Chapter 25 #2
So, we end up stepping into the kind of place Anna would choose. Marble floors. Cream walls. Soft instrumental music that probably has a composer with three names. The front desk smells faintly of citrus and something expensive.
Lucy grips my hand, eyes wide. “Is this a princess place?”
“It is a queen place.” Anna smiles. “Which is better.”
We are ushered to plush leather chairs in front of long mirrors framed in gold.
The stylist assigned to Lucy runs her fingers through her hair and actually gasps. “Oh, my goodness. Look at this color.”
I smile because yes, I know. Lucy’s hair is the kind of red people try to recreate and never quite achieve. Thick, long, wild when it wants to be. Mine is darker, deeper copper, but just as heavy down my back.
“Just a trim,” I say immediately, protective. “No length.”
Anna waves a dismissive hand. “Maintenance. Shine. Health.”
Lucy sits very still as the stylist sections her hair.
I watch the strands fall, small pieces, nothing dramatic.
Just enough to make it look tame instead of wild.
They wash it with something that smells like vanilla and rosemary, and Lucy closes her eyes like she is at a spa retreat instead of being three years old.
When they blow it out, I nearly laugh.
She looks polished. Like a tiny redheaded heiress. Her hair falls in smooth waves down her back, glossy and impossibly soft. She keeps flipping it over her shoulder the way Anna does her long blonde locks.
“I look fancy,” she whispers to me.
“You do,” I agree.
Then it is my turn.
Warm water at my scalp, fingers massaging slowly, and I exhale deeper than I have in years.
I hadn’t realized how tense I have been until my shoulders drop nearly a foot.
They apply a deep-conditioning treatment, wrap my hair in a warm towel, and I sit there with my eyes closed, breathing in eucalyptus and pretending, just for a moment, that life is uncomplicated.
When they blow-dry my hair, smoothing and shaping it, I barely recognize myself. The copper catches the light and shines in a way my home treatments could never match.
Anna stands behind me in the mirror.
She says quietly. “You are allowed to shine, Hildy.”
Lucy hops off her chair and runs to me. “Mommy, you look like a movie.”
Hormones or not, I still can’t get used to all these feelings, the good kind, let alone the compliments.
After, Anna receives the same treatment and somehow looks even more polished than she already was, she insists on one more stop.
The nail salon is just as polished. Pale pink walls. Quiet conversations. The kind of place where they bring you tea without asking.
Lucy sits in the oversized pedicure chair as if she were on a throne. Her legs barely reach the edge.
“Warm?” the technician asks.
Lucy dips her toes into the water and squeals. “It’s bubbly!”
I choose a soft neutral for myself, something understated. Lucy chooses a pale blush with the tiniest shimmer because “it sparkles but not too much.”
Anna watches us with a small smile, hands folded in her lap, as if memorizing the scene.
When they paint Lucy’s tiny nails, she holds her fingers out carefully, concentrating with the seriousness of a surgeon.
“Do not smudge,” she mutters to herself.
I lean back, letting someone shape and file and paint my nails while my sister, no… my daughter, giggles beside me, both of us redheads with matching glossy hair and soft pink toes.
For a few hours, we are not navigating concussions or illnesses, expectations or forced engagements, we are just… girls being girls.
When we step back onto the sidewalk, hair shining, hands linked, Lucy between us, she looks up at me. “Do you think Daddy will notice?”
I smile. “Of course, he’ll notice, but Lucy, never forget that he noticed before.”
That night, after dinner, her bath, and three separate negotiations about which pajamas are the “comfiest,” Lucy chooses a book about a brave little fox who is afraid of the dark but learns that the forest at night is full of friends.
I lie on my side beside her bed, reading softly. Lenzin is sitting against the headboard, listening, arms crossed, watching us like we are sacred. I catch his eye when I turn the page. He smiles, barely.
Lucy fights sleep the way she fights everything over the past couple of days, but her blinks grow slower. Her fingers curl around the edge of the blanket. By the time the fox finds his courage, she has already drifted off.
I brush her hair back from her forehead and whisper, “You are so loved,” though she cannot hear me.
I must drift too, because when I open my eyes again, the room is darker. The little fox book is still open in my hand. And my neck aches slightly from the position I fell asleep in.
The hallway light is on, and I hear his voice, low enough that I can’t hear the words, but they are floating toward me.
I ease Lucy’s hand from the blanket and step out quietly, padding down the hall.
Lenzin stands near the window again, phone to his ear, shoulders tight in a way I do not see often. His voice, controlled.
“Yes,” he says in German. “I understand.”
A pause.
“No. I did not make this decision lightly.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“I will not marry her.”
The air leaves my lungs.
“I care for Anna deeply. She is my friend. She always will be. That is a big part of why I cannot do this.”
His hand runs through his hair, frustration breaking through the calm.
“You wanted something… romantic,” he continues. “Something that does not exist between us. You cannot force that.”
Silence. Then his jaw tightens.
“I have found it.”
My heart begins to pound so loudly that I am certain he can hear it through the walls.
“Yes,” he says. “With her.”
There is no hesitation. No doubt.
“I knew the first time I saw her,” he goes on, softer now. “In a lecture hall. She was arguing about policy, and I thought I needed to know her. I did not even know why. Then we met again. And again. And it was not fate in a dramatic sense. It was simply… inevitable.”
He exhales.
“She is the only woman who could ever be my wife.”
My hand presses to my mouth.
“She challenges me. She steadies me. She loves Lucy as if she has always been here. That is not something you arrange. That is not something you negotiate.”
His voice shifts, something fierce underneath it.
“I will not apologize for choosing Hildy…love. Real love. Not obligation and not strategy, not a lie you want to stitch together. I love her, I love Lucy, and I love what we grew together.”
Silence stretches. I can imagine his family on the other end. Angry about tradition, expectations, disappointment, and the weight of what that does to past and future generations.
“I respect you,” he says, and then, with finality, he adds, “But this is my life.”
Another pause.
“Yes. I am certain.”
When the call ends, he lowers the phone to the table and stands there for a moment, staring out at the dark, shoulders slowly relaxing.
I don’t realize I am moving toward him until the floor creaks and he turns.
For a second, neither of us speaks until he finally says, “You heard.”
There are a hundred things I could say. About fear, about being worth that kind of defiance, about how terrifying it is to be someone’s choice against his own family.
Instead, I walk to him and whisper, “I never wanted you to lose them because of me.”
“I am not losing them,” he says, and there is steel in it. “I am choosing you, because you are love, my love.”
My chest feels too small for my heart.
He cups my face, thumbs brushing my cheeks as if confirming I am real. “I did not end something that was true,” he says. “I ended something that was expected.”
“And us?” I ask because selfishly, I need to hear it again.
“Us,” he says, leaning his forehead against mine, “is the truest thing I have ever known.”
His lips brush mine first, soft. Then deeper. Not urgent or frantic, just certain.
A kiss that says this is my partner, my future. This is the woman I met at a lecture I did not want to attend, and somehow recognized before I even knew her name.
Right now, with Anna heading back to Germany, guilt and history and obligation are not hovering over me; I let myself believe it… fully.
He did not choose me because I was convenient; he chose me because I am his love.