to the machine and made her a fresh cup and set it beside her then read the pages over her shoulder.

She waited as he read slowly.

When he finished he stepped back and she turned to look at him.

“Well,” she said.

“Read it to me out loud,” he said. 

“It’s four in the morning.”

“I know what time it is,” he said. “Read it.”

She picked up the pages.

Read it out loud in their kitchen at four in the morning while Elena slept and San Francisco did its near-silent thing outside and Avalon leaned against the counter with his arms crossed and listened.

When she finished the kitchen was very quiet.

“That’s it,” he said.

“It’s too personal,” she said.

“That’s why it’s it,” he said.

“I talk about Elena,” she said. “The first Elena. In front of a room full of people.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And Nene,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“And the displacement bonds,” she said. “And Edward Pierce dying in Marin. And Rosa Gutierrez holding up a piece of paper.”

“Yes,” he said. “All of it. That’s the speech.”

She looked at the pages.

“What if I can’t get through it,” she said.

“You’ll get through it,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you,” he said. “You’ll get through it because the people in that room need to hear it and you’ve never let needing stop you from doing something.”

She looked at him.

At this man at four in the morning in the kitchen they’d built a life around.

“Come back to bed,” she said.

“In a minute,” he said.

“Now,” she said.

He looked at her.

Something in the way she said it.

“Selene,” he said.

“Four to six weeks,” she said. “It’s been four weeks.”

He went very still.

“Dr Okafor said—”

“I saw Dr Okafor yesterday,” she said. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted to surprise you.”

“What did she say?” he asked.

Selene held his gaze and said nothing.

She allowed the silence to be the  answer.

He crossed the kitchen in three steps.

The ceremony was at the Herbst Theatre on a Tuesday evening in September.

Six hundred people in the kind of room that knew how to be impressed and was waiting to be.

Selene stood backstage with Elena in Avalon’s arms and her speech in her hand.

“You look terrified,” Maya said beside her.

“I’m not terrified,” Selene said.

“You’re absolutely terrified,” Maya said. “Your left hand is doing that thing.”

Selene looked at her left hand.

It was doing the thing.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You’re fine and terrified,” Maya said.

 “Okay,” Selene agreed.

Kofi was beside Maya, his hand at the small of her back, both of them dressed like they understood that tonight mattered and had chosen accordingly.

Amara appeared from somewhere with the composed authority of someone who had built the structure that made tonight possible and was not going to let nerves undo it.

“Six hundred people,” Amara said. “The Chronicle is here and two other foundations who’ve reached out about the stability framework. Kevin Walsh is in the front row with Evelyn and Gloria Reyes.”

“Gloria came,” Selene said.

“Gloria and Esperanza both,” Amara said. “Front row.”

Selene looked at Avalon.

He was looking at Elena, who was awake and assessing backstage at the Herbst Theatre with the focused gravity she brought to all new environments.

He looked up and found Selene’s eyes.

Something passed between them that didn’t need words.

Everything they’d built. Everything it had cost and everything standing in the front row of a theatre on a Tuesday in September waiting to hear what they were actually building toward.

“Ready?” Amara said.

“Yes,” Selene said.

She walked out to six hundred people and put the speech on the podium and looked at the room.

She saw Kevin Walsh in the front  row, Evelyn, Gloria and Esperanza Reyes, seventy nine years old, sitting with the specific stillness of someone who had been waiting a long time and had finally arrived somewhere.

She looked at her speech, then she put it down.

“I was going to read this,” she said into the microphone. “It's four pages and carefully written and very true.” She looked at the room. “But Esperanza Reyes is in the front row and she once told me that if we were going to do this it needed to be real, not a ceremony, and I think she’s right.”

She looked at the pages and pushed them aside.

“My name is Selene Castellano Pierce. Two years ago a dead woman’s will forced me into a room with a man I’d spent ten years avoiding and asked us to build something together or lose everything. I thought it was manipulation. I was right. I also didn’t understand yet that the most important things in my life were going to arrive through exactly that kind of inconvenient, unrequested and impossible situation.” She paused. “My daughter’s name is Elena. She’s five weeks old and she’s backstage right now probably assessing this building for structural integrity. She’s named after a daughter I lost before I knew she was there. She was alive for four minutes and seventeen seconds and someone held her because I couldn’t and I didn’t know that for ten years and when I found out it changed the shape of everything.”

The room was completely silent.

“The foundation exists because of that shape,” she said. “Because of what gets lost when systems decide that some people are less important than efficiency. Because of Rosa Gutierrez and Esperanza Reyes and Gloria and Kevin Walsh’s forty two young people and a man named Darius who is employed and housed and has a case manager who knows his name.” She looked at Esperanza. “Because of an eighty one year old man who died in Marin last month having finally said what he needed to say.”

She looked at the room.

“We are building toward a world where nobody has to wait forty five years to be acknowledged,” she said. “Where the gap between what people need and what systems provide is closed not by charity but by dignity. Where a question asked fifteen years ago by a woman who didn’t live to hear the answer keeps being answered by the people she trusted with it.” She paused. “We’re not there. We’re still building toward it and we will always keep building toward it. That’s the point. The building is the point.”

She stepped back from the microphone.

The room was quiet for one full seconds before it erupted into claps of approval 

Backstage afterward Avalon was waiting with Elena, who had apparently decided that the applause was interesting and was looking toward the sound with the expression of someone storing it away.

He looked at Selene.

“You put the pages down,” he said.

“Esperanza was in the front row,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I watched.”

She took Elena from him.

“Well,” she said.

“You just gave the best speech I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“Don’t get smug about it,” she said.

“I’m not smug,” he said. “I’m—”

“Proud,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. 

She looked at him.

“Take us home,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

They were almost at the car when her phone rang, it was Rachel.

She answered.

“That speech,” Rachel said. “I need to tell you something. I was recording the audio only, for my own notes, I wasn’t going to publish without permission.” She paused. “Selene, someone else was recording too. I saw them. It was a man I didn’t recognize and he left immediately after you finished.” Another pause. “He wasn’t a press either. I know everyone here but I don’t know him.”

Selene looked at Avalon.

“Who was he?” Selene asked.

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “But he was specifically recording you not the ceremony.”