Fair.
I exhale.
There it is then.
The next move.
The one I’m not sure whether Stella is ready for, except some instinct in me says maybe she is. Maybe because nothing about her shrinks from rooms like this anymore. Maybe because she was built for rooms like this and just never got invited in under the right light.
My mother speaks again.
“If she’d be comfortable, bring her for drinks this afternoon.”
I go quiet.
Not because I don’t understand the invitation.
Because I do.
This isn’t some formal ambush.
It isn’t a performance.
It isn’t “let’s inspect the girl.”
This is my family saying—we’ve seen enough to want to know her and hear how serious you are.
And that matters.
Enough that for one second I don’t answer.
My father fills the silence first.
“Only if she wants to,” he says, and I hear the real thing under the polish there too. “No pressure.”
My mother adds, “Do not spring us on her if she’d hate that. I like her already. I’d prefer not to ruin it.”
That gets another short laugh out of me.
Then I look back through the glass again at Stella.
At the way she’s listening to Jade now, head slightly bent, sunlight catching the gold at her ear. At the long line of her body in cream and black. At the fact that she’s here at all—here with me, after all the years we lost, after all the damage, after everything it took to get us into the same light.
“I’ll ask her,” I say.
“Good,” my mother replies.
There’s a beat.
Then, more quietly than I expect, “You seem happy.”
The words hit somewhere low and tender.
I don’t answer right away.
Because I know what she’s really saying.
That she saw it in the pictures.
