Chapter 27 #2
My mother eyed me over the rim of her glasses, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. “That depends entirely on what sort of matter it is,” she said, a glint of mischief in her tone. “Do you want Anne to stay, darling?”
I got the distinct sense she was enjoying herself, indulging in the sport of watching me squirm.
Turning to my mother, I said firmly, “I’m planning a proposal, and I’d prefer to keep the details between us.”
The effect on Anne was immediate.
She went still, her smile cracking for a heartbeat before she reassembled it, brighter and more brittle than before. “Well, as a young lady myself, perhaps I could offer some insight—what women might appreciate in such a moment.”
“That’s very generous, darling, but I think this is best left to family.” My mother’s tone was laced with authority that Anne didn’t dare to challenge. “After all, this is one conversation I think a mother’s earned the right to keep to herself. At least for now.”
Anne’s smile faltered—barely, but enough to expose a thin crack in the varnish. “Of course,” she said, collecting her papers. “I’ll have the revised list on your desk tomorrow.”
She gathered her things with brittle composure. As she passed me, she paused just long enough to lean close. “You’re making a mistake.”
The door shut behind her with a soft click.
My mother removed her glasses and set them down delicately on the desk. Her mouth curved, half-smile, half-reproof. “You do pick your moments, darling” she remarked.
I met her gaze and saw the knowing there—the kind that had always unsettled me.
She crossed to the window and unlatched it, a wash of soft spring air pushing in as she angled the pane wider.
“Honestly,” she murmured, fanning the sill with one hand, “Anne always lays it on too thick with the perfume.”
She returned to her chair, a smile warming her face in a way that never failed to disarm donors, and tilted her head at me. “So….this ‘proposal’ revelation. Do you have ideas, or was that only to make poor Anne combust?”
When I hesitated for a second too long my mother asked, “Since when does my son look bashful?”
“I want it to be perfect for her,” I confessed, and the words came easier once I let them start. “Something she’ll never forget. Not a spectacle that would overwhelm her, but something private, beautiful, unforgettable… Ours.”
Her expression softened. “I knew she’d changed you. I just didn’t realise she’d made you a romantic.”
I chuckled under my breath. “You say that like it’s a weakness.”
“No,” she replied, a little laugh in her voice, “like it’s a miracle.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The quiet stretched, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It felt…honest, in a way that we rarely were. I took the opening.
I leaned forward, forearms on my knees, and let the first idea unfurl.
“I was thinking about the Conservatory Garden. We close the gates after dusk, have Parks reopen for us. Lights hidden along the hedges—nothing theatrical, just a path that glows. A small ensemble tucked out of sight. She walks through the flowering arch and I’m by the fountain, timed to that hour when the city goes quiet and the air smells like new leaves. ”
The scene bloomed in my mind so completely that I had to blink to come back to the room. It was ridiculous, how much I wanted it—to build something that beautiful just to see her face when she found it. For a second, I was almost light-headed with wanting it to be real.
“You’d rent out half of Central Park to ask a single question?”
“If it means she remembers it every spring for the rest of her life, yes,” I told her without hesitation.
She laughed, touched in spite of herself. “You sound like your father when he first met me—impossible, expensive, and sincere.” She tapped a finger against her notebook. “We’ll need a donation large enough to make bureaucracy sprint. Think of her shoes! Grass and silk are enemies.”
“I’ll lay a temporary walkway,” I said. “Stone if they’ll allow it, raised panels if they won’t.”
“Of course you will.” She smiled. “Go on.”
“The Chrysler,” I said, and I heard my voice lift.
“The top. No one else. We clear whatever floor they’ll give me under the spire, polish the glass, warm the light to gold, shelter candles inside the arches so they don’t fight the wind.
She wears that dress she loves and the ring reflects the city back at her. ”
As I spoke, the image got sharper in my imagination—vast and gleaming, the skyline spread out like an offering.
I wanted to give her that view, to let her see the city the way I did when I thought of her: endless, alive, impossibly ours.
It wasn’t about the grandiosity, or the money it would take to buy it; it was about creating something that no one else could—something worthy of the way I loved her.
