CHAPTER 89: The Night Before

POV: Avalon Pierce

The foundation’s first public event was on a Friday. It wasn't a gala or a charity event, Selene had been very clear  about that from the beginning.

It was more like a symposium, there was open registration. Academics, practitioners, community members and people who worked in the gaps the foundation was built to address. It was a day of conversations rather than presentations.

However, the Thursday before, Avalon sat in the study at midnight unable to sleep, he had the feeling of standing at the edge of something real.

He’d felt it before.

Selene came in at twelve thirty.

She was in her robe, hair down and the look of someone who had been lying awake and given up pretending otherwise.

She sat in the chair across from his.

“You’re doing the ceiling thing,” she said.

“I’m doing the lamp thing,” he said. 

“What’s the difference.”

“The lamp is warmer.”

She looked at the lamp.

“Fair,” she said.

They sat in the study quietly.

“Are you nervous?” she said.

“Yes.”

“About what specifically.”

“That it won’t be what we intended,” he said. “The gap between intention and reality will be visible, that we built something that looks right and works wrong.”

“James’s problem,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The wrong structure.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” she said.

“Tell me.”

“The pilot program,” she said. “The community partners we’ve been working with for the last month. Maria Chap organisation, the one that works with housing insecure families.” She paused. “She came to the office last week while you were in the board meeting.”

“I remember you mentioning it.”

“She sat at the table and at the whiteboard for a long time. And then she said—” Selene paused. “She said it looked like something that was still asking questions, that most foundations came in with answers. This one looked like it came in with questions.”

He looked at her.

“She said that was the first time she’d felt like a partner rather than a recipient,” Selene said. “Her words. Partner rather than recipient.”

He sat with that.

“That’s the intention,” he said.

“That’s the reality too,” she said. “Already before the symposium, before anything public.” She looked at the lamp. “The structure is holding the principle at least with Maria Chap it is.”

He was quiet.

“One data point,” he said.

“One real data point,” she said. “Which is worth more than thirty projected ones.”

He looked at his wife, the woman who had woken up at five in the morning three months ago with fourteen pages and had built from those pages to this, to a symposium on a Friday, then toMaria Chap feeling like a partner.

To the name at the bottom of the proposal.

“She would have been at the symposium,” he said. “Nene. She would have been in every conversation.”

“She will be,” Selene said. “Her question is the frame for the whole day.”

He nodded.

“What would you tell her?” Selene said. “If you could, what would you tell Nene about what we’ve built?”

He thought about it.

“That her question has an answer,” he said. “Not a final one but a real one built every day.” He looked at the lamp. “And that the structure is holding.”

Selene reached across the space between their chairs and sat on his legs.

They sat in the warm circle of the lamp while the city did its quiet midnight thing.

Tomorrow the foundation would take its first public step.

Tonight they just sat with what they’d made.

Which was, in its own way, the most important thing.

She fell asleep on his leg sometime after two to waking up seeing Avalon covering her with the blanket from the bed.

The city beginning its early morning sounds.

“Go to bed,” she said quietly.

“In a minute,” he said.

He went and sat for another few minutes in the quiet of the study.

Looking at what you could build when the walls came down and that turned out you could build quite a lot.