Than had seen the women Fly dated, and he did have a pattern
For a reason.
Not because he was careless, but because he understood the cost of doing it poorly. His choices were risk management. Alignment. He didn’t divide himself lightly. When he chose a woman, it had to be real, and if it was real, he didn’t get to walk away.
He was sure he couldn’t walk away from that kind of woman.
But the truth of the matter was simple. He would hurt Mei if she was in love with him. His moral compass wouldn’t allow him to do anything but let her down gently, and that would mean Than’s love for her would have nowhere to go.
It would destroy all three of them in a single blow.
Fly groaned softly.
Damn it.
He now hoped, desperately, that what he’d seen between Than and Mei was real because if Than was right, this wouldn’t just hurt.
It would cost him the two people he wasn’t willing to lose.
It would ruin everything.
Days later, they arrived at the Charles Carroll House just as the sun dipped low over the Severn. Lanterns glowed along the terraced lawns, their light reflecting off the water. White tents rose among the sycamores, music drifting gently across the gardens.
Mei’s parents met them at the entrance, pride written all over their faces. Her mother clasped Mei’s hands, eyes shining. Her father shook Fly’s and Than’s hands with quiet gratitude, as if these two young men mattered to his daughter in ways words couldn’t fully express.
The artwork lined the stone paths and terraces. Paintings of blue crabs and marsh grasses. Sculptures shaped from driftwood and reclaimed metal. A photograph of a storm rolling across the bay, beautiful and dangerous all at once.
Mei paused in front of that one. “This is my favorite,” she said softly. “It reminds people that the sea gives and takes. You can love it and still respect it.”
As they moved deeper into the gardens, Fly finally noticed what was suspended above them.
Three enormous canvases hung from fine steel wire stretched between the old sycamores, floating in the open air as if gravity had loosened its grip for the night. They swayed almost imperceptibly in the river breeze, catching the lantern light and the last gold of sunset.
A blue whale reimagined. Not whole but pieced out for impact.
One canvas captured the whale’s head and eye, immense and calm, the gaze ancient and knowing, as if it had seen everything the water could give and take and endured anyway. Another focused on the long, ridged throat pleats, pale and powerful, the brushstrokes layered so thickly they seemed to move when the light shifted. The third showed the curve of a massive fluke, textured in deep cobalt and slate, the scale of it unmistakable even without context.
Than stopped beneath them without realizing he’d done it. He tilted his head back, eyes tracking the sweep of the images as they hovered above the crowd, above the music, above the soft clink of glasses and murmured conversations.
The whales didn’t dominate the space. They inhabited it. Moving through the night the way they would move through the sea, vast and deliberate, untouchable and utterly present.
But he didn’t look at Fly. Not once.
Fly felt it, too, the instinctive hush that came when something big and real passed overhead. He waited for Than to say something. A muttered observation. A dry aside. Anything.
It didn’t come.
Mei stood beside them, hands folded loosely in front of her, watching the guests react rather than the paintings themselves.
Fly glanced at her, then back up at the canvases, and understood that this wasn’t art meant to impress. It was art meant to remind people how small they were, and how careful they should be with what carried them.
Than swallowed, his gaze still fixed overhead.
“Geezus,” Fly murmured quietly. “Those are… something else.”
Mei only smiled, a small, contained expression that held something mysterious and meaningful.
While the whales drifted above them, suspended between earth and water, Fly had the strangest sense that the night itself was holding its breath.
