Chapter 12 Julian
Isit behind my desk at home, the room arranged in the same manner it has been maintained for years, unchanged not out of habit but by design.
The desk itself is a study in restraint.
Dark walnut, hand polished to a muted sheen, its surface nearly bare save for what is necessary: a leather binder centered perfectly, a Montblanc pen aligned parallel to its edge, a small stack of documents squared with mathematical exactness.
No clutter. I learned long ago that disorder invites distraction, and distraction is a luxury I have never afforded myself.
Well, I try not to afford myself. My conscience has been reminding me often of late that Harper has become a distraction, but I push that aside.
To my right, the library stretches the full length of the wall—floor-to-ceiling shelves in the same deep walnut, filled for use.
First editions and financial texts sit beside architectural monographs, league reports beside biographies of men who built empires and some who lost them later. Every volume has earned its place.
Behind me, the city rises in glass and steel through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but my attention isn’t on the skyline.
It’s on what’s falling through it: snow.
At first, it’s barely visible. Fine, drifting flakes catching briefly in the light before disappearing against the gray sky, like static on an old TV.
But as I watch, it gathers into a scene that’s more resolute, soft snowflakes settling against ledges and rooftops as though the city has exhaled and decided to finally slow.
The first flurry of winter.
The quiet calm before the storm always feels different. It’s subtle. Unannounced. Unmistakable.
I lean back slightly in my chair, my gaze tracking the movement of it.
Change rarely arrives with force. More often, it begins like this—slowly, until suddenly it isn’t.
A soft knock sounds against the door.
“Come in,” I say.
The door opens and Percy steps inside, the motion smooth and unhurried.
He carries a silver tray, polished to a mirror finish, upon which rests a porcelain teacup and matching pot. Steam curls faintly upward, delicate and controlled.
Chamomile.
The same afternoon tea he has brought me for decades.
He crosses the room with measured steps, his presence is as pulled together as the room itself and sets the tray down at the corner of my desk.
“Your tea, sir.”
I glance at it, then back to the window, where the snow has begun to gather more steadily now, softening the edges of the city.
“You’ve been bringing me that since I was thirteen,” I remark, more observation than question.
Percy doesn’t miss a beat. “Fifteen, sir,” he corrects gently. “Your preference shifted from Earl Grey in November of that year. You found chamomile… calming.”
A faint smile touches my mouth. “Did I?”
“You did,” he says. A slight pause. “You had discovered, at the time, that your father’s evening schedule was unlikely to change, regardless of your own.”
Percy has always had a way of delivering truth without weight, allowing it to exist without the need to delve deeper.
I reach for the cup, the porcelain warm against my fingers, familiar in a way few things are.
“Consistency has its advantages,” I say.
“It does, sir.”
I take a sip, the taste exactly as it has always been—light, unassuming, and steady. Unchanged by time or by circumstance. By anything at all.
Percy lingers after setting the tray down, his gaze drifting toward the window. “The first of the season,” he observes.
I follow his line of sight, watching the flakes as they catch the light before disappearing into the gray. “It’s beautiful.”
“There is something restorative about the first snow,” he continues, folding his hands lightly behind his back. “It suggests a certain… reset.”
“A clean slate,” I say, leaning back slightly in my chair.
“Precisely, sir.”
“New York doesn’t often lend itself to clean slates,” I add.
“No,” Percy agrees, a hint of amusement threading through his voice. “But it does provide the illusion of one, and I’ve found that, more often than not, the illusion is sufficient.”
“You’ve always had a talent for reframing reality.”
“I’ve found it to be a useful skill, sir.”
There’s a comfortable quiet that follows before Percy speaks again.
“The holidays are approaching,” he says. “There have been several inquiries regarding your availability. Invitations, primarily.”
“Let’s put off decisions for now,” I reply, my attention still fixed on the window.
“As you wish.”
There’s no judgment in the response, no curiosity about the decision—Percy has never questioned the boundaries I draw around my time, even when those boundaries have grown narrower over the years.
He inclines his head and turns toward the door. He takes a step, then another, wobblier. Then a third. That’s when it happens.
His step falters—not dramatically, not enough for anyone who doesn’t know him to notice—but I do. I’ve spent decades watching him move through rooms with certainty, each motion deliberate, each step placed with exacting care.
This is different.
There’s the faintest hesitation that shouldn’t be there, and before I can even process it fully, his hand reaches for the nearest chair, gripping the back of it as his weight tips forward.
“Percy—”
The chair scrapes sharply across the floor, its legs protesting against the hardwood, and the sound fractures the calm of the room. It tilts under his grip, knocking into the long wooden console table behind it—just enough force to disturb what had, until now, been perfectly still.
The table jolts.
The framed photographs arranged along its surface tremble, teeter, and then—inevitably—one of them tips past the point of recovery.
It falls and the crack of glass against wood is clean and decisive, echoing far louder than it should in a room designed to absorb sound.
Percy regains his balance, straightening with a kind of practiced composure that suggests he’s already attempting to will the event out of existence, to fold it neatly as if it never happened.
