“Okay,” he said. “What kind of rug?”
“A colorful one. Not gray.”
“I like gray.”
“That’s because you haven’t tried other colors.”
Sloane, standing near the kitchen, bit the inside of her cheek.
By the end of that first weekend, the penthouse had two potted plants from a shop on Columbus Avenue that Maya had selected herself, a framed drawing of an ankylosaurus that she made at Julian’s kitchen table, and a small multicolored rug that cost fourteen dollars from a street vendor and looked exactly as out of place as Maya said it should.
Julian didn’t move any of it.
The months that followed were not easy. They were not a movie montage. There were hard days. Days when Maya refused to go to Julian’s apartment because she was tired and wanted her own bed. Days when Hannah had to sit in her kitchen and stare at the wall because the weight of what had been taken from her—the years, the certainty, the partnership she should have had—pressed down until she couldn’t breathe.
There were days when Julian called Hannah to ask about Maya’s allergies and his voice was so careful, so controlled, that she wanted to reach through the phone and shake him and say, “Feel something. Just once. Stop managing everything and feel it.”
But he did feel it.
She knew because of the drawing.
Maya’s ankylosaurus, pinned to the refrigerator in the penthouse, was still there six months later. And eight months later. And a year later.
And on the night that Maya stayed over for the first time during a thunderstorm and was too scared to sleep, Julian sat on the floor of her room—the room he had redecorated three times because she kept changing her mind about the color—and read her a book about dinosaurs until his voice gave out.
At 2:00 a.m., she fell asleep holding his hand.
He didn’t move.
Sloane found him there in the morning, still sitting on the floor, his suit wrinkled, his tie loosened, the book still open in his lap.
She took a photograph.
He never asked her to delete it.
—
The twist came on a Sunday in April.
Hannah brought Maya to Julian’s apartment for an early birthday celebration—Maya was turning six, and she had requested a dinosaur cake with green frosting and “actual rocks,” which turned out to be chocolate stones from a candy shop on Broadway.
Julian had ordered the cake himself. He had gone to the bakery in person. The woman behind the counter had stared at him—the charcoal suit, the winter eyes, the quiet authority that preceded him like weather—and asked if he wanted a message written on it.
“Just her name,” he said.
He was setting the table when Hannah arrived. She came through the door carrying Maya’s coat and a small wrapped present, and behind her, moving slowly, carefully, like someone entering a room they were not sure they were welcome in, was an older woman.
She was small. Seventy, maybe seventy-five. Silver hair pulled back in a clip. A coat that had been mended once at the collar. She held a handbag with both hands in front of her, the way people hold things when they need something to do with their hands.
Julian straightened.
Hannah’s expression was unreadable.
“Julian,” she said. “This is my mother. Ruth Mercer.”
The room changed temperature.
Ruth Mercer looked at Julian Blackthorne. She looked at him the way a person looks at the thing that took seven years from their daughter. She looked at him with everything—grief, anger, exhaustion, hope, and a fierce, terrible love for a granddaughter who had made her believe that people could still be surprised by the world.
