Caught Between Ice and Fire

Chapter 17 Friday Mornings

The rosemary had taken.

It was standing in its corner of the cutting garden with the particular stubborn vitality of a plant that had decided, after some consideration, that it intended to stay — low and dense and fragrant, the kind of green that was almost grey in certain lights, the kind of smell that hit you before you were close enough to see it properly.

I crouched beside it on the first Friday morning and pressed two fingers into the soil and felt the moisture and the texture of it and thought: yes. This is right. This is exactly right.

Roman arrived at eight-thirteen. I heard him on the stairs and didn't turn — I was checking the lavender, which had established beautifully, the purple of it extraordinary against the dark soil. He crossed the rooftop without rushing and stopped beside me and crouched too, and we both looked at the garden in the morning light.

"The rosemary," he said.

"I know." I sat back on my heels. "It just needed time."

He reached out and ran two fingers along one of the rosemary stems — not picking it, just touching it, the way you touched things you were glad existed. I watched him do it and felt something in my chest that I had stopped trying to name.

"My mother used rosemary in everything," he said. "She said it was the most honest herb. It smelled exactly like what it was. No pretence."

"That sounds like something she would say," I said. And then realised I'd said it — as if I knew her, as if the fragments he'd given me over weeks had assembled into something real enough to have instincts about.

He looked at me. Not with the assessment. With something open and slightly wondering.

"Yes," he said. "It does."

We sat in the morning quiet of the rooftop garden — the city below us, the building around us, the lavender and the rosemary and the things just beginning to grow — and it was the most comfortable silence I had ever shared with another person. Not the silence of two people managing the space between them. The silence of two people who didn't need to fill it.

"Tell me about her," I said. "If you want to."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Her name was Anne. She was — small. Smaller than you'd expect, for someone who took up so much space." He paused. "She laughed loudly. It embarrassed Ethan when we were young. He was always very concerned with what things looked like from the outside. She didn't care at all." Another pause, longer. "She was ill for a long time. Seven years, from the first diagnosis to — " He stopped. "She didn't complain. Not once. She said complaining was a waste of the time you had."

I looked at the lavender. "She sounds extraordinary."

"She was ordinary," he said. "In the best possible way. She was — just a person. She loved flowers and she burned rice and she laughed too loudly and she held on to things that mattered and let go of things that didn't and she —" He stopped again. "She would have had opinions about everything in this building. Very specific opinions. She would have moved the tree."

I turned to look at him. "Moved it where?"

"Closer to the east glazing. For the morning light." He considered this seriously. "She would have been right."

"She would have been right," I agreed, and something moved through his expression that was too large and too brief to catch completely — grief and warmth and something else, something that had to do with this moment specifically, with being on a rooftop talking about his mother to someone who listened.

We stayed for forty minutes. We talked about Anne — gradually, not all at once, in the way Roman did everything, careful and deliberate. He told me about the Saturday markets and the burned rice and the way she used to argue with the television news as if the presenters could hear her. He told me she'd wanted to be an architect when she was young, before life had redirected her, and that he thought — though he'd never told anyone this — that the building was partly for her. For the version of her that had wanted to make things.

I told him about my mother. About the three jobs she'd worked when my father left, about the way she sang in the kitchen off-key and completely without self-consciousness, about the hospital visits and the payment plans and the way she still, from a hospital bed, wanted to know if I was eating.

"She sounds like Anne," Roman said.

"Stubborn women who don't complain," I said.

"The best kind," he said.

We were both quiet for a moment.

Then he stood and I stood and we looked at the garden — growing, rooted, alive in the northeast corner of a rooftop in Velmoor City — and I thought: we built this together. Not the physical installation — that was the specialist team and the soil and the plants. But the idea of it, the impulse behind it, the specific shape of this corner of the building. That was ours. That was something we had made together out of conversation and trust and the particular honesty of two people who had stopped performing for each other.

"Same time next Friday?" I said.

He looked at the garden. Then at me.

"Same time next Friday," he said.

We went back downstairs. Together, this time, without the stairwell door being held or either of us pretending it was accidental. Just together, the way you went somewhere with someone when you'd stopped pretending you were going separately.

* * *

The Friday mornings became a thing.

Not announced, not scheduled in any system, not mentioned to anyone — though Marcus knew, because Marcus always knew, and Ethan knew because Ethan was Roman's brother and had the particular rAnner of someone who had spent a lifetime reading a person most people found unreAnneble. But it wasn't discussed and it wasn't performed and it was simply — a thing that happened. Every Friday at eight, the rooftop, the garden, the morning light.

Some Fridays we talked. Some Fridays we barely spoke — just checked the plants, noted the progress, stood in the particular quiet of a space that had become, without either of us deciding it, ours.

On the third Friday Roman brought coffee from Michael's — carried in a paper bag, two cups, handed to me without comment, as if this were something he had always done. On the fourth Friday I brought fruit from the market near my apartment — the east market, specifically, because the east market was where the lavender had come from and it felt right. He looked at the bag when I handed it to him and something crossed his face that I was beginning to be able to read, the specific expression that meant he had been moved by something and was containing it.

He ate three of the four mangoes before we went back downstairs.

"You could have saved one for later," I said.

"I prefer to eat things when they're good," he said. "Not later."

I looked at him. He looked at the garden.

I thought: I know what you mean. I thought: so do I. I thought: we are talking about mangoes and we are not talking about mangoes and I think you know that as well as I do.

"The penthouse units on forty," I said. "The limewash is finished on the east side. I want you to see it before we proceed with the west."

"Monday morning," he said.

"Yes, monday morning," I agreed.

We went downstairs.