CHAPTER 86: What Maya Found

POV: Maya Castellano

She found it in the archive.

Three weeks into foundation work Selene had given her access to Nene’s personal papers. Not the board notes but the other things like letters, personal correspondence, documents Margaret had kept because she hadn’t known what else to do with them and throwing them away had felt wrong.

Maya had been going through them for the visual identity work. Looking for the texture of who Nene was before she was a legacy, way before she was a question in a board presentation.

She found the photographs on a Thursday afternoon when everyone else had gone home.

Inside a folder at the bottom of one of the boxes were photographs, old ones. The kind with the white border and the slightly faded color of pictures from the seventies.

She sat on the office floor and went through them.

Nene in young portrait, she looks like she's in her thirties, standing outside a building that still exists on Market Street. Nene had written the address on the back in her small precise handwriting.

Another was Nene at a table with people Maya didn’t recognize. Laughing, unguarded and real.

Then one that made her stop.

Nene and a man were standing outside what looked like a courthouse, both of them looking formal. Nene in a suit that said the seventies clearly and the man beside her in a jacket and tie, one hand at the small of her back.

On the back in Nene’s handwriting: Robert. The day we filed. 1976.

Maya sat on the floor for a long time looking at it.

Robert Laine.

The man who had told Nene to wait. Who had helped her build the structure from the beginning. Who had died three months after Jonathan Pierce.

He had his hand at the small of her back.

The day they filed.

She called Selene.

Selene arrived twenty minutes later.

Maya handed her the photograph without speaking.

Selene looked at it.

At the handwriting on the back and the hand at the small of Nene’s back.

“Oh,” Selene said quietly.

“Yeah,” Maya said.

They sat on the office floor together.

“They were more than colleagues,” Selene said.

“I think so.”

“Margaret said she didn’t believe so.”

“Margaret told you what she knew,” Maya said. “I don’t think she knew this.”

Selene looked at the photograph.

Selene said, “She never told anyone, kinda kept it completely private, built a company and raised a grandson and carried thirty years of evidence about her son’s death and loved someone she never acknowledged publicly.”

“She was protecting everything simultaneously,” Maya said.

“Yes.”

“The company, Avalon, Robert and whatever this was.”

Selene was quiet.

“She was so alone,” she said finally. 

Maya looked at the photograph, before saying:

“Not completely, she had him for a while.”

Selene looked at her.

“And then she had Margaret,” Maya said. “And then she had Avalon. She was never completely alone.” She paused. “She just carried things privately. ”

Selene sat with that.

“You sound like you understand that,” she said.

“I do,” Maya said simply.

They sat in the office in the Thursday evening quiet.

Selene told Avalon that night.

Maya was there. She’d come home with Selene the way she sometimes did now, with no particular announcement.

Avalon looked at the photograph for a long time.

At his grandmother young.

At Robert Laine’s hand and the handwriting on the back.

“She loved him,” he said.

“Yes,” Selene said.

“And he died, she carried that too on top of everything else.”

“Yes.”

He set the photograph down carefully.

“She built something anyway,” he said.

“Yes,” Selene said.

“Out of all of it. The loss. The evidence. The waiting. Robert. My father.” He looked at the photograph. “She built something anyway.”

Maya watched him.

Watched the quality of a man encountering the full dimensions of someone he’d thought he understood.

“She wasn’t just strategic,” he said. “She was brave.”

“Yes,” Selene said.

He picked up the photograph.

Took it to the hallway and hung it beside the photograph of his father laughing.

“They should be together,” he said simply.

Maya looked at the two photographs side by side through the hallway doorway.

Jonathan Pierce laughing.

Nene young and formal with Robert Laine beside her.

Two people who had been kept privately for too long now on a wall where they’d be seen every day.

She called Kofi later that night from her apartment and told him about the photograph.

He listened the way he listened.

“She sounds like someone worth knowing,” he said about Nene.

“She is. She was.” Maya looked at the ceiling. “She’s the reason all of us are here. The whole situation. The will. The foundation. Everything.” She paused. “She made one decision and it created everything.”

“Most things start with one decision,” he said.

“What decision started this?” she said. “Us.”

“You staying at the table,” he said immediately.

She thought about the coffee shop.

“That was barely a decision,” she said.

“The best ones usually are.”

She smiled at the ceiling.

“Kofi.”

“Yes.”

“When are you coming to San Francisco?”

He pause.

“I have a project finishing in six weeks,” he said.

“And after?”

“After I don’t have plans that require me to be somewhere specific.”

“San Francisco is somewhere specific,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

She smiled.

“Six weeks,” she said.

“Six weeks,” he agreed.

She put the phone down.

Lay in the dark and thought about one decision creating everything.