CHAPTER 92: Something Shifts

POV: Selene Castellano

She noticed it on Tuesday.

He laughed at something James said on a phone call.

She was in the kitchen when she heard it through the study door, stopped what she was doing to be sure she heard right.

It wasn’t the laugh specifically. It was what the laugh meant. He’d been on the phone with James for twenty minutes and she’d heard the conversation move from foundation business to something else. Something James had said about his first failed company, apparently it was genuinely funny in retrospect.

And Avalon had laughed without managing it first.

She went back to what she was doing and said nothing when he came out.

She just noted it the way she noted things now and filed it.

On Wednesday he held the door for a man on the street.

This was not unusual. He was courteous in the practiced way of someone raised to be courteous.

What was unusual was the thirty second conversation that followed.

The man said thank you and Avalon said of course and the man said you having a good day and Avalon said yes actually and the man said good and walked on and Avalon stood on the sidewalk for a moment watching him go with an expression she’d never seen on him in that context.

Open.

Just open.

She was beside him.

He turned and found her watching him.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment and accepted the nothing without pushing.

They walked on.

By Thursday he called Catherine.

Selene was in the adjacent room and she heard his voice through the wall.

She didn’t move closer.

Didn’t try to hear.

He came out twenty minutes later and sat across from her at the dining table.

“I called my mother,” he said.

“I know, I heard you.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing with her. I want to be clear about that. I do not have a plan.”

“Okay.”

“But the letter.” He looked at the table. “She said she was sorry for protecting me in the way she did. For making decisions that were hers and leaving me to live with them.” He paused. “Catherine made decisions that were hers and left me to live with them too.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t make them the same.”

“No,” Selene said. “It doesn’t.”

“But they’re not entirely different either.”

She looked at him.

“What did you talk about?” she said.

“Nothing significant. I just asked how she was, what she was doing and whether her therapist was still the same one.” He looked at his hands. “She cried at the end and I didn’t know what to do with that so I just stayed on the line until she stopped.”

“That was the right thing.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“She asked about the foundation,” he said. “I told her about the symposium, Susan Park and the infrastructure problem.”

“What did she say?”

“That it sounded like what Nene always wanted to build.” He paused. “Then she apologized again and I told her she didn’t need to keep apologising. That once was enough and she’d done it.”

“Was that true?”

He thought about it.

“Getting there,” he said.

She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers.

He turned his palm up.

By Friday morning she told Amara about the laugh, the man on the street and the phone call.

They were alone in the foundation office, the others had not yet arrived, and Amara was going through the symposium feedback with the methodical attention she brought to everything when Selene found herself saying it before she’d decided to.

“Something shifted in him,” she said.

Amara looked up.

“Nene left him a letter,” Selene said. “We found it Sunday.”

Amara was quiet.

“What kind of shift?” she said.

Selene thought about how to describe it.

“The walls,” she said. “The ones he built. They’ve been coming down since before I came back but the letter—” She paused. “He’s stopped maintaining them. He was already not building new ones and now he’s stopped maintaining the ones that were left.”

Amara looked at her for a long moment.

“That’s significant,” she said.

“I know.”

“How do you feel about it?”

The question surprised Selene slightly.

She thought about it honestly.

“It feels like standing near something that’s opening,” she said. “Something that was closed for a long time.” She paused. “It requires a different kind of attention, not managing around the walls but just being there for what’s on the other side of them.”

“Are you ready for that?” Amara said.

Selene looked at her.

“I’ve been waiting for it since I came back,” she said.

“That’s not the same as being ready.”

“No,” Selene said. “But I think they’re the same thing in this case.”

Amara looked at her for a moment.

Then went back to the feedback.

Which was its own form of response.

On Saturday they walked to no place in particular, just moved around the city watching San Francisco Saturday morning of farmers markets and coffee shops opening and people with dogs and the light that arrived at that particular angle in October.

They walked for two hours, talked sometimes and didn't talk sometimes.

At one point he stopped outside a bookshop and went in and came out with something and put it in her bag without saying what it was.

She looked later.

A book about community-centered design. The kind of thing she’d have found herself in a week and ordered. He’d found it first.

She didn’t say anything about it then.

At another point she stopped and bought two coffee rolls from a bakery that had a line and handed him one.

He ate it while they walked and got powdered sugar on his jacket.

She brushed it off.

He looked at his jacket and then at her and said: “Did I get it.”

“Mostly,” she said.

“That means no.”

“It means mostly.”

He looked at the remaining sugar and gave up on it.

They walked on.

The city around them doing what the city did.

Indifferent and reliable and occasionally covered in powdered sugar.

That evening she wrote in the journal she’d been keeping since the symposium.

She wrote about Avalon for the first time, about things she’d observed.

He’s letting things through that he used to route around. The laugh. The street. Catherine. The book. These are small things which are not so small.

She put the pen down.

Looked at what she’d written and added one more line.

**I think this is what it looks like when someone decides to stop almost.

She put the journal away.

Somehow, she drifted into thinking about Maya in Accra reading the novel about the woman who kept almost doing the brave thing.

Thought about how it looked different from the outside than it probably felt from the inside.

From the inside it probably felt like nothing much like laughing at something James said.

Small things.

He was already asleep when she turned off the lamp and lay beside him in the dark listening to him breathe.

She thought about a woman writing letters she’d never send until she had no other options and about a man who’d spent ten years optimizing for being alone and was now leaving books in bags and staying on lines and laughing without managing it first.

She closed her eyes with a smile on her face as she drifted off into her dreamland.