All Chapters of Between Us and Ashes: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Grace Park called Zara's cell phone on a Friday morning in September and said: "I know I told you not to contact me again and I know I'm violating that. I'm calling anyway because I have something to offer and I think you should hear it before you decide whether to hang up."Zara was standing in the kitchen making coffee, Lyra in the carrier on her chest because it was a Saturday and on Saturdays Clara was off and Zara had been doing the domestic calculations of a woman managing an infant alone and finding them less impossible than she had expected. She stood with the coffee carafe in her hand and thought about hanging up."Go ahead," she said."Thank you." Grace Park's voice was steady. Not overly apologetic — she had apparently decided that sustained apology was not what this call required. Zara respected that. "I've been thinking about leaving events planning. Not entirely — but pivoting. I've been working on a concept for a legal services firm that focuses on estate reform. Family

Mitchell & Park opened its doors on a Monday in January, which Dana called "deeply on-brand" and Grace Park called "efficient" and which Zara called the correct choice because a Monday established immediately that the firm was a working entity and not an event.The office was on the twenty-second floor of a building on Madison Avenue, leased with the combined capital of two women who had done their financial calculations very carefully and who had agreed that the address mattered for the kind of practice they were building. Estate reform was a practice area that needed to signal, through its professional environment, that it took itself seriously.The office was not large. It was not designed to be large — they were two people and two associates and a paralegal named Jerome who had come with Grace from events planning and whom Zara had evaluated carefully and retained because he was organized to a degree that impressed her. Large offices were performance. A well-organized smaller offi

She met Eli for the first time on a Sunday in December when Lyra was eleven months old and she was dropping Lyra at Caleb's apartment for the alternating weekend. The handoffs had been smooth — she would arrive, he would be there, Lyra would be transferred with whatever equipment the weekend required, and they would exchange the small logistical details of a ten-month-old's life without making it into anything more than it was.But on this Sunday, when she arrived, there was a small boy in the apartment.He was four years old. He had Caleb's bone structure and a very specific kind of gravity that she recognized immediately as something that would, in the right conditions, become either genuine dignity or insufferable seriousness. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of what appeared to be hot chocolate, very seriously involved in a picture book about dinosaurs.Caleb met her at the door. He said quietly: "Vanessa had a family emergency. Eli is going to be here for the weeken

His name was Michael Adeyemi and he was a corporate attorney who had been referred to Mitchell & Park in February by a colleague, whose estate dispute was legitimate and whose conduct throughout the engagement was entirely professional, and who asked Zara to dinner in March in a way that was direct and unambiguous."I'd like to take you to dinner," he said. "Not as a client — that would be inappropriate. The matter will be resolved by then. As someone who has spent the past six weeks being impressed by you and who thinks there might be something worth exploring."Zara looked at him across the conference table where they had just concluded what was, in fact, the final substantive meeting of his case. He was forty-one. He was good-looking in an uncomplicated way that she found restful by contrast with other things she had been feeling recently. He was also, as far as she could determine, an honest person who said what he meant."My daughter is sixteen months old," she said."I know," he

She did not have the conversation immediately. This was not avoidance — or if it was avoidance, it was the productive kind, the kind that buys time to be fully certain before you act. She had learned, in two years of rebuilding, that acting before certainty had cost her things she could not retrieve, and she was not going to do that again in the area of her life that was already the most complicated.So she took three more months. She completed the Henderson estate case, which was their most complex to date — a trust with four beneficiaries across two family branches, a stability covenant that had been administered with extraordinary creative interpretation by a trustee who had managed to spin three different interpretations of "stable family unit" to serve three different financial interests. She won it in July, on Lyra's second birthday weekend, which created a scheduling conflict she resolved by celebrating both on a Sunday — the case victory with Grace and the associates at a reas