“My apologies, sir,” he says at once, smoothing a hand down the front of his jacket as though he can restore order through the gesture alone. “That was… entirely my fault.”
I’m already out of my chair.
“It’s nothing,” I say, crossing the room quickly, though even as I say it, I know that isn’t quite true. I’ve never seen him do that before. Not once. Not in all the years he’s been in my life.
I crouch near the fallen frame, carefully lifting it from the floor. The glass has fractured in a fine web across the surface, a single crack branching outward into smaller, more delicate lines, but the photograph beneath remains untouched.
I gently set it back on the table before reaching for a cloth to gather the loose shards, my movements slower now, more deliberate.
“You don’t need to—” Percy begins, stepping forward as if to intervene.
“I’ve got it,” I reply.
He stills at that, and when I glance up at him, I catch something I don’t often see.
Not just embarrassment but a flicker of awareness of Father Time, knocking on his doorstep.
“It was a brief, one-time lapse,” he says, as though offering an explanation will reestablish equilibrium. “Nothing more.”
“Of course,” I answer, though my eyes linger on him.
I’ve taken for granted Percy’s steady presence, his unerring precision, the quiet competence that he has carried through every phase of my life without alteration.
Until now.
“You’re all right?” I ask gently.
“Perfectly, sir.” The answer comes easily.
And for the first time in as long as I can remember, I find myself questioning it.
I nod anyway, allowing him the dignity of his response, of the control he’s so carefully reasserting.
My mind is so wrapped up in Percy and picking up the broken frame, I just now realize the photo the frame was holding, it’s of her… of them.
Kylie is laughing, her head tipped back just slightly, her dark curls loose around her shoulders, her expression so alive I can almost hear her laughter.
And beside her, cradled in the curve of her arm, is Ben—so small it feels almost impossible, swaddled in a blanket that dwarfs him, his face soft and untroubled, untouched by anything the world would eventually ask of him.
I don’t speak.
Behind me, Percy shifts his weight imperceptibly, and I know without turning that he’s seen it—that he understands exactly which photograph fell, what it holds, and what it does to me.
“I’ll have that repaired,” he says quietly.
I let my thumb trace the edge of the frame, careful of the broken glass, as if the gesture itself might preserve something that can’t actually be preserved.
“It was taken the day we brought him home,” I say, my voice steady, though it echoes as though it’s coming from somewhere slightly removed.
There’s a pause, gentle and measured. “I recall the day very well, sir.”
Of course he remembers. He drove us home that day.
Percy has always remembered the things that matter, even when I’ve tried not to.
I set the frame back onto the table, aligning it instinctively with the others, though the crack running through it leaves it imperfect and draws the eye no matter how carefully I place it.
“I know,” he says, “that this time of year is… difficult.”
There’s no pity in it. No attempt to soften the truth beyond what’s necessary. Just an acknowledgment, offered plainly, the way he’s always done when the subject cannot be avoided.
I let out a faint breath. “That’s one way of putting it.”
He studies me with that same steady presence that has made it possible for me to endure more than I would have otherwise been able to.
“You’ll have that love again, one day,” he says.
It isn’t hopeful in the conventional sense. No attempt to persuade me toward a conclusion I haven’t already rejected. It’s simply placed there between us.
I turn to look at him, really look this time, but I don’t yet respond. Not because I don’t have an answer, but because I understand exactly what he’s offering, and just as clearly why I cannot accept it.
“Percy,” I say, “once one has experienced perfection…” I let the thought settle, allowing it to arrive exactly as it is. “It doesn’t come twice.”
The words don’t sound bitter. They’re simply true.
He holds my gaze, and I can see that disagreement he won’t voice, that belief he carries on my behalf even when I refuse to carry it myself.
But he doesn’t challenge me.
He never has.
“I see,” he says.
And then he lets it go.
I turn back toward the window and the snowfall that has become steady and continuous.
Behind me, I hear Percy adjust the tray slightly, restoring it to its proper position, reestablishing the order that was briefly disrupted.
“Is there anything else you require, sir?” he asks.
I shake my head, though the gesture is mostly for myself. “No.” A beat passes. “Thank you.”
It isn’t about the tea.
He knows that.
“Of course, sir.”
The door closes softly behind him, the sound swallowed by the room, and I’m left alone with the silence, the snow, and the photograph that sits just slightly out of place on the table behind me.
I stand there, watching the way the snow falls and somewhere in that quiet, my mind drifts back to that day.
The drive home from the hospital.
“Eyes forward, sir,” Percy had said from the driver’s seat, his words delivered as if he was almost amused, like he understood exactly what had shifted and had decided, generously, not to comment on it further.
It had been snowing then too.
I can still see the way the light caught in it, the way Kylie looked down at Ben as though he was the only thing that had ever mattered, the way I knew—without question—that nothing in my life would ever exceed that moment.
They were the center of everything.
Outside, the snow continues to fall.
And I remain where I am, watching it, the present and the past folding into each other just enough that it briefly becomes impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.