10. SIENNA
SIENNA
"Well," Adrian says. "I wasn't expecting this."
We're still in the truck, parked outside the Huntington Botanical Garden's service entrance, the engine ticking as it cools. Adrian is looking at the gate, then at me, then back at the gate. The darkness is thinning. Not dawn yet, but close.
This place is like my second home. The first time I came here I was nineteen and broke. Someone had given me a free pass and I spent four hours in the Japanese Garden alone. I went home lighter than I'd been in years. I've been coming back ever since.
Adrian is still looking at the gate. I watch the way he takes it in without comment.
"I think," he says, "that we might be too early. It's going to be closed for a while."
"Come on." I'm already getting out. "I know someone."
I pull out my phone as we walk toward the entrance and send a message. Thirty seconds later, the beam of a flashlight appears on the path.
Frank comes out pulling his jacket straight. He's somewhere in his sixties, broad-faced, unhurried. He's been on this overnight shift for as long as I've been coming here, and we have the kind of easy familiarity built from years of early mornings and very little small talk.
"Sienna." A nod. He looks at Adrian with a mild assessment.
"Frank, this is Adrian."
He looks at Adrian for another second. Apparently arrives at an acceptable conclusion. "Japanese Gardens?"
"You know me."
He unhooks the latch and swings the gate open.
The path inside is gravel and shadow, the trees pressing close on both sides, and the smell hits immediately. Damp earth. Cedar. The cold green smell of moss. Adrian falls into step beside me. His footsteps are careful on the gravel, like he's aware the space asks for quietness.
The garden reveals itself gradually. You can't take it all in from one point.
It unfolds as you move through it, one section opening into the next, and that's always been part of what I like about it.
Stone lanterns stand as dark shapes in the pre-dawn light.
The koi pond sits flat and still, its surface the color of pewter.
The pavilion roof curves against the sky.
There are no people. No voices. Nothing to disturb the peace.
I hear Adrian exhale.
Slow. Long. Something going out of him that he'd been holding.
I stay quiet.
He turns to look at me, and I think it’s the first time that I’ve seen him relaxed.
We start walking.
The path winds toward the moon bridge, the water sounds reaching us before we see it, a quiet constant movement from somewhere beneath. The cold is still here but it's a clean cold, the kind that sharpens rather than closes you down.
"So," Adrian says, after we've been walking a while. His voice is pitched low, fitted to the space. "You come here often?" The pickup line deliberate.
I laugh. "I do, actually. When I need to reset."
"And this is the reset of choice."
"Japanese gardens are intentional in a specific way.
" I'm watching the path in front of us, the lantern shapes, the way the moss holds the night's moisture.
"Every element placed with a reason. Nothing accidental.
But the intention isn't to control nature.
It's to work with it." I pause. "My approach to landscape is looser, more natural.
But I find something in this that I can't get from anywhere else. "
I can see him listening with full attention.
We round a bend in the path and the Japanese Garden section opens ahead. The stone placement, the carefully raked gravel, the single gnarled pine growing at an angle that looks like decades of wind shaped it.
I stop at the edge.
"The point isn't perfection," I say. "It's the opposite, actually.
There's a concept in Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi, that finds beauty in imperfection.
" I watch a few leaves, blown by the breeze, land on the raked gravel and stay there.
"That stone has a crack in it. That tree grows sideways.
And that's not despite the design. That's the design. "
Same as in life I think. But I don't say that out loud.
I hear myself and wince.
"Sorry." I shake my head. "Old habits. I used to give guided tours here, years ago. Apparently I can't be here without falling into the role."
He looks at me, and he gives me an easy smile. "No apologies needed. I find it fascinating."
The way he looks at me I dare to hope he is not talking about the garden.
"Come on," I say. "Take your shoes off. Let’s feel the earth."
He looks at my feet as I'm already crouching to unlace my boots.
"You mean…Grounding?" He scoffs. "You actually believe in that?"
I look up at him. "You know what grounding is?"
"Direct contact with the earth's surface electrons." He seems to find this entertaining. "The woo-woo practice that's supposed to heal you ." He says making air quotes on the final two words.
"There are studies," I say defensively. "And even if it doesn’t do all that is supposed to, it’s not going to harm"
He considers this for a moment. Then he sits on the edge of the path and starts removing his shoes.