“That is bolder than I would have expected from you,” Mother said. “Alexander would have demanded trumpets. You were always the one who preferred the room to forget you were there.”
“She deserves to see what the world looks like from my vantage point,” I told her. “Because I want it to be hers too.”
I let that sit between us and then offered the last idea.
“The observatory at the Hayden. After hours. No audience. Just the dome and us. We program the projection to the sky over Boston the night we first kissed—constellations in the right places, the city lights dimmed to nothing. I ask her there, with the stars coming on like they’ve been waiting. ”
I could see it clearly, the two of us alone beneath that borrowed sky.
There was an intimacy to it that felt almost sacred, everything spinning on the axis of a single truth.
I’d always believed it was some kind of providence that I found my way to Olivia; that in all the infinite versions of this world, in every possible arrangement of atoms and chance, she and I exist in the same one.
Maybe that’s what the universe does for people like us—it folds, it bends, it rearranges itself until we collide.
My mother looked at me in a way that folded years into a single moment.
“I expected grandeur. I didn’t expect this much sentimentality. You’ve always been driven by results, Nathaniel. Everything you do has a purpose, an end in sight. This is the first time I’ve seen you care about the journey itself.”
“She’s the only thing I can’t quantify,” I said. “So I build what I can—moments she’ll remember when everything else fades.”
“That’s love, darling,” she said, a little wistful, a lot proud. “The one thing we can’t persuade into perfection, though you’ll certainly try.”
By the time I left, she’d promised to make some calls, and I felt a certainty take hold—an internal axis tilting toward a single, inevitable point: Olivia, and the life I’m ready to ask her to choose with me.
Now, after dropping Olivia at the office, that certainty stays with me. Instead of the usual ache of parting, I feel an undercurrent of anticipation that carries me forward.
My driver cuts across the park to Fifth and 105th, where my mother waits by the Conservatory Garden gates, already chatting with the groundskeeper. Of course she’s managed to have them open early.
She is dressed with uncharacteristic pragmatism—sunglasses, a linen blouse, and flats that look almost democratic on her.
I step out of the car and she lifts a hand in greeting, her smile wry. “Don’t look so astonished, darling. I can be sensible before noon.”
“Noted,” I reply. “I’ll alert the press.”
The garden is hushed at this hour. Dew still clings to the grass, and somewhere out of sight, a sprinkler runs, soft as static. My mother surveys the fountain as though she’s evaluating a sculpture for purchase, head tilted, lips pursed.
“Lovely,” she says. “But there’s something almost too polite about it.”
I walk the path ahead of her, imagining what it might become at night—the lanterns tucked between hedges, the sound of strings rising out of the dark, petals lifting in the breeze as Olivia walks toward me.
The vision holds for a breath, then dissolves.
Too perfect. Too staged. Beauty built to impress rather than move.
When I turn, my mother’s watching me with that knowing half-smile. “No?”
I give a small shake of my head and she chuckles in response, fond and genuine, the sound carrying lightly over the stone.
We leave the garden not long after and settle into her car. The windows are half-open, the city spilling in—lilac and asphalt, the faint bite of roasted coffee from a street cart.
Conversation drifts the way it sometimes does when we forget ourselves. She talks about her foundation’s new partnership; I mention the progress that Olivia and I are making on our capstone project. The atmosphere between us feels easy, almost like it did before Alexander died.
Then, without prompting, she says, “You know, your brother would have been unbearable about this. He’d have insisted on scouting every location himself, just for the excuse to be in the middle of it.”
I can’t help the smile despite the ache in my chest. “He’d be drafting the proposal speech for me by now, I’m sure.”
“Oh absolutely,” she agrees. “He’d have found a way to make a spectacle of it too—drone, fireworks, live orchestra.”
We both laugh, and for a moment it feels easy to remember him.
At the Chrysler Building, security meets us in the marble lobby and escorts us to a private elevator. The brass gleams as though it is polished hourly. Inside, it’s silent but for the soft mechanical hum as we rise through the building’s spine.
