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"How would I build a practice in London without it looking like the Kensington family built it for me?"

"The same way you built everything else," I say.

"With your own clients and your own work. I would like to buy you the building, though. Wherever you want it. Mayfair, St. James's, anywhere you choose."

She turns to look at me, and for the first time in days, something close to a smile touches her mouth.

"You want to buy me a building."

"I want to buy you a building," I say.

"Think of it as a gift from a man who's in love with you. It's the only part of this I'm going to insist on."

She laughs softly and shakes her head.

"I'm not going to argue with a man who wants to buy me a building in Mayfair." Then the smile fades, and she holds my gaze.

"But the clients are mine, Ross. Every one of them. I don't want a single introduction from your family, your office, or your friends. If this works, it works because of me."

"They'll come for you," I tell her, and I don't hesitate, because I don't need to.

"Not for my name. I won't make a single introduction unless you ask me to."

"I'm not saying yes," she says.

"I know."

"I'm not saying anything yet."

"I know that too," I say.

"I'd just like you to see it before you decide. Bring the boys to London when camp ends, before school starts. A week, maybe ten days. They can meet my mother and Sebastian and Jane. You can walk around the city and see whether it feels like somewhere you could build a life. If it doesn't, we fly home and figure out something else, even if that means I spend half my life on planes to San Francisco."

She studies my face the way she did at the kitchen table two nights ago, searching for the catch, and this time I can tell she doesn't find one.

"Ten days," she says. "And I'm the one who decides when we leave."

"You're the one who decides all of it," I tell her.

She leans her head against my shoulder, lightly, for the first time since I walked out of her kitchen with that folder. I don't move. I sit on her back steps in the dark with a soccer ball in the grass and her weight against my arm, and I let the quiet be enough.

***

Two weeks later, camp is over, and I fly home to London with Blaire and the boys. My mother decides the first meeting should happen in the garden, not the drawing room.

"Children shouldn't meet their family across a coffee table," she tells me on the phone the night before.

"Bring them outside, where they can move."

So on their second afternoon in London, with the boys still half on California time, I walk Blaire, Wells, and Miles through the house and out onto the terrace. My mother is waiting on the bench beneath the old pear tree. She doesn't rush toward them. She stays seated, so that when the boys reach her, she's nearly at their eye level, and I can see her hands trembling in her lap.

"Hello," she says.

"I'm your grandmother. You can call me whatever feels right."

Miles considers her with open curiosity. Wells steps forward and offers his hand, the same way he shook mine at the front door the day we met, and my mother takes it with both of hers and holds on a moment longer than a handshake requires.

"Your father tells me you beat him at chess," she says.