Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

SIX YEARS AND A LIFETIME LATER

Aurora POv

Zenya hit the floor before I could finish the sentence.

"slippery." I said the last word to nobody. She was already down, sitting flat on the kitchen tiles with her legs spread wide and both palms pressed to the floor like she was checking whether it was still there, and then she looked up at me with an expression that was equal parts surprise and satisfaction, as though falling had been the plan all along.

"I'm okay," she announced.

"I know you're okay."

"You looked worried."

"I looked like your mother." I crossed the kitchen and crouched in front of her, brushing her dark hair back from her face to check for damage she absolutely did not have. "Which means I'm allowed to look however I want."

She considered this with the particular seriousness she applied to everything, arguments, breakfast choices, which book came next, the precise arrangement of stuffed animals on her bed. Henry's brow. My stubbornness. A combination that had been making my life complicated for six years and would, I suspected, continue indefinitely.

"Elizabeth says I have to eat lunch," she said.

"Elizabeth is correct."

"But it's summer."

"Summer and lunch are not mutually exclusive, Zenya."

She squinted at me. "What does mutually exclusive mean?"

"It means one thing doesn't cancel out the other. Come on." I stood, extending my hand. She took it and pulled herself up with more drama than the situation required, then immediately turned toward the window instead of the dining room.

"Dad would let me play," she said.

She said it quietly. Not as manipulation, Zenya didn't operate that way, not yet, not at six. She said it the way she said most things about Marc, as plain fact, as though the laws of the universe included a clause specifically about what Marc Jacobs would and would not allow.

I didn't correct her. I never did.

"Dad also used to put vegetables in your smoothies and tell you it was dessert," I said. "He was not always on your side as completely as you remember."

The corner of her mouth moved. An almost-smile. She was learning to hide those, which was a development I found both impressive and inconvenient.

Elizabeth appeared in the doorway, patient, unhurried, the particular composure of a woman who had been managing both of us for four years and had made her peace with it. She held out her hand to Zenya with the quiet authority of someone who knew she would eventually win.

Zenya looked at her hand. Look at me. I looked out the window.

"I'll come read to you after lunch," I said.

She went to Elizabeth.

I stood at the window after they left and let the kitchen settle into quiet around me.

Los Angeles in the morning was a particular kind of beautiful, the light came in sideways, gold and unhurried, touching everything briefly before the heat arrived and changed the quality of the day entirely. I had fallen in love with it six years ago, arriving from New Jersey with two bags and a secret I hadn't yet named, stepping off the plane into warm air that smelled like nothing from my previous life. I had taken that as a sign. I had needed a sign badly enough that I was willing to find one in the weather.

Marc used to say I chose Los Angeles because it had no memory. Every city keeps a version of the people who lived in it, he said, their patterns worn into the streets, their histories folded into the architecture but Los Angeles was too busy becoming something new to hold onto the past. It forgot you the moment you left.

"That's why you love it," he told me once. "It won't remember who you were when you arrived."

He was right. He was frequently right, which had been occasionally irritating and was now, eighteen months after his death, something I missed so specifically that it caught me off guard sometimes. Not the broad grief,I had made a kind of peace with that, or at least a working arrangement but the specific things. The particular ways he was right. The sound of him being right in that quiet, undemonstrative way he had, like he wasn't scoring points, just observing.

I turned from the window and picked up my coffee from the counter.

The files were on the kitchen table where I'd left them last night, three folders, color-coded, my assistant Nina's work. She color-coded everything. I had asked her once why and she had looked at me as though I'd asked why air was necessary. The top folder was pale blue. Inside it, among other items requiring my attention this week, was a merger proposal.

I read it twice last night. I will read it again this morning. I had told Nina to hold my nine o'clock specifically so I would have time.

I sat down and opened it.

The company was called Nicolas Enterprise.

I had seen the name in the subject line of Nina's briefing email three days ago and I had sat very still for approximately thirty seconds before I continued reading. It was not an uncommon name. Nicolas was not a rare word. I had finished the email, requested the full proposal, and said nothing to anyone.

Then the proposal arrived and the company address was New Jersey and the founder's name was Henry Nicolas and I closed the document and went to put Zenya to bed even though it was only six-thirty and she wouldn't sleep for another two hours. I needed something true and ordinary and entirely mine. I needed my daughter's voice asking me to do the voices properly when I read to her.

I went back to the proposal after she was asleep.

It was a strong proposal. That was the first thing, the business thing, the thing I needed to assess before everything else. Nicolas Enterprise was proposing a merger that would significantly expand AME's reach in the northeastern market a gap I had been considering how to close for the better part of a year. The terms, as written, favored his company disproportionately. 

