Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN : New Year

~Zella's POV~

The penthouse was very quiet.

Outside Paris was doing what Paris did on New Year's Eve, being dramatic about it, lights and noise and the particular energy of a city that took celebration seriously and had the architecture to match. Inside there was just the sound of Brynn's door and then nothing.

Evander was looking at the door.

I was looking at him looking at the door.

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he moved toward it and I followed without being asked, stopping at the doorframe while he knocked. Three times. Quiet, not demanding.

A pause. Then the door opened slightly. Brynn, still in her black dress, mascara telling a story her face was trying not to, looking at her father with the expression of someone who had cried a little and was going to absolutely not admit it.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey." He looked at her. "Can I come in?"

She opened the door wider.

I stayed at the doorframe. Close enough. Far enough. The witness rather than the participant.

Evander crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed, the same bed, the same practiced ease, the same father who had removed her socks after the Christmas market and tucked her in after the pool and Brynn stood for a moment and then sat beside him and they both looked at the floor for a second like two people who had said several things they meant and were now figuring out what to do with all of them.

"I handled it badly," he said. Not 'I was wrong to have concerns.' Not 'I shouldn't have said what I said.' Just ... I handled it badly. Which from Evander was the most honest version of an apology, and somehow more meaningful for not being cushioned.

Brynn looked at the floor. "I shouldn't have said you treat me like I'm twelve."

"You weren't wrong."

"I was mean about it."

"You were frustrated." He paused. "I haven't always made it easy to tell me things. I know that."

Brynn was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Can I tell you something without you being weird about it?"

"Probably not. But tell me anyway."

She almost smiled. "I know it wasn't easy. After mum. Raising me alone, not — not bringing anyone else in, making everything about making sure I was okay." She looked at her hands. "I've never said thank you properly. Because saying it properly makes it real and making it real is a lot and I'm..." she stopped. "I'm saying it now. Thank you. For all of it. Even the parts that were annoying."

Evander looked at his daughter.

He didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at her the way parents look at their children when they're not children anymore and the realization of it keeps arriving fresh no matter how many times it's happened before.

"Bring Theo for dinner," he said. "Proper dinner. I'll try again."

Brynn looked up. "Yeah?"

"I mean it. Give me another chance with him." A pause. "That's your New Year's gift. You have my blessing. Go celebrate with him tomorrow."

For approximately one second Brynn stared at her father like he had said something in a language she was still translating. Then she launched herself at him with the full commitment of someone who had never once done anything by halves and Evander caught her the way fathers catch daughters automatically, completely, like there was never any question of it.

"You're so annoying," she said into his shoulder.

"I know."

"You couldn't have just said that at the restaurant?"

"I needed to think."

"You think too much."

"You don't think enough. We balance each other out."

She laughed. He held on. And I stood at the doorframe and watched the two of them and felt something open in my chest that I hadn't given it permission to open and couldn't close now that it had.

---

I don't know how long I stood there before the thought arrived.

It came quietly, the way the things you've been keeping in a box always arrive when you stop watching the box, not with drama, just with the particular weight of something that has been waiting patiently for the right moment and decided this was it.

My parents died when I was seven. A car accident, a wet road, a Tuesday evening in November that I remember mostly in the specific way you remember things you were too young to understand at the time, not the facts but the feeling of the facts, the way the world changed shape and stayed that shape.

After that there was my aunt's house. Dara. A childhood that wasn't unkind exactly but that had a particular quality to it, the quality of being present without being expected, of taking up space that belonged to someone else and being quietly aware of it every day. I got good at making myself smaller. At not asking for things. At being grateful rather than wanting.

Cole had been the first person who made me feel like I wasn't a guest in my own life. I had given him six years for that feeling and he had given me back a ring on a dresser and Dara in his bed and a termination email before I had finished the honey lemon tea a stranger bought me.

I watched Evander pull back from the hug and push Brynn's hair out of her face with one hand, the automatic gesture of a man who had been doing that specific thing for twenty-four years. I watched Brynn say something that made him shake his head but not in a disagreeing way. I watched the two of them exist in the easy language of people who have been each other's home for a long time and know it.

'Would they have loved me like this?'

Not the grand version of the question. Just the small one. The specific one. Would my mother have sat on my bed when I cried? Would my father have knocked on my door to apologize for something? Would I have grown up knowing, really knowing, in the bone-deep way that Brynn knew it, that I was someone's first concern?

I didn't know. I would never know. And that was the thing about grief that nobody told you, it didn't always arrive as missing. Sometimes it arrived as wondering. Sometimes it was just a doorframe on New Year's Eve and a father and a daughter and the quiet understanding of everything you'd had to build without a blueprint because the people who were supposed to give you one weren't there.

I would not cry in this doorframe. I had decided.

I blinked. Looked at the window. Took a breath.

