34. Epilogue Brielle
Chapter thirty-four
Epilogue: Brielle
One year later
I wake up to the smell of coffee and the sound of an argument about eggs.
Not a real argument. The kind that happens between people who know each other well enough to disagree about small things without it meaning anything, which is its own kind of intimacy.
Jase insists the eggs need more time. Evan is insisting that Jase doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Max is saying nothing, which means he already made his eggs earlier.
I lie in bed for a moment and listen to them.
The apartment is big enough for all four of us, which was the first thing I looked for when I was choosing it.
Three proper bedrooms and a fourth that we use for whatever it needs to be on any given day, a study, a storage room, occasionally a place where someone sleeps when the others are being impossible, which happens approximately never, but the option is there. High ceilings. Good light.
A kitchen big enough for four people to occupy simultaneously without anyone losing their mind, which was a non-negotiable requirement that I did not explain to the realtor.
I bought it six months ago, after the lawyers finished with my mother’s lawyers and the trust was unfrozen and the first thing I did was write a check to Station 47 large enough that Weston stared at it for a full thirty seconds before he looked up at me then he laughed, short and disbelieving.
He shook his head and said, “Well, I'll be damned.”
I smiled and left him to it.
The second thing I did was buy this apartment.
The third thing I did was call my father.
He answered on the first ring, which told me he’d been waiting for it, and we talked for an hour and a half about nothing important, and at the end of it, he said, “I just want you to be happy, Brielle,” and I said I am.
We have dinner once a month now, the two of us, at a restaurant in the West Village that he chose because it has nothing to do with his social obligations and everything to do with the fact that they make a risotto he has been ordering for fifteen years.
My mother has not called. I have not called her either. The lawyers say the trust situation is resolved, and that’s enough for now. Maybe one day it won’t be. Maybe one day she’ll be ready for the version of me that actually exists. I’m not waiting for it, but I’m not closing the door either.
That’s as much grace as I have right now, and I think it’s the right amount.
The argument about eggs reaches its natural conclusion, which is Jase conceding that the eggs are done and plating them with the energy of a man who has won on a technicality, and I hear the scrape of chairs and the low sound of the morning settling into itself.
I get up.
The acting classes are on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, a small studio in the West Village run by a woman named Donatella who has been teaching for thirty years and who told me in our first session that I had either a great deal of natural talent or a great deal of unprocessed emotional material and that in her experience these were often the same thing.
I told her probably both.
She said goodbye and handed me a monologue, and that was that.
Callie’s film screened at Tribeca in the spring, and the reviews were the kind that make a filmmaker cry in a bathroom and then pretend they weren’t crying.
Three of the reviews mentioned me. Two were a single line each. The third gave me a full paragraph and used the word luminous, which I read four times alone in the apartment before I texted it to Callie. She called me immediately and screamed for approximately ninety seconds.
The agent she recommended signed me two months later.
I have done two more small projects since then, nothing large, nothing that requires me to be anywhere except exactly where I am.
I am not trying to be a star. I am trying to do the thing I love in the way that fits the life I’ve built, and so far those two things have not asked me to choose between them.
The workshops started in September.
Twelve young artists from three different neighborhoods, a studio space in Bushwick that I found through Callie’s network, a small grant that I funded myself, and I am working to build it into something sustainable.
They meet twice a week. They make things. Some of them are extraordinary, and some of them are starting, and all of them deserve the space to find out which they are, which is the whole point.
I go every Thursday before my acting class. I sit in the back and watch them work. I think about a sixteen-year-old girl who was told that pursuing art wasn’t a direction, and I think that she would have liked this room.
Max made captain in October.
Weston retired on a Friday, and on Monday morning, Max walked into that station as its captain.
I watched him do it from the doorway of the admin office, which I still run two days a week because I like it. Weston’s replacement hasn’t found anyone better, and I haven’t felt the need to stop.
He walked in and took the room the way he takes every room, quietly and completely, and I thought about a man I saw in a fire chief’s shadow for years finally stepping into his own light.
