CHAPTER 51: One Year

POV: Selene Castellano

She found the note at 7 AM.

An actual handwritten note, folded once, sitting against her coffee cup like it had always lived there.

She picked it up.

Wear something you love not something appropriate. I’ll be back at six. — A

She read it twice.

Looked around the kitchen like he might still be there.

He wasn’t and his keys were gone. The apartment had the specific quiet of someone who’d left early on purpose.

She looked at his handwriting — slightly cramped, leaning right, and felt something warm and uncomplicated move through her.

One year.

She hadn’t forgotten. She’d just assumed they’d acknowledge it quietly the way they acknowledged most things — without ceremony or performance. A recognition between two people who’d stopped needing occasions to say what they meant.

Apparently Avalon had other ideas.

Maya called at nine.

“He texted me,” she said, without preamble.

“Good morning to you too.”

“Avalon. He texted asking about your favourite restaurant, the one near the Ferry Building.”

“He did not.”

“He absolutely did. He also asked whether you preferred flowers or something else and I told him you’d never admit to preferring flowers but you do, so he should get flowers.”

Selene sat down on the couch.

“You two have been texting?”

“Apparently we have now.” A pause. “He asked three follow-up questions. Very thorough, like he was preparing a legal brief.”

Selene didn’t respond for a moment.

“He’s never done anything like this,” she said quietly more to herself.

“I know,” Maya said, gentler now. “That’s kind of the point.”

After she hung up, Selene sat with the note in her hand and thought about the man who’d married her as a contractual obligation and had spent his morning texting her sister about flower preferences.

The distance between that person and the one who’d stood in a deposition room admitting love under oath.

It wasn’t small.

She wore the green dress she’d bought eighteen months ago with Maya — dark green cotton, small gold details at the collar that Maya had insisted on and she’d been glad of ever since.

She looked at herself in the mirror and felt loved.

He came back at six exactly.

She heard his key in the lock, gave herself five seconds, then walked into the hallway and found him standing there in a dark jacket, no tie, holding flowers.

Peonies.

Her absolute favorite, which she had never once mentioned to him.

“Maya,” she said.

“Maya,” he confirmed.

She took them. Looked at him.

“You wrote me a note,” she said.

“On paper. Yes.”

“You’ve never done that before.”

“I’ve done a lot of things this year I’d never done before.” He said it simply. 

“Ready?”

The restaurant was small and entirely wrong for a billionaire anniversary dinner.

A corner table near the water with a candle and a view of the bay. The owner greeted Avalon by name and nothing about the evening was performative.

“You come here alone,” Selene said.

“Used to.”

“What changed?”

“I stopped wanting to be somewhere nice by myself.” He picked up the menu. “It loses something.”

She looked at him across the table. In the candlelight, he looked younger. The version of himself that existed when he forgot to be observed.

“A year,” she said.

“A year.”

“We should say something meaningful.”

“I don’t have a speech,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what to say since this morning and everything sounds either insufficient or excessive.”

“Then say the small true thing.”

He set down the menu.

“I didn’t know what this would be,” he said. “When the will was read or when I called you. I thought I was solving a problem, fulfilling a requirement, it was completely mapped.” A pause. “I had no idea.”

“About what?”

“Any of it. About you and what it would be like to actually let someone—” He stopped. “I’d been alone in for a long time, not lonely. There’s a difference, although I made my peace with it.” His voice was quiet. “And then you came back and I had to unmake that peace entirely. It was the most inconvenient thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Selene felt her throat tighten.

“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” she said.

He looked uncertain.

“Inconvenient,” she repeated. “Like I disrupted something you’d decided was fine. As if you’d made a perfectly good arrangement with loneliness and I came back and ruined it.” She reached across the table. “That’s exactly what love is, Avalon.”

He looked at her hand on his.

“Happy anniversary,” he said.

“Happy anniversary.”

They walked home along the water afterwards.

The city doing its nighttime thing — lights on the bay, distant music, the particular smell of San Francisco after dark that she’d grown up with and left and returned to find entirely unchanged.

“Tonight we just walk,” she said.

“Walk,” he agreed.

They did.

Her phone buzzed at ten PM.

Maya. 

How was your date? I also have something to share with you….

I met someone, his name is Kofi and I need to tell you something about him that’s either very funny or very complicated

Selene smiled.

Then the fourth message arrived and the smile disappeared.