'You're not going back there tonight,' I told myself. 'You have a life in front of you. Live it.'

I came back.

---

Brynn saw my face when she turned around.

She didn't say anything about it. She just reached out and squeezed my hand once — her version of 'I see you, I'm not going to make it into a thing, but I see you' — and then she looked at the window and said "how long do we have?"

Evander checked his watch. "Three minutes."

"Three minutes." She looked between us with the energy of someone who had just been given her New Year's gift and her father's blessing and had approximately one hundred and eighty seconds before midnight and intended to use all of them. "Then we need to be at the window. Move. Both of you. I'm not watching fireworks from a doorframe, that's not a life."

"You've been crying," I said.

"I have not."

"Your mascara..."

"Is fine and we're moving, come on."

We moved.

---

The three of us stood at the floor to ceiling windows and watched Paris count itself into a new year.

The city below lit up. Fireworks over the river, gold and white, the kind that made the sky look surprised by itself.

The crowd noise drifting up even from this height, the particular sound of a lot of people deciding simultaneously that something was beginning.

Brynn counted down at full volume. She had her phone out filming the window which meant she was also slightly in the way of the window but this was Brynn's natural state, simultaneously the most present person in any room and also somehow in the way of it and nobody said anything about it.

"Ten! Nine! Eight!" She grabbed both of our arms without looking. "Seven! Six! You two are not counting, that's unacceptable..."

"Five," Evander said, drily.

"Four!" I said, because it seemed wrong not to.

"Three! Two! One!"

Midnight.

The city erupted. Fireworks went up over the Seine, gold and white and red against the dark, the kind of display that looked like someone had decided to set the sky on fire and had done it properly. Brynn screamed "HAPPY NEW YEAR" at a volume that suggested she felt the city might not have heard, then threw both arms around both of us simultaneously and pulled us into the collision she called a hug.

Evander steadied her. I laughed, really laughed, the kind that comes from somewhere genuine rather than polite, the kind I hadn't done in two weeks and for a moment all three of us were just people standing at a window watching something beautiful happen outside and it was enough. It was more than enough. It was the first moment in fifteen days that felt entirely like itself without anything complicated underneath it.

Brynn pulled back with her eyes bright and her mascara definitively not fine and her expression the specific one she wore when she was happy and knew it and didn't need to say so.

"Happy New Year," she said to me.

"Happy New Year," I said back.

She looked at her father. "Happy New Year, you annoying man."

"Happy New Year," he said. He was looking at her but I felt him not looking at me in the specific way I had come to recognize, the deliberate redirect, the conscious choice of where his eyes went.

I looked at the fireworks.

---

We stayed at the window for a while after that, the three of us, until the fireworks finished and Paris settled into its slightly-after-midnight version of itself still lit, still celebrating, but quieter now, the first breath of a new year rather than the shout of it.

Then Brynn turned around and looked at me with an expression I recognized as guilt approaching.

"Okay." She pressed her lips together. "So. Theo is going to come get me in the morning." She looked at me. "And I'm going to be gone all day. Which means you're going to be here alone. Which is my fault. And I'm sorry."

"Brynn. I'm fine."

"You won't be fine, you'll be bored. You'll sit in your room and overthink things and I won't be here to stop you and that's a terrible way to spend New Year's Day and it's my fault for dragging you to Paris and then abandoning you..."

"You're not abandoning me."

"I am a little bit abandoning you."

"Brynn..."

"She won't be bored."

Both of us looked at Evander.

He was looking at me. Not at Brynn. At me, with the expression that lived in the territory between a statement and something else entirely, calm and certain and completely deliberate.

"I'll take her out," he said. "She'll be looked after."

Brynn looked at him. Then at me. Then back at him. Then at me again, with the slow, considering expression of someone running a calculation they hadn't been expecting to run tonight.

"Yeah?" she said.

"Yes."

Another look between us. Brynn's mouth curved slowly, satisfied, the smile of someone who has just noticed something and is deciding what to do with it.

"Perfect," she said.

Then she kissed me on the cheek, said "goodnight, happy New Year, don't stay up too late" to both of us in a way that suggested she was talking to two people simultaneously for a reason, and disappeared down the hall.

Her door closed.

The penthouse was quiet.

I looked at Evander.

He looked at me.

Outside Paris had moved into the soft part of midnight, the part after the celebration, the part that was just the new year being itself without the announcement of it. The fireworks were done. The window showed a city settling. The room was warm and still and contained exactly two people who had an agreement that had failed repeatedly and a new year that had just started and nowhere in particular to be until tomorrow.

"She'll be looked after," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"You said that very casually for what it was."

"What was it?"

I looked at him. He looked back. Something in his expression that was not quite a smile and not quite a question and not quite a promise but was all three at once and he knew it and I knew it and the new year had approximately twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes left in its first day.

I didn't answer.

He didn't need me to.