When the doors open, the city unfurls below—streets glowing like circuitry, the river a band of silver heat. I step to the glass. In my mind, Olivia’s reflection mingles with mine, her ring catching the light from a thousand windows. It’s cinematic, ostentatious, and instantly wrong.
Too exposed. Too loud.
My mother joins me at the window, following my gaze downward. “It’s a hell of a view,” she remarks.
“Yes…” I agree, “but it still doesn’t feel right.”
She nods. “Then we’ll keep looking.”
Afterward, we walk the short distance to Le Pavillon, all glass and greenery, serene amid the city’s noise.
Light spills across the tables, softening even the sharp lines of the suits nearby.
The hostess greets my mother by name, naturally, and we’re shown to a table by the window, a vase of tulips dividing the space between us.
We talk about nothing of consequence.
She tells me about a pianist she’s trying to secure for her next fundraiser, and I tease her about her knack for collecting prodigies. She pretends not to be flattered.
It’s pleasant. Unremarkable in the best way.
At one point she asks, “Are you sleeping any better?”
“When Olivia’s beside me.”
She doesn’t inquire further. She simply says, “Good.”
Lunch settles into an ease we haven’t had in years—the kind that used to live in some distant past before everything came apart and was put back together with visible seams.
By midafternoon, we arrive at the Hayden Planetarium. The private dome is still and perfectly tempered, the air artificially cool, the floor swallowing sound. When the lights dim, the ceiling comes alive—stars multiplying across the darkness, their glow almost mathematical.
I think of yesterday’s talk of providence and bent universes and how sometimes the only thing that makes order of the world is the person who stands inside it with you, and for a second, I let myself believe this could work.
The wonder of it all. The idea of asking her beneath this manufactured sky.
But then the sterile perfection of it gives me pause. It’s beautiful, but it lacks a pulse.
My mother must sense it. She slips her arm through mine and says softly, “Another maybe?”
I nod. “Another no.”
She gives a small, indulgent smile. “There will be others.”
I drop her off at Westchester afterward. When we reach the estate, she touches my wrist briefly before stepping out. “You’re closer than you think, darling.”
On the ride back to Manhattan, the city glides past in streaks of glass and light. Every grand, orchestrated vision I had feels wrong now. Too polished, too far from the undeniable gravity that exists between Olivia and me.
Still, the day has left me restless. Hours spent imagining how I might ask her have wound something tight inside me. The only thing I crave is the simple truth of her in my arms—the world narrowing to that small, perfect center where everything else falls away.
By the time the car pulls into the private drive beneath Caldwell Tower, that need has condensed into urgency—an energy that feels almost electric under my skin.
The doorman greets me, but I barely hear him.
I move through the lobby and into the elevator with the single-minded focus of someone closing in on something vital.
The ascent is painful, each floor ticking by slower than thought, until I’m half-tempted to pry the doors open.
When I step out onto the floor of Caldwell Ventures, I’m greeted by a manufactured stillness that is particular to power—the low hum of computers, the measured voices from distant rooms. I pass rows of desks, eyes scanning without seeing, guided more by instinct than direction.
Then, through the glass wall of a conference room, I see her.
She’s standing by the window, phone pressed to her ear. Her posture is composed, but there’s an undercurrent of excitement to her that pulls at me. I can’t hear the words, only fragments of her tone—soft, steady, edged with a kind of wonder.
“That would be wonderful. Thank you.”
Then, she ends the call but doesn’t move, her gaze distant, caught on whatever she’s just heard. She seems almost awestruck as a small, private smile blooms on her face like she’s holding onto a secret she hasn’t yet spoken aloud.
That smile undoes me. Because I don’t know what—or who—put it there.
The tenderness turns in on itself, jealousy tightening around it like a fist. I want to know the source of that light—and I want it to be me, every time.
Before I can think better of it, I cross the room, the sound of my steps swallowed by the carpet. “Baby?”
She turns, startled. The smile vanishes. What replaces it is too quick to hide—a flicker of anxiety, almost resembling guilt, breaking through before she schools her face.
I stop a few paces short as the silence stretches taut between us, with her phone still grasped firmly in her hand.