But the strategic logic was sound and the opportunity was real, and if I restructured the terms, which I absolutely would, this was exactly the kind of deal Marc had always said AME needed.

Marc had built the company with a specific philosophy: never close a door because of what's standing in front of it. Evaluate the door. Evaluate the opportunity. Then decide.

I ran the numbers three times. I had thought about it for three days.

I approved it.

Nina's response arrived in under four minutes, which meant she had been waiting.

<Wonderful. I'll arrange the New Jersey trip for the fourteenth. Shall I notify their team directly or would you prefer to draft the email yourself?>

<Directly> I replied. <Standard approval language. Don't tell them anything beyond confirmation.>

<Understood. Should I include your name in the correspondence?>

I looked at that question for a moment.

<Use the company name. AME CEO approval. That's sufficient.>

I set my phone face-down on the table.

Henry would know, eventually. The moment I stepped out of the car he would know. That was unavoidable and also, if I was being honest with myself, not entirely unfortunate. The expression on his face when he understood who had approved his merger, who had restructured his terms, who had been in control of this deal from the moment it landed on her desk, I was human enough to want to see that. I was honest enough to admit it.

But that was not why I approved it. I needed to be clear about that, inside myself where it counted. I approved it because it was good for AME. Because Marc's philosophy was right and I had built my entire professional life on the principle that good decisions come from clear eyes, not from emotion.

I was going to New Jersey to close a merger. The fact that my ex-husband would be standing outside waiting to greet a CEO he had never imagined was a secondary consideration.

An extremely satisfying secondary consideration.

But secondary.

Zenya found me still at the table when she came back from lunch, Elizabeth trailing behind her with the particular expression of someone who had heard an unreasonable amount of opinions about sandwiches in the last twenty minutes.

"There were crusts," Zenya said, by way of explanation.

"There are always crusts."

"There shouldn't be."

I pulled out the chair next to mine. She climbed into it and immediately reached for the nearest folder, which I moved before her fingers landed.

"Is that work?"

"Yes."

"Are you going somewhere?"

I looked at her. She was watching me with those dark eyes, Henry's eyes, though she didn't know that, though she had no framework for that information yet and her expression was careful in a way that was too old for six. She had learned to read my face the way children learn to read weather. She knew what preparation looked like on me.

"New Jersey," I said. "For a few days. Elizabeth will be here."

She absorbed this. "Can I come?"

"Not this time."

"Because of school?"

"School starts after. This is work."

She turned this over. Outside, a bird landed on the window ledge and regarded us both briefly before departing. Zenya watched it go with the focused attention she gave to small things, the same attention Marc had given to everything, a quality I had always loved in him and now saw everywhere in the daughter he had chosen.

"Mom," she said, still looking at the window.

"Mm."

"Is work important?"

"All my work is important."

"More important than usual?"

I considered her. Six years old. Entirely too perceptive. Henry's brow, my stubbornness, and apparently Marc's ability to ask the question underneath the question.

"Yes," I said. "More important than usual."

She nodded slowly, as though confirming something she had already suspected. Then she slid off the chair and held out her hand to me with the gravity of someone making a formal offer.

"Then you should come read to me now," she said. "Before you start thinking about it too much."

I looked at her hand. Small and certain, extended toward me across the kitchen table, the most straightforward thing in my life.

I took it.

"Lead the way," I said.

She did.

That night, after Zenya was asleep and the house was quiet and Los Angeles was doing its particular version of darkness outside my bedroom window, I sat on the edge of my bed and I thought about New Jersey.

I thought about a taxi pulling away from a house I would never go back to. I thought about a plane lifting off the ground with everything I owned in the overhead compartment and a secret I hadn't named yet growing quieter inside me, choosing, even then, to survive.

I thought about Marc in a hospital room telling me the truth about his diagnosis without flinching, because he had decided that was who he was going to be a man who told the truth even when it cost him something.

I thought about what I had built. What it had taken. What I had become in the specific and irreversible way that only loss can make you into something.

And then I thought about Henry Nicolas standing outside his building on the fourteenth, with his team arranged behind him and his press contacts and his careful professional optimism, waiting for the CEO of AME.

Waiting for a stranger.

I lay back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling and felt something move through me that wasn't quite satisfaction and wasn't quite grief. Something older than both. Something that had been waiting six years for its moment to simply exist without needing to be anything other than what it was.

I closed my eyes.

“You will understand soon enough,” I thought. “What you had. What you handed away without looking at it.”

“I'll be there on the fourteenth.”

“Try not to recognize me too quickly.”

I was asleep before the thought finished.