CHAPTER 95: The Last Pages

POV: Avalon Pierce

He finished the notes on Thursday night.

He didn't race through them, he'd been reading one section at a time for months, letting each part settle before moving to the next.

But the last section was different.

He’d started it without meaning to finish it, picked it up right after dinner while Selene was still at the foundation and told himself twenty minutes but ended up reading for three hours.

The final section covered the last two years of Nene’s life.

Her handwriting was the most deliberate here. Every word placed the quality of someone who had started to understand their time and had decided not to waste any of it.

She wrote about the company less and more about what she’d learned.

Small observations. The kind that accumulated into wisdom so gradually you didn’t notice until you looked back and saw how far you’d come.

The thing about building is that you never see the finished thing. You only ever see the building. I used to think that was the tragedy of it. Now, I understand the point.

He read that twice.

Then he drifted into thinking about the symposium, the foundation office, Selene,  Amara, James and Maya building something that would outlast all of them.

Never seeing the finished thing.

Only ever seeing the building.

He understood that now in a way he hadn’t before she died.

Near the end she wrote about him directly.

I’ve been watching him lately. Something is changing and I don’t know if it’s therapy or the company maturing or simply age working on him the way age works on everyone eventually. But he laughs differently. He used to laugh with the part of himself he was willing to show and keep the rest back. Now sometimes the rest gets in too.

I think he’s going to be alright. He was always going to be alright, I just worried so long I couldn’t see it.

He stopped reading.

She’d written that before she died. 

She’d already believed it.

He’d spent a year learning things she’d already known.

The last entry was three weeks before she died.

He could tell by the handwriting. It was slower and more careful like the handwriting of someone for whom writing had become effortful.

It was short.

**Today, I am tired. The type that comes from having done many things.

I keep thinking about what I want to leave that will find its way. Not the money. Money is just patience in a different form.

What I want to leave is the question. Someone has to keep asking it. Someone who won’t accept the convenient answer and I think I know who that is.

I think she’s already on her way.**

He sat with the notebook in his hands for a long time.

She’s already on her way?

She’d written that three weeks before she died, way before the will was read, before the conference room and the depositions and the board battles and everything that followed.

Selene had been on her way and Nene had known it, she orchestrated it and had written it down.

She died three weeks later trusting it.

He looked at the notebook again, at the last entry and the handwriting that had become his grandmother’s voice in his head over months of reading.

Selene came home at nine while he was still in the study.

She came in and saw him face deep into the notebook in his hands, she sat down without speaking.

He showed her the last entry.

She read it.

Then read it again.

I think she’s already on her way.

She looked up at him.

Her eyes were wet from tears she has refused to let drop. 

“She wrote this three weeks before she died?” Selene asked.

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t know me that well.”

“Well, she knew enough.”

Selene looked at the page.

“What did she know?” she asked.

“That someone would come who wouldn’t accept the convenient answer.” He paused. “That person happens to be you, Selene” 

Selene was quiet.

“About that, what does it mean to be a person who was waited for without knowing you were the one they were waiting got.”

He thought about it.

“It means the waiting was real,” he said. “Even without a name, it was real and it was for something real and you were it.” He looked at the notebook. “That’s—” she interrupted.

“That’s the most loved I’ve ever felt,” she said quietly. “And it's someone who never really knew me.”

He looked at her.

“She would have loved you even if she knew you completely,” he said. 

“How do you know?”

“Because she loved people who couldn’t accept the convenient answer,” he said. “It was her defining characteristic. She was surrounded by people who accepted convenient answers and she spent her whole life loving the ones who didn’t.”

“Well, she loved you too,” she said. “Especially.”

“I know.” His voice was rough slightly. “I’m only just understanding how much.”

She reached over and took his hand.

“What do we do with them?” Selene said. “The notes.”

“We keep them,” he said. “Let Maya photograph the pages and add them in the foundation archive.” He paused. “They belong there. They’re the beginning of the answer.”

Selene nodded.

“And the letters?” she asked.

“The letter stays here,” he said. “Those ones are ours.”

She understood the distinction.

The notes were the foundation’s and the letter was theirs.

Both things.

Always both things.