The moment I step onto the grass the cold hits my soles immediately. Sharp and specific, every blade of grass distinct, the damp of the earth coming up through it.
I close my eyes.
I breathe.
I think about Charlie. About the surgeon saying full recovery and how those words released the part of me that had been braced since Officer Alvarez’s call.
About the specific feeling of relief that was waiting underneath all the hours of holding it together, and how it's only arriving now, here, in this cold grass at four thirty in the morning.
It's letting go now.
Here, bare feet on cold grass, cedar in the air, the whole long night somewhere behind us.
I breathe.
I think about the journey that got me here. Not just tonight. These past years. The parts I survived, what it cost me and the fact that I am standing here with bare feet, building a life from the parts that remained.
The tight place at my cheast releases.
Then my shoulders.
I open my eyes.
Adrian is standing a few feet away. He's stopped walking. He's looking at me. Steady and open.
The morning light is just beginning to show, grey-blue and thin, coming in from behind the tree line. In it his hair seems darker, and the planes of his face are sharper. His eyes are grey, with faint lines at the corners. And they are locked on me.
My pulse starts to speed up.
I look toward the water.
"So." I keep my voice even. "You, William and Carter, are friends?"
A slight pause. Something moves across his face.
"William and I go back a long way." He gives me a meaningful look: "Since his family moved next to mine."
I understand what he is really saying. Since his family was forced out by my father.
"Carter," he continues, after a moment, "I know because of William. Since they started working together."
Neither of us says anything. There is now the weight of the past between us.
Adrian reaches over and takes my hand. His fingers close around mine, and he tilts his head toward the koi pond. We walk to the edge and sit. The water moves in slow dark circles, the koi invisible in the low light, only the surface disturbed to show they're there.
Adrian is quiet beside me. Both of us are absorbed by our inner thoughts.
"Okay," I say eventually, because my thoughts and the silence are starting to weigh on me. "I have to ask. How do you know about grounding? That's not very aligned with the legal eagle lawyer image."
He laughs. The real one, not the flirtatious one. "Is that how you see me?"
"I mean…" I look at him sideways. "A little."
"That's fair." He doesn't seem bothered by it. "I'm a lot of things."
"Clearly."
He's looking at the pond now. The easy expression is still there but something underneath it has shifted.
"There was a time I would try anything." His voice sounds different.
I wait.
It's costing him to continue. I can see that. The way his jaw moves once before he speaks, the way his eyes stay on the water.
"Thymus cancer." He says it plainly. "Caught early.
" A pause. "Found it in a routine scan. One of those things…
." He turns a small stone in his free hand, sets it down beside him.
"Did chemo. And everything else that might help.
Came out the other side." He looks at me.
"I'm three months away from the five-year mark. "
The garden is suddenly very quiet.
I look at him. I don’t know how to react to this information.
He's watching my face, with a careful manner. Like he's waiting for my reaction to this reveal to let him know whether he made a mistake.
"Okay," he says, with a dry half-smile. "Go ahead. Let's get all the clichés out of the way."
I look at him in confusion. "What?"
"You know." A glance at the sky, reciting: "Everything happens for a reason. God only gives you what you can handle. You look good, you don't even seem sick."
I think about it for a second.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger?" I offer.
A beat. Maybe this is the wrong thing to say.
He laughs.
Then I do too, which is ridiculous and exactly right. Here in the Japanese Garden at nearly five in the morning with damp grass under our feet and the long night behind us.
It dies down slowly.
What's left is the two of us. His hand still holding mine. Eyes shinning with tears. Laugh tears. Definitely laugh. The morning coming in grey and soft through the trees, the koi pond moving, the cedar smell and the cold.
Sometimes you don't need to do anything. You don't need to fix anything or help carry the load. Sometimes you just need to be present.
I reach over with my other hand and close both of mine around his. I hold on.
He looks down at our hands.
Then up at me.
The light is changing. The grey warming by degrees toward something that will eventually be gold. His face in it, close and unguarded, is the most honest version I've seen of him.
He reaches up.
His hand finds my face, his fingers at my jaw, and the touch is slow and certain and I'm not moving away from it.
He guides me forward and his mouth finds mine and the kiss is quiet and deep and it has the feeling of something that was always going to happen.
The specific feeling of an inevitability finally arriving.
Just like the new day that is starting.