I spent the two weeks after Vivian’s office in a strange, suspended anticipation, waiting for the “soon” Julian had promised, and somewhere in the waiting, unexpectedly, I found myself afraid in a way I hadn’t braced for — not of losing him, but of the actual size of what saying yes to him would mean.
I told my mother first, sitting in her kitchen over the same ginger and scallions that had witnessed my Whitfield confession months earlier, and she listened to the whole tangled shape of my fear without interrupting, the way she always had.
“I keep thinking about Marissa,” I admitted. “Twenty years of exactly this, watching someone she loved choose the crisis over her, over and over, until it hollowed her out. I believe Julian’s changed. I watched him choose Ethan over the board, watched h
