I hadn't thought about it in those terms before. I'd been going to the cemetery as a kind of accounting. Coffee, silence, the crow. Tallying what I owed. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be something else.
"I'd like to come with you," she said. "If that's okay. Not to intrude on anything. I just." She stopped, which she rarely did. "I'd like to know where she is."
I thought about Nadia standing in the cemetery with her coffee and her directness and her complete absence of performance. Saying nothing in particular. Just being there.
"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that."
She nodded, satisfied, and picked up her book again.
The lamp made its usual warm circle. The cats watched from the shelves. Outside, Sofia's garden did whatever gardens did in the dark.
After a while, I said, "There's something I want to talk about."
She lowered the book. "Okay."
"The apartment." I looked around the room. The trivet on the stove. The book on the shelf. The coffee in the cabinet. "It's Sofia's. I've always known it was temporary. She's eighty-six, and at some point this is going to be a different decision." I took a beat. "I've been saving. Since I got out. Every month. I didn't have a plan exactly. I wanted to have options." I looked at her. "I think I've been saving for a specific option without knowing what it was yet."
She was watching me carefully.
"I'm not asking you to decide anything tonight," I said. "I want you to know that's where my head is. When we talk about next year, I'm thinking past next year."
Her mouth formed an O before she could get it under control. "You're thinking about a house."
"I'm thinking about a house."
"With me."
"With you. And the trivet. And whichever of the cats Sofia lets me take."
She looked at the shelf of ceramic cats and considered this with genuine seriousness. "The tabby with the chipped ear," she said finally. "He looks like he's seen things and kept quiet about them. That's the one we take."
"Done," I said.
She turned back to her book. Two pages in, she reached over without looking and found my hand and held it, her thumb tracing back and forth in the absentminded way she had when she was reading.
I sat in the warm light of the apartment that had been my entire world for three years and would not be for much longer, and thought about the fact that I was not afraid of that. I could sit here and feel the change coming and want it, completely and without reservation, in a way I had wanted nothing since before I was old enough to know what wanting things cost.
My mom would have had a lot to say about that.
She'd have led with something dry. Made me laugh before I'd realized she'd got to the point. And then she'd have gone back to her kitchen and made something technically inedible and expected me to eat it, because that was how she loved people. Imperfectly, specifically, with her complete self.
I thought I was finally understanding that.
EPILOGUE
DAEMON
Six months ago, I'd stood in a parking lot and listened to Nadia's engine fade and thought I'd lost everything.
Tonight, she was running the catering for Lindsey Hunter's latest book launch, her new staff moving through the venue with the same focus I'd seen her model for three years.
The difference was that I was carrying a small velvet box in the inside pocket of my jacket. One I'd been carrying for three weeks.
Lucky Break had done the setup. Tables, lighting, and the AV for Lindsey's reading. But the kitchen was entirely Nadia's operation now. Six staff, all trained, all good, and a business that had survived.
Survived was the accurate word, and Nadia used it deliberately. The complaints had been withdrawn five weeks after the community hall meeting, no explanation offered, which was as close to a confession as Elevate's lawyers would ever sign.
Their office on the highway stayed open. They still quoted against her on the corporate work, still sent associates to smile at chamber mixers. Nobody had packed up and fled town in the night. They'd gone patient instead, the way money does when daylight gets expensive.
