“Don’t you dare make it small. You lost everything, and you built it backbetter. I’m so proud of you, baby. So proud.”
I found Julian across the room, giving us space, watching. When our eyes met he gave me a private smile. He’d done this for me. Flown my whole family in, just because he knew I’d want them and would never once ask.
The ribbon-cutting was brief. The mayor said kind things. Julian spoke, and every word of it was about my vision and my work, and he took credit for none of it. When they handed me the giant scissors my hands barely shook.
“The law office of Alyssa Carter,” the mayor said, “is officially open.”
By half pastten the crowd had thinned to nothing, my family swept off by Raschad toward dinner, and it was just Julian and me standing in the quiet of the practice among the empty champagne glasses.
“Thank you,” I said. “I wouldn’t be able to do any of this if it wasn’t for you, Julian. I don’t take this for granted. You’ve made my dream come true.”
He stepped closer, reached into his jacket and took out a red square leatherette box, and set it on the reception desk between us. Didn’t say anything about it.
“Julian,” I gasped.
“Open it.”
My hands hadn’t held a box like it in years and I knew what it was before I opened it.
A Van Cleef Alhambra bracelet. Five motifs. Yellow gold. Mother of pearl. And when I turned the clasp up, an engraving, very small, very precise, was the year I’d passed the bar.
I’d bought that exact bracelet as a gift to myself when I’d passed the bar. The first beautiful thing I had ever bought with money I’d earned. And I’d sold it in the bankruptcy with everything else that wasn’t nailed down. I had never once let myself grieve it because it seemed obscene to grieve a bracelet when I was grieving so much else.
“You bought that yourself. Earned it. Should still be yours.”
That was all he said.
The tears came. Not the kind you wipe away fast because they’re embarrassing. The slow leak of a thing arriving that you’d stopped letting yourself want. I let them flow. He watched me and didn’t flinch. He just let me have it.
“How did you know? And the year too?” I finally managed.
“You told me. Long time ago. We were at Maple’s, I think. And the year, that’s not hard to look up, Lyss.” He took the bracelet from the box, turned my wrist gently in his hand, slow with the clasp, his knuckles brushing the inside of my arm.
I looked down at it on my wrist. Same style bracelet. Different woman. The engraving saidyears agoand the giving of it saidnow.
“Julian. This is the best, most thoughtful, most beautiful gift I’ve ever,everreceived. Better than when I bought it the first time. Way better.”
I went into him and he caught me, and held me in the middle of the practice I’d dreamed up and he built for me, and I cried into his neck for reasons I’d spent most of my life not being able to cry for. Because I was loved. I was seen. I was remembered. Locatable again.
“I love you so much, Julian,” I said, when I pulled back.
“I love you more, Lyss.”
In the car heading home,he laid out the logistics he’d arranged.
“Your sisters can stay at your place. Your mother and Micah at Simone and Raschad’s.”
“Which leaves you, going home with me.”
“Condo or Belmead?”
“Condo, I figured, so you can be close to your sisters.”
I looked out at Lennox Falls going by in the dark, the bracelet a small new weight on my wrist, and realized both of his places had stopped beinghis placesomewhere along the way. Home had quietly stopped being an address and started being wherever he was.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
51/
