All Chapters of Second Bloom: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Daniel Cole arrives in Barcelona on a Thursday in August for reasons that are, he says, entirely work-related, which everyone accepts with the polite shared understanding that is not entirely true. He is twenty-nine, the youngest Cole brother, and he has the quality of someone who has spent his whole life being the practical one between two brothers who are each brilliant in their own direction and has developed, as a result, a particular kind of intelligence — the kind that sees the gap between what people say they want and what they actually need and quietly closes it without drawing attention to the fact that it was a gap. Valentina has met him twice — at the Chevy Chase dinner, and briefly in Washington during her August visit. Both times, he put his phone away when dinner started and asked questions that suggested he had done his research. She has liked him from the first meeting in the way she likes people who are exactly w

The morning of the wedding is foggy. Not the gloomy kind — the Begur kind, which rolls in from the sea before dawn and sits on the hills and the castle ruins and the harbour with the quality of something that has always done this and will continue doing it regardless of what anyone has planned, which is, Valentina decides at six-thirty from the window of the hotel room, exactly right. Ethan is asleep. She has been awake for an hour, not from anxiety, but from the particular alertness of a person who does not want to sleep through the quality of a morning. She makes coffee from the small machine on the hotel dresser and stands at the window and watches the fog and thinks about nothing specific and everything general, which is the correct state for the morning of the day you have been building toward. By nine, the fog has lifted to the hills, burning off in the way of sea fog that knows it is tem

They go to Kyoto. Not for the obvious reasons — though the obvious reasons are real and valid — but because Ethan read about the Ura Senke (one of the three main schools of Japanese tea ceremony, founded in Kyoto — the tea ceremony, or chado, meaning 'the way of tea,' is a practice codified in the sixteenth century that uses the preparation and sharing of matcha as a framework for exploring concepts of harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility; the Ura Senke school has been transmitting this practice for over four hundred years in the same location in Kyoto) school of tea ceremony and thought of Pep's Japanese ceramics training and thought of the Priorat and the Azores and the Girona linen and the idea that their honeymoon should be a version of the same work they do when they are not on honeymoon — arriving somewhere old and specific and paying full attention. He tells her this the week before they leave. She looks a

The morning after the wedding, she wakes in the Begur hotel room with the sea outside, Ethan still asleep, and the particular quality of a day that is the first of something. Not the honeymoon — that is in three weeks, after the Girona textile campaign launches, the Azores brief enters its implementation phase, and the Eixample hotel's first season with the new positioning closes out. They agreed on this without discussion: neither of them is the kind of person who can enjoy a honeymoon while a work deadline is unresolved, and they have both stopped pretending otherwise. This morning is just the first morning. The first of the days that will accumulate into the life they have been building toward from different directions for different amounts of time. She lies still for a while and listens to the sea. The Begur sea in September, the morning after a wedding, with the light coming through the cu

She knows before she takes the test. This is not intuition in the mystical sense — it is the specific physical literacy of someone who has lived in a body for thirty-four years and has been paying close attention to it for the last fourteen. She knows the morning of the Thursday before the test, lying awake at six listening to Ethan make coffee in the kitchen, that something has changed in the way her body is operating. The quality of her tiredness. The particular way the coffee smells different when he brings it to the desk. The thing that is not nausea but is adjacent to nausea, specific to mornings, resolved by ten. She takes the test on a Saturday morning, alone, before Ethan wakes. She sits on the edge of the bathtub, looks at it and thinks about the door she left open. About the first life and the what-if that was not a what-if anymore. About thirty-four years old, which is exactly the right age for this, whi