She glanced up at me, already halfway into the next memory.
“She used to take me to Stonecreek sometimes. I barely remember it, but I remember the elevator. I used to make one of the interns ride it up and down with me like it was an amusement park. That jawn was old and probably a death trap in the making.”
She smiled then, quick and unguarded. She had come fully back to life in the way she always did when something genuinely met her where she was. She didn’t just take information in. She responded to it, built on it, and took it somewhere else without asking permission first.
I had seen it before. Her mother had done the same thing. I’d sat across from Celeste James many times and always left knowing more than I had when I sat down, notbecause she was trying to teach anything, but because she moved through conversation like it was something meant to be shared and expanded. Nova did it the same way.
I watched her reach for another record, already mid-thought, already carrying the conversation forward.
“Fun fact. The building was an old gun factory,” Nova was saying. “Civil War. It was converted to offices and apparently a chunk of Philly history.” Then she looked at me with an expression that was almost an accusation. “You’ve been sitting on all of this.”
“I was waiting for the right conversation.”
“The right conversation,” she said. She picked up her crate find, the D’AngeloLive at the Jazz Cafeshe’d come out here for, and turned it over in her hands. Then she looked at me again, brief, the second look, the one she didn’t always know she was giving. I knew it. I had the whole catalog.
We made our way out. I got her door then walked around to the driver’s side and got in and neither of us said anything for a moment, and the not saying anything had a texture it had recently developed, a texture I was not going to examine out loud yet but was aware of the same way I was aware of a room’s acoustics before anyone in it said a word.
I put the car in drive. The D’Angelo sat on her lap in its paper bag, her hands folded over it, still. I did not look at her hands. I had learned that looking at her soft, delicate hands was a thing I needed to ration.
We got on 422 just after riding through Valley Forge then hopped on the Schuylkill to head east. The city cameinto view ahead of us, the skyline of a place that had never tried to be anything other than what it was and had made something out of that.
“She always loved this place,” Nova said. Not to me, exactly. To the window, to the city, to whomever she talked to when she was talking to her mother in the middle of a sentence about something else.
“I sometimes wish she were here to tell me what she thinks of it,” I said. “Like, not how she showed up for it, but her core thoughts on why here. Why Philly. Why did she perform every set like it was the last love letter Philadelphia would ever hear?”
She was quiet. The lights of the city got closer.
“No matter what she would’ve said, though, the ear I always lean in for is yours.”
Nova turned to look at me. Something was moving in her face, and I watched her manage it and did not push. She had said earlier she was closer than she was. She had said she would tell me when it was ready. I was a man in possession of both those sentences and I knew how to wait while praying it was just what my soul ached to hear.
She looked back at the road. Her hands stayed folded on the paper bag. We drove the rest of the way home in the comfortable silence of two people who were not yet saying the thing and both knew it, the silence with the shape of the thing inside it, solid and patient, waiting to be named.
Chapter 11
NOVA
The gate washalfway up when I got there, which told me everything I needed to know about how long he’d already been inside.
I ducked under and stepped into the space without announcing myself, letting the quiet settle around me before I said anything. The front windows pulled the morning in at an angle that made the dust visible in the air. The place didn’t feel unfinished. It felt like it had been worked on without stopping, which was not the same thing.
Deion was at the counter with a screwdriver in his hand, focused on a hinge that had already been tightened enough to hold.
“You do know you’re allowed to leave here,” I said.
Deion didn’t look up right away. He gave the screw one more turn, then set the tool down before glancing over his shoulder.
“I did leave,” he said. “Came back.”
“That doesn’t count.”
He almost smiled at that, but it didn’t fully land. His attention moved past me for a second, checking our surroundings the way he always did, like he was keeping track of everything at once.
“You’re early,” he added.
“You were vague,” I said, setting my tote down and stepping further in. “You said you needed help. You did not say you were building an entire infrastructure by yourself.”
That was when I saw the black milk crates. They lined the side wall in uneven stacks, with some of the vinyl inside sealed, others opened and previously loved. There were records leaning against one another outside of a few of them, like he had started organizing and then stopped to fix something else. Curiosity got the best of me and I walked straight toward them.
