As I spoke, the image got sharper in my imagination—vast and gleaming, the skyline spread out like an offering. I wanted to give her that view, to let her see the city the way I did when I thought of her: endless, alive, impossibly ours. It wasn’t about the grandiosity, or the money it would take to buy it; it was about creating something that no one else could—something worthy of the way I loved her.
“That is bolder than I would have expected from you,” Mother said. “Alexander would have demanded trumpets. You were always the one who preferred the room to forget you were there.”
“She deserves to see what the world looks like from my vantage point,” I told her. “Because I want it to be hers too.”
I let that sit between us and then offered the last idea. “The observatory at the Hayden. After hours. No audience. Just the dome and us. We program the projection to the sky over Boston the night we first kissed—constellations in the right places, the city lights dimmed to nothing. I ask her there, with the stars coming on like they’ve been waiting.”
I could see it clearly, the two of us alone beneath that borrowed sky. There was an intimacy to it that felt almost sacred, everything spinning on the axis of a single truth. I’dalways believed it was some kind of providence that I found my way to Olivia; that in all the infinite versions of this world, in every possible arrangement of atoms and chance, she and I exist in the same one.
Maybe that’s what the universe does for people like us—it folds, it bends, it rearranges itself until we collide.
My mother looked at me in a way that folded years into a single moment.
“I expected grandeur. I didn’t expect this much sentimentality. You’ve always been driven by results, Nathaniel. Everything you do has a purpose, an end in sight. This is the first time I’ve seen you care about the journey itself.”
“She’s the only thing I can’t quantify,” I said. “So I build what I can—moments she’ll remember when everything else fades.”
“That’s love, darling,” she said, a little wistful, a lot proud. “The one thing we can’t persuade into perfection, though you’ll certainly try.”
By the time I left, she’d promised to make some calls, and I felt a certainty take hold—an internal axis tilting toward a single, inevitable point: Olivia, and the life I’m ready to ask her to choose with me.
Now,after dropping Olivia at the office, that certainty stays with me. Instead of the usual ache of parting, I feel an undercurrent of anticipation that carries me forward.
My driver cuts across the park to Fifth and 105th, where my mother waits by the Conservatory Garden gates, already chatting with the groundskeeper. Of course she’s managed to have them open early.
She is dressed with uncharacteristic pragmatism—sunglasses, a linen blouse, and flats that look almost democratic on her.
I step out of the car and she lifts a hand in greeting, her smile wry. “Don’t look so astonished, darling. I can be sensible before noon.”
“Noted,” I reply. “I’ll alert the press.”
The garden is hushed at this hour. Dew still clings to the grass, and somewhere out of sight, a sprinkler runs, soft as static. My mother surveys the fountain as though she’s evaluating a sculpture for purchase, head tilted, lips pursed.
“Lovely,” she says. “But there’s something almost toopoliteabout it.”
I walk the path ahead of her, imagining what it might become at night—the lanterns tucked between hedges, the sound of strings rising out of the dark, petals lifting in the breeze as Olivia walks toward me. The vision holds for a breath, then dissolves. Too perfect. Too staged. Beauty built to impress rather thanmove.
When I turn, my mother’s watching me with that knowing half-smile. “No?”
I give a small shake of my head and she chuckles in response, fond and genuine, the sound carrying lightly over the stone.
We leave the garden not long after and settle into her car. The windows are half-open, the city spilling in—lilac and asphalt, the faint bite of roasted coffee from a street cart.
Conversation drifts the way it sometimes does when we forget ourselves. She talks about her foundation’s new partnership; I mention the progress that Olivia and I are making on our capstone project. The atmosphere between us feels easy, almost like it did before Alexander died.
Then, without prompting, she says, “You know, your brother would have been unbearable about this. He’d have insisted onscouting every location himself, just for the excuse to be in the middle of it.”
I can’t help the smile despite the ache in my chest. “He’d be drafting the proposal speech for me by now, I’m sure.”
“Oh absolutely,” she agrees. “He’d have found a way to make a spectacle of it too—drone, fireworks, live orchestra.”
We both laugh, and for a moment it feels easy to remember him.
At the Chrysler Building, security meets us in the marble lobby and escorts us to a private elevator. The brass gleams as though it is polished hourly. Inside, it’s silent but for the soft mechanical hum as we rise through the building’s spine.
When the doors open, the city unfurls below—streets glowing like circuitry, the river a band of silver heat. I step to the glass. In my mind, Olivia’s reflection mingles with mine, her ring catching the light from a thousand windows. It’s cinematic, ostentatious, and instantlywrong.
Too exposed. Too loud.
