CHAPTER 63: The Fact of You

POV: Selene Castellano

Nobody wanted to cook.

That was the first thing. They’d been in a federal courthouse for most of the day and before that a hotel room and before that a night of not sleeping and standing at a stove making something deliberate felt impossible in the way only genuinely exhausted people understand.

Avalon opened the fridge and stood in front of it.

“There’s eggs,” he said.

“I see the eggs.”

“And that cheese Maya brought.”

“The cheese has been there three weeks.”

“She said it was aged.”

“She said it as a joke.”

He closed the fridge. Opened it again immediately the way people do when they’re hoping the contents have changed.

They hadn’t.

“We could order,” Selene said.

“We always order.”

“Because we never cook.”

“We cook.”

She looked at him.

“The rice that one time,” he said.

“True. You made rice but rice is survival not cooking.”

He closed the fridge with the finality of a decision made. “I’m going to make eggs.”

“You’re going to make eggs.”

“Very good eggs.”

She pulled herself up onto the counter to watch not to help. He didn’t mind being watched while he did something with his hands. Some people found it uncomfortable. Avalon went quieter and more focused as he worked his way around.

He found a pan, found butter, cracked the first egg and a piece of shell went in and he spent thirty seconds fishing it out with a focus completely disproportionate to the task.

She just watched him struggle with it 

They ate at the counter because the table still felt like a place where serious things happened.

The eggs were good. She didn’t say so immediately.

“They’re good,” she said eventually.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to sound smug about eggs.”

“I’m accurate not smug.”

Outside the evening light went gold and then pink and then a blue that had no real equivalent anywhere else. She’d missed it when she lived away but hadn’t let herself admit how much.

“Your mother,” she said.

Avalon was quiet for a moment. 

“She didn’t flinch once,” he said. “Whitmore’s lawyer was trying to rattle her and she just sat there and answered. Like she had already decided before she walked in that nothing he said was going to move her.”

“She had decided.”

“Yes.” He pushed a piece of egg around. “I keep trying to make what she did today cancel out what she did ten years ago and it doesn’t work.”

“It’s not supposed to work,” Selene said. “They’re both true. They just live in different rooms and you don’t have to make them be in the same room.”

He sat with that.

She got up and washed the plates because the dishwasher was full and she hadn’t run it. 

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“I can do it.”

“I know, but I insist.”

She stepped back and let him.

He ran the dishwasher with the careful attention he brought to everything he decided to do. This man who ran a billion dollar company pressing the buttons on a dishwasher like they mattered.

They probably did to him.

She’d learned that about him, everything he decided to do mattered to him.

 They ended up on the floor of the living room later that evening.

Avalon had his back against the couch while Selene was beside him close enough that their arms touched. The city outside had gone properly dark and the room had only the lamp in the corner making the quality of light that put everything slightly outside of time.

“What did you think about last night,” she asked. “Before the call.”

“My father,” he said. “Nene, whether she knew what she was really protecting the company from.” A pause. “And you.”

“What about me.”

“Just the awareness that you exist and are here.”

Selene sat with that for a moment.

Her phone buzzed against the floor.

She felt it and didn’t reach for it.

Avalon noticed and said nothing.

“I’ve been thinking about Elena,” she said.

He went still beside her. 

“Not with grief exactly,” she said. “Just wondering.” She looked at the lamp rather than him. “When I was twenty five I used to see little girls on the street and think — she’d be about that age now. She’d be starting school. She’d have opinions about everything. Strong ones probably.” Paused. “When I was thirty I thought about what she’d look like then. Whether she’d have your jaw or mine. Whether she’d be serious like you or completely unreasonable about things the way I was at that age.” She stopped. “I built different versions of her over the years and they changed a lot  as I got older.”

The room held the silence carefully.

Avalon didn’t speak for a long time.

She waited.

Then quietly, in a voice she hadn’t heard from him before, he said one word.

“Elena.”

For the first time from his mouth in a room rather than in a deposition, questions or statement. Just her name acknowledged and her existence confirmed by someone else who she mattered to.

Selene felt something release in her chest that had been held for ten years.

“Thank you,” she said.

“She was real,” he said. “She should be said out loud.”

Selene pressed her face briefly against his shoulder.

He put his arm around her and they sat in the lamplight while the city did its quiet thing outside and neither of them moved for a long time.

The voice note from Maya had been sitting unplayed for twenty minutes.

Selene reached for the phone and played it.

Maya’s voice, slightly breathless, words tumbling out fast the way they did when she was trying to speak before she thought better of it.

Okay so I need to tell you something and I need you to not make it weird. Kofi asked me to go to Accra with him next month. He has a project there, buildings or whatever, the point is he asked and I said I needed to think about it and then I went home and packed a hypothetical bag in my head for forty minutes so I think we both know what the answer is but I haven’t told him yet and I’m telling you first because you’re you and I need someone to tell me I’m not insane. Okay. That’s it. Call me.

Selene lowered the phone.

Looked at Avalon.

He’d heard every word.

“She packed a hypothetical bag,” Selene said.

“For forty minutes,” Avalon said.

“She’s going to Accra.”

“She’s already in Accra in her head.”

They looked at each other and bursted out laughing.

Outside the city went about its night.

The lamp held its small warm circle.

And somewhere across town Maya Castellano was probably packing an actual bag now, not a hypothetical one, because she’d already decided forty minutes ago and everyone knew it except possibly Kofi.