CHAPTER 194: After

POV: Avalon Pierce

By eight PM the apartment was quiet for the first time in forty eight hours.

Elena was asleep, Maya had gone home, Margaret had stopped calling, Kim’s office had issued its final statement for the day and Rachel’s piece had done what Rachel’s pieces did — cut through everything she understood that the true story was always more powerful than the manufactured one.

Selene was in the shower.

He sat on the kitchen floor.

He thought about Susan Park sitting across from Selene in the first symposium talking about infrastructure funding, the way she’d said they fund the program but never what makes the program possible. He’d believed every word. They all had. Because the words were true even if the person saying them was selling everything they said to someone who wanted the foundation destroyed.

That was the thing about Daniel Reyes’s strategy. He hadn’t recruited liars. He’d recruited someone whose genuine insight made her useful cover for what she was actually doing.

The door opened.

Selene came out in the robe, hair damp, and looked at him on the floor and sat down across from him without comment because the floor needed no explanation between them anymore.

“She meant what she said,” Selene said. “About infrastructure and the gap.”

“I know,” he said.

“She just also meant the other thing,” she said.

“People can mean two contradictory things simultaneously,” he said.

“She leaned her head back against the cabinet.

“I’m tired,” she said. 

“I know,” he said.

“The tiredness that comes from people,” she said. “From discovering again that someone you trusted was something else underneath.”

“Yes,” he said.

“When does it stop,” she said.

“It stops when we stop building something worth taking apart,” he said. “Which means it doesn’t stop.”

She looked at him.

“That’s not comforting,” she said.

“No,” he said. “But it’s true.”

“Say something comforting,” she said.

“Elena slept for three consecutive hours this afternoon,” he said.

She smiled.

“That is genuinely comforting,” she said.

“I thought so,” he said.

She reached across.

He took her hand.

“I want to talk about something that isn’t any of this,” she said.

“Then talk,” he said.

“The speech,” she said. “At the ceremony before everything with Sandra Cole, Daniel, Catherine and Susan.”

“What about it,” he said.

“I put the pages down,” she said. “I spoke without them.”

“Yes,” he said.

“It was the right thing,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking about why it was right.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“Because the pages were what I was supposed to say,” she said. “And the room needed what was actually true. ” She paused. “I keep thinking about how often I do that.You know, saying the appropriate version instead of the true version.”

“You don’t,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “With you.”

He looked at her.

“Tell me something true then,” he said. “Right now. Something you haven’t said.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“I’m scared about what comes next,” she said. “ The next part of us. Elena growing. Who we become when the crisis stops and it’s just—life. Ordinary life.”

“What scares you about ordinary life,” he said.

“That I won’t know how to be in it,” she said. “I’ve been surviving things for so long. Fighting things. Building things under pressure.” She looked at their hands. “What if I don’t know how to just be happy without something threatening it.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“You’ve been happy,” he said. “On the kitchen floor at two AM. In the nursery at six watching Elena look at the light. Walking on the beach in October when she was still theoretical.” He paused. “You’ve been happy. You just keep waiting for it to be taken away.”

She looked at him.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s not going to be taken away,” he said.

“You can’t promise that,” she said.

“No,” he said. “But I can promise that whatever comes next we’re in it the same way we’ve been in everything else.”

“Together,” she said.

“Together,” he said.

She looked at him.

At this man on the kitchen floor in yesterday’s shirt who had run two red lights and tracked hospital routes and chosen a window for the morning light and stayed on lines until people stopped crying and had learned, slowly then all at once, to stop managing what she needed to know.

“Avalon,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I love you,” she said. “Not as a fact I’ve established. I love you the way I loved you standing at that podium when I put the pages down. Without the safety net.”

He looked at her.

Something moved across.

“I love you,” he said. “The way I couldn’t remember your laugh for ten years and it turns out I never forgot it. It was just the most buried thing I had.”

She felt that in her chest.

In her throat.

In several places simultaneously.

“Come here,” she said.

He moved across the floor to her.

She put her hand against his face the way she had the night everything changed.

He turned into it the way he always did.

“We’re not surviving anything tonight,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

“Tonight we’re just—”

“Here,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He kissed her.

She kissed him back.

The kitchen floor and the quiet apartment and Elena asleep in the nursery and outside San Francisco entirely unaware that inside two people had finally, completely, without reservation, chosen each other with nothing threatening it for the first time.

His phone buzzed against the floor beside him.

He ignored it.

It buzzed again.

And again.

Selene pulled back slightly.

“Answer it,” she said.

“It can wait,” he said.

“It’s buzzed three times,” she said.

“It can wait,” he said again.

She reached past him and looked at the screen.

Her face changed.

“Avalon,” she said.

Something in her voice made him look.

Three messages from an unknown number.

The first: Mr Pierce. You don’t know me. My name is Jonathan Reeves. David Kim arrested my father tonight.

The second: My father is Daniel Reyes. Reyes is his mother’s name. His real name is Daniel Reeves.

The third: He’s my father. But he’s also yours. We share a father, Mr Pierce. I have proof. I’ve been trying to tell you for six months.