I thought that his father would be proud and that Max’s pride was the one that mattered and that those two things were finally, after a long time, the same.
He came to find me afterward, in the admin office, and he stood in the doorway the way he stood in it the day my mother came. He looked at me and said it feels different.
He came in and sat down and we talked for an hour about nothing and everything and it was one of the best hours I have had in a year full of them.
Jase is still the heart of wherever he goes.
This has not changed and will not change.
He brought home a stray cat three months ago without asking anyone, named it Gretzky after the hockey player, and presented it to the apartment as a fait accompli with the energy of a man who knows he’s done something questionable and is betting on charm to carry him through.
It worked. Gretzky now sleeps exclusively on Max’s pillow, which Jase finds funnier than anyone else in the apartment.
Evan called Erick.
He told me about it afterward, lying on the couch with Gretzky on his chest, keeping his voice easy the way he does when something matters more than he wants to show.
He said it was a good call. He said Erick cried a little, which Evan said was very inconvenient and also kind of great.
He said his mother wants everyone to come for Easter, by which he means all four of us, and that he’s told her yes.
We’re going in April.
I have been thinking about it since he told me, the image of the four of us in a house in Queens with his family, his brothers, and his parents.
I think his family would like me.
I think I would like them too.
It’s a Saturday in November, and almost a year since a fire in a church in Brooklyn Heights, and the four of us are in the apartment with nowhere to be.
Jase won the egg argument and is insufferable about it.
Evan is on the couch with Gretzky and his laptop and the easy looseness of a man entirely at home in his own life.
Max is at the kitchen table with a book he has been reading for three weeks, but something always interrupts him, and he has stopped being bothered by it, which is itself a kind of progress.
I am in the armchair with my coffee, and my script for Tuesday’s class, and I am only half reading it because I keep looking up at the three of them in this apartment on this ordinary Saturday morning like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
Later, there will be dinner, and it will be good because Max is cooking and always cooks well, and the table will be loud and warm, nothing like the dinners of my old life.
And later still, when the city has gone to its quietest, and the apartment holds only us, there will be the four of us together, warm and unhurried, the ease of people who know each other completely.
***
The four of us end up in the bedroom the way we often do on quiet Saturdays. No big production. Just the natural drift after dinner and a couple of glasses of wine.
Jase pulls me into a kiss first, lazy and familiar, his hand resting on my waist. I smile against his mouth and feel Evan come up behind me, pressing a warm kiss to the side of my neck.
“You smell so good,” Evan says quietly, his breath tickling my skin.
Max watches us from the foot of the bed, then steps in close. He doesn’t say anything.
He slides his hand into my hair and kisses me like he’s been thinking about it since he got home. The kiss is slow and deep, the kind that makes my knees feel a little unreliable even after a year of this.
They undress me without any rush. Jase tugs my sweater off and drops it on the chair.
Evan kneels to peel my leggings down my legs, pressing a quick kiss to my stomach on the way back up. Max unhooks my bra and lets his hands linger on my ribs for a second, thumbs brushing under my breasts.
I climb onto the bed and lie back. The three of them follow, surrounding me in that way they’ve perfected over time.
It doesn’t feel overwhelming anymore. It feels like home.
Jase kisses me again while Evan mouths along my collarbone. Max settles between my thighs, pushing them open gently.
When his tongue slides over me, warm and slow, I let out a long breath and close my eyes. He knows exactly how I like it now, patient strokes with the right pressure. No showmanship. Max doing what he does best: focusing completely on the task in front of him.
“Still tastes so fucking good,” he murmurs against me, almost to himself.
Evan laughs softly near my ear. “You say that every time.”
“Because it’s true every time,” Max replies, then licks me again, deeper.
Jase’s mouth finds my breast, sucking lightly while his hand strokes my side. Evan kisses down my other side, slow and unhurried, occasionally nipping at my ribs to make me twitch.