30. Jasmine
JASMINE
Jasmine had stayed at her mom’s.
It wasn’t entirely intentional, the staying.
The first night, she’d told herself she would go back to her own house in the morning, and then the morning had come with its notifications and news alerts and its various reminders of how comprehensively things had fallen apart, and she’d stayed.
And then she stayed again. Her mother had made up the spare room with the good sheets without being asked and had said nothing about the length of the visit, just kept the food coming and the television off and the little table by the window set for two.
Jasmine had barely opened her phone in two days. She’d sent Eden a text to confirm she was alive, answered one message from Marco about a paperwork item that needed her signature, and otherwise left it face-down on the nightstand.
She moved around the condo like a ghost. The house was on the market, and she’d hired movers to go in and pack everything up. If she wanted to, she could never return there again.
But where would she go next? That was the big question. One she wasn’t ready to answer.
Her mom was happy here. She had her friends, her church community. She volunteered at the hospital a few days a month. She’d moved to LA for Jasmine, but Jasmine knew she wouldn’t move away from it for her. And Jasmine would never ask her to.
Whatever journey Jasmine went on next, she would undertake it alone.
It was a Tuesday morning, and she was sitting in the spare room reading, or rather holding a book and looking at it, which was as close to reading as she’d managed since she’d arrived, when she heard her mother come in from wherever she’d gone that morning.
There were the familiar sounds — keys on the hook, shoes at the door, the soft movements of a woman who was being considerate of someone else’s quiet.
Then, after a moment, the low sound of the television.
Jasmine lowered the book. Her mother never had the television on in the morning. She was a radio person, always had been, preferred voices without pictures, said television in the morning was how you started the day already exhausted.
She waited.
The volume came up slightly. Whatever was on, it had definitely caught her mom’s attention.
She put the book down and came out of the spare room.
Her mother was sitting in her chair by the window with her hands folded under her chin, watching a press conference.
The screen showed a long table with microphones, journalists visible in the reverse shots.
And at the table, in a charcoal suit that she recognized from the first night they’d ever spoken, was Nate.
“Mom,” Jasmine said, the word catching in her throat.
“Sit down.”
“I don’t want—”
“Jasmine Rose.” Her mother said it in the voice that had exactly one meaning, which was that the conversation about whether to sit was over. “Sit. You need to see this, all right?”
Jasmine sat on the edge of the sofa, arms folded, jaw set. She directed her eyes at the wall slightly to the left of the screen.
She heard him anyway.
She heard him say the words stupid, arrogant bet and made in a bar, and I own every one of them, and despite herself, her eyes moved to the screen, because his words and tone were working the anger out of her. They were softening her up, in spite of herself.
She heard him say her name.
She heard him refuse to let the story stand as it was being told. She heard him say the scandal belongs to me, not to her. She felt it move through her despite the folded arms and the days of distance she’d built between herself and anything that had his name on it.
She heard: she has more courage and more honesty and more genuine grace than anyone I’ve met.
She heard: the past weeks have been the best of my life.
She was no longer looking at the wall.
She was watching the screen, both feet flat on the floor now, the book she’d been pretending to read long since abandoned.
The press conference cut away to commentary, and her mother turned the volume down and looked at her.
Jasmine looked at her hands in her lap. “Before you say anything—”
“I’m not going to say anything,” her mother said serenely. “I heard about it on the radio in the car, and I just thought we should watch it, is all.”
“I need to think.”
“Of course.”
“This doesn’t automatically fix—”
“Of course not.”
“Mom.”
“I’m agreeing with you.” Her mother smiled slightly, the picture of patience.
Jasmine stood up and went to the window. Could she trust Nate? Could she believe him?
She wasn’t sure. He seemed genuine at the press conference. Why get up there and say all those things? It wasn’t like they did him any good. The only reason would be that he genuinely cared for her.
Or he wanted to save face and win her back just so he wouldn’t feel like the bad guy. Honestly, nothing felt off the table right now. The world felt like it had been turned upside down.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the front door.
Jasmine turned around. “Are you expecting someone?”
Her mother was already halfway to the door.
“You should see who it is first,” Jasmine said, but her mom was already opening the door.
And there he was, standing at the threshold.
Nate.
“Nate,” Jasmine’s mom said. “So good to see you.”
“You, too,” he said, his voice sounding raspy and winded.
He was in the same suit from the press conference, tie loosened. He looked at her mother first, a quick, grateful look, and then his eyes found Jasmine across the room and stayed there.
Her mother patted his arm and walked past him toward the kitchen. “I’ll be watering my plants. Holler if you need anything.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Nate came into the room slowly, not crowding her, and stopped a few feet from where she stood at the window.
Jasmine swallowed hard. “We just watched your press conference.”
“I meant it,” he said. “All of it.”
“I know.” Her voice came out quieter than she’d intended.
“I’m sorry, for all of it. The bet. The emails.
The restaurant six years ago. Telling you that you knew the risks when what you needed was for someone to just say that it wasn’t fair.
” He stopped. “It wasn’t fair, Jasmine. None of what happened to you was fair, and you deserved to hear that from me a long time before now. ”
She looked at him and felt the last carefully constructed piece of the wall she’d been maintaining start to come down. There was no use. She simply couldn’t fight it anymore.
“I love you,” he said. He took a breath.
“I can’t imagine my life without you in it.
I don’t want to try.” He paused. “I know I have things to fix. I know there’s damage, and I know it’s mine to repair.
I know it takes more than a press conference and showing up at your mother’s door.
But I am here, and I am asking, and I will do whatever it takes for however long it takes. ”
She looked at him for a long moment. This man who had frustrated her and infuriated her and surprised her, who had brought her breakfast on a tray and remembered her coffee order and laughed over a guinea pig named Gerald, who had sat with her in lamplight at one in the morning and admitted to being afraid, who had just stood in front of the world and chosen honesty because she was worth that much to him.
“I love you too,” she said. “I have for a while. I was just waiting for it to be safe enough to say.”
Something in his face opened. She’d watched him go careful and controlled in difficult moments, watched him maintain composure under pressure and conditions that would have cracked other people. This was the opposite of that. This was just him, undone slightly, by three sentences.
He crossed the room and she met him halfway, because that was always how it was supposed to work, and when his arms came around her, she pressed her face into the warm, solid reality of him and breathed him in.
The relief that washed over her was the feeling of being exactly where she was supposed to be.
“Your mother called me,” he said into her hair.
“I suspected as much.”
“Twenty minutes before the press conference.”
She pulled back to look at him. “She called you before?”
“She said, and I’m quoting directly, you’d better say something worth saying.” He looked at her with the almost-smile. “I did my best.”
She laughed, and he pulled her back in. From the kitchen doorway came the extremely unsubtle sound of her mother making an aww noise.
“Mom,” Jasmine said.
“I’m making coffee,” her mother said with perfect innocence.
“You’ve already got coffee.”
“I’m making more.”
Nate laughed against her temple, warm and low, and she shook her head and held on.
The world that had felt entirely broken just days ago was still broken in places, still had work to do, still had a house on a listing and a career that needed rebuilding and a body that would need managing every day for the rest of her life.
But she would not do any of it alone.
She’d known that once before, had felt it in her mother’s voice on the phone and in Eden’s arms in the doorway, and she felt it again now, more completely, in the arms of a man who had driven across the city to confess his love to her.
She was going to be okay.
She already was.