CHAPTER 50: Ordinary

POV: Avalon Pierce

He woke up before she did.

That had become its own kind of ritual — waking first, lying still, listening to her breathe. Not from anxiety the way it used to be, that vigilant monitoring of whether she was okay, whether her wound was healing, whether the night had been kind to her.

Just because she was there and the morning was quiet and some part of him still hadn’t fully accepted that this was his life now — this woman, this bed, this particular quality of early light through the curtains without needing a moment to verify it.

She was lying on her side facing away from him. Her breathing was slow and even and the scar on her abdomen was hidden but he knew it was there, paler now than it had been, doing what the doctors said it would do.

He got up without waking her.

The kitchen at 6 AM was its own country.

He made coffee badly — ground too coarse, water slightly too hot — and it tasted exactly like the effort involved, which was not much, but was fine. He stood at the counter and drank it and looked at the city beginning its day below and thought about nothing in particular.

That was new.

Six months ago his mind had never been quiet. Every morning had arrived with a running inventory — the company, the board, the lawsuit, the next threat. His brain had treated stillness as a problem to solve.

Now he just stood in his kitchen in the early light and drank bad coffee and listened to the city.

The news about Hale had moved fast. Federal charges formally filed, assets frozenand his position in Pierce Holdings legally encumbered pending trial. Margaret and their securities team had moved on the twelve percent within the hour and secured a significant portion before the market fully processed what was available.

Thomas had been useful. Infuriatingly, honestly useful.

Diana had taken the deal. He hadn’t heard from her since the call and he didn’t expect to.

The board was restructuring, and new members were being vetted. The company was not just stable — it was, according to the latest financial reports Margaret had sent, performing better than it had in three years.

By any measure, they’d won.

He was still figuring out what to do with winning.

Selene appeared in the kitchen doorway at seven, wearing his sweater, her hair entirely unsettled from sleep.

“That coffee smells wrong,” she said.

“It tastes wrong too.”

“Why did you make it?”

“It was early. My judgment was compromised.”

She went to the machine, emptied what he’d made, started again with the competence of someone who took coffee seriously. He watched her do it and felt something simple and uncomplicated move through his chest.

“How’s the side?” he asked.

She turned and looked at him.

“You said you’d stop asking that.”

“I said I’d stop asking it at night. It’s morning.”

“That’s a technicality.”

“I’m a CEO. Technicalities are my native language.”

She almost smiled then back to the coffee before he could see that.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Better than fine, I actually keep forgetting it’s there.”

“Good.”

She made two cups properly and brought them to the counter and they stood side by side looking out at the city the way they’d started doing — without planning it, without declaring it a thing they did, just both ending up at the same window.

“Maya texted me this morning,” Selene said.

“How is she?”

“Strange.” A pause. “Happy strange, like something shifted.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “She wouldn’t say what.”

Avalon thought about Maya. 

“Good,” he said. “She deserves something of her own.”

Selene looked at him sideways. “When did you start having feelings about my sister?”

“I’ve always had feelings about your sister. She’s funny and terrifying in equal measure.”

“She’d like that you said that.”

“Don’t tell her. She doesn’t need the encouragement.”

Selene laughed — the real one.

They didn’t have anywhere to be until eleven.

That was unusual enough that neither of them quite knew what to do with it. The last several months had been structured entirely around urgency — depositions, board meetings, police stations and hospital rooms. The absence of urgency felt unfamiliar, like a quiet that might be hiding something.

“We should do something normal,” Selene said.

“Define normal.”

“Something people do when nobody is trying to steal their company or shoot them.”

“That’s a low bar.”

“It’s our bar. Work with it.”

They ended up walking. No destination, no agenda, just out into the city on a morning that had decided to be unexpectedly kind — cool but clear, the kind of San Francisco day that made you understand why people stayed despite everything it cost them.

Selene walked beside him with her hands in the pockets of her jacket, her steps easy, nothing careful about the way she moved anymore. He noticed because he’d been watching her move carefully for months and the difference was significant.

She was healed.

Not metaphorically. Her body had done what bodies do when you give them time.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“You’re walking differently.”

“People generally do when they’re not recovering from a gunshot wound.”

“You look—” He stopped.

“What?”

“Like yourself before all of this.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Not quite before,” she said. “Good different.”

They walked through Noe Valley as it woke up — coffee shops opening, a dog walker managing six dogs with varying enthusiasm, a small child on a scooter moving with terrifying confidence. He’d missed ordinary things.

He hadn’t realized how much until now.

They stopped at a bakery that Selene pointed at wordlessly and went in and came out with pastries neither of them needed and ate them on a bench in the weak morning sun like people with nothing pressing.

“I’ve been thinking about the company,” Selene said, pulling apart a croissant. “About what comes next. Not the crisis management, I mean the actual future.”

“What about it?”

“I want to do something with it. Not just protect it but actually build something.” She looked at the croissant. “Nene built Pierce Holdings around certain principles. The company has drifted from those, I want to bring them back.”

“What kind of principles?”

“The kind that care about more than return on investment.” She looked at him. “I have ideas and I have been writing them down.”

“Show me.”

“When they’re ready.” A pause. “Soon.”

He looked at her — this woman who’d arrived in his life as a contractual obligation and had quietly become the most interesting person in it — and thought about how strange it was that the inheritance had brought them here. That Nene’s manipulation from beyond the grave had produced, somehow, this.

“She knew,” he said.

Selene looked at him. “What?”

“Nene. She knew what she was doing. Not just forcing us together — she knew we’d find our way to this. To actually building something together.” He looked at the city spread below them. “She was always about the long game.”

Selene was quiet for a moment.

“I think she’d like us,” she said.

“She’d be insufferable about being right.”

“Absolutely.” A pause. “I think about her sometimes. Whether she’d recognize what the company is becoming.”

“She’d recognize it,” Avalon said. “She built the bones of it. We’re just—”

“Filling it in,” Selene finished.

They sat on the bench in the thin morning sun eating pastries they didn’t need in a city that had tried to destroy them and hadn’t managed it, and the morning was quiet and ordinary and entirely, completely enough.

His phone buzzed.

He looked at it.

A calendar reminder he’d set three months ago and forgotten about entirely.

Tomorrow was their one year anniversary.

One year since a lawyer had read a will aloud in a room and both their lives had changed entirely.

He looked at Selene.

She was watching a pigeon conduct an aggressive negotiation with someone’s abandoned coffee cup and hadn’t noticed him go still.

He put his phone away.

Started thinking.