The Last Roar #2
She considered this with the thoroughness she brought to most decisions. Pedro did not deliberate. He simply put his arms around my neck, which made it momentarily difficult to breathe, and said: “Yes please.” Then, against my ear, quieter: “I already told Mamá you’d ask. She didn’t believe me.”
I laughed, which broke something open in the room — I could hear it.
Luz joined the embrace from the other side. “Then you’ll be our papá,” she said. “For real.”
I disentangled myself gently, stood, and turned to Estrella.
She was crying. Not the distressed kind — the other kind, the helpless kind that happens when something you have wanted very much and barely let yourself believe in becomes, without warning, real. Her chin was up, because she was always herself even in the moments when she was most undone.
I took her hands.
“You found me,” I said, “when I was lost in a library and could not write a single honest sentence. You looked at me and saw someone worth knowing before I was sure I was.” I released one hand to reach into my pocket, and her breath caught.
“You taught me that the question wasn’t what I’d leave behind. It was what I could build.”
I opened the box.
The ring was a star-shaped diamond at the center, smaller stones in constellation around it.
I had spent a long time on the design. The center was her — the star, her name, the quality she had of making every room she entered more legible somehow, more itself.
The surrounding stones were the children, this family we had assembled through choice rather than accident, which was the only kind of family that had ever made sense to me.
“Estrella Flores,” I said. “Will you marry me?”
The room held its breath.
“Yes,” she said. Clear and certain, the way she did everything. “Yes, Leo Ramírez. I will marry you.”
The ring went onto her finger and she pulled me up and into her arms and the room erupted and none of it registered because I was holding her, finally, in front of all of it, not managing or minimizing or protecting a careful quiet thing from exposure but simply here, in public, with this woman, home.
Late that night, after the celebration dinner, after the children had been put to bed with special dispensation to stay up past their usual hour and had extracted every possible concession from the occasion before finally conceding to sleep, Estrella and I stood on the balcony of the house we now shared.
Los Angeles at night from a balcony. The lights going on forever.
She leaned against me, her ring catching the ambient glow of the city. León was visible through the glass on the kitchen counter, still wearing his Aztecs jersey, presiding over the empty celebration dishes with the dignity of an official observer who has completed his duties satisfactorily.
“So,” she said. “Coach Ramírez.”
“Coach Ramírez,” I agreed.
“Are you happy with all of it? The retirement, the Olympic appointment—” She tilted her head to look up at me. “All of it at once?”
“All of it at once has always been my preferred approach.”
She laughed softly. “I’ve noticed.”
We stood there a moment, the city moving below us, unhurried.
“I need to tell you something about the book,” I said.
She didn’t say anything immediately. She had been watching me write for months with a curious, patient quality — noticing, I knew, that something had changed in how it felt, and waiting without pressure for me to tell her what.
“It isn’t the memoir,” I said. “It hasn’t been the memoir for a while. What I’ve been writing — it’s a novel. A mystery. A woman detective in Mexico City, nineteen-seventies, a cold case that everyone has decided to stop caring about except her.”
Estrella was very still.
“I know we have the publisher situation—”
“What is her name?” Estrella said.
I paused. “Marisol.”
“Marisol,” she repeated, as if trying the weight of it. “And she’s a detective.”
“The best one in the city. Which nobody will admit, because of various factors that become apparent in the first chapter.”
Estrella turned to face me fully. There was something in her expression I couldn’t entirely read — moved, and amused, and something more personal than either.
“Leo,” she said. “I have been watching you write that woman for four months and I did not know that’s who she was.”
“I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
I thought about it. “Because I wasn’t sure, yet, if I was doing it justice. It felt — presumptuous, maybe. To think I could write a character like that. A woman like that.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached up and touched my face, briefly, the gesture she used when she meant something she didn’t have a word for.
“Write her well,” she said. “And when you’ve written her, let me read her.”
“You’ll be the first.”
“Good.” She turned back to the city. “Maybe this is the story you were always meant to tell.”
I kissed her temple. She leaned into me. Below us, Los Angeles did what it always did, indifferent and luminous, every light in it belonging to someone’s story.
I had spent sixteen years chasing a roar that satisfied something in me I didn’t have a name for. I had found, somewhere along the way, that the thing I was actually searching for made no sound at all. It was just this: a balcony, a city, a woman who had opened a door I hadn’t known was there.
The Lion had found his pride.
And on the kitchen counter, León the stuffed lion sat in his Aztecs jersey, watching over the house with the quiet authority of someone who had known all along how this story would go.