Chapter Twelve
JAYCEON
I say date — she says, when I propose it, "Is this professional or personal?" and I say, without hesitation, "Personal," and she goes quiet for a second and then says, "Okay. Yes."
I take her to a restaurant on the east side that I know partly because the furniture is ours — I made the bar seating and the booth benches, white oak with a soft oil finish — and partly because the food is genuinely good and the atmosphere is warm without being pretentious.
I tell her about the furniture before we sit down, pointing out the work in a way that I hope reads as sharing something rather than showing off.
"You made where we're sitting," she says, running her hand along the booth edge.
"A year ago, almost exactly."
She sits down and looks at the bench like it's a new thing.
"I've been in spaces where the design is invisible," she says. "Where everything is so perfect it reads as neutral. I'm trying to do the opposite with the Lantern project. I want you to feel the material. I want you to know someone made it."
"Tell me about the rebrand," I say, and she does, and for twenty minutes she's completely lit up by it — leaning forward, hands moving, the composed professional manner dropping away to reveal something underneath that is vivid and specific and entirely hers.
At some point between the entrées and dessert, she tells me about Moore.
She doesn't preface it heavily. She doesn't set it up with warnings or disclaimers.
She just, in the middle of a conversation that has wandered from the Lantern project to favorite neighborhoods to the question of whether Nashville has changed for better or worse in the last five years, says: "I got out of a marriage about nine weeks ago.
It's — it's why I moved to the new apartment.
If that's relevant context, it might explain why I'm still figuring out what I actually want from the next chapter. "
She says it lightly. Not performing bravery, not seeking sympathy. Just offering a fact the way she'd offered the detail about the booth — here it is, it's part of the material, you're allowed to feel it.
I set down my fork.
"You don't have to explain it," I say.
"I know." She looks at me directly. "I'm not explaining it. I'm just — placing it. So you have context."
"Okay." I lean back slightly. "Then I'll place something too.
I'm not in a hurry for anything. I'm not sitting here trying to fast-forward to a version of this that I've already scripted.
I'm sitting here because this is the most interesting conversation I've had in — probably longer than I want to admit. "
Something in her face shifts. Not relief exactly. Something quieter.
"That's a good answer," she says.
"It's just true."
She nods, and for a moment she looks back down at the table, and I can see her deciding something. Not about me specifically, I don't think, but about whether it's safe to be here, in this specific kind of honesty, with another person.
"His name was Moore," she says. "We got married young.
I thought — I don't know what I thought.
That showing up consistently would be enough.
That loving someone without conditions would make them choose you.
" She turns her wine glass slowly. "He had a secretary.
She was — she knew what she was doing. And he let himself be flattered by her needing him.
And I kept tracking it, kept waiting for him to see it, and then one night we were in bed together and she called because she saw a mouse in her apartment, and he picked up the phone and left. "
She says the last part with such absolute flatness that it takes me a moment to process it.
"He left."
"He was out the door in under four minutes. We were — it wasn't like we were just watching TV." A dry, brief exhale. "I sat there and I thought: okay. That's the answer. That's the clearest answer I've ever been given."
"Aviance."
"I'm fine." She says it without flinching, and I believe her because she's not performing fine — she's operating from some internal place that's already made its peace with what the story is.
"I left that night. I packed what I needed, I left my rings on the counter with four pages of documentation, and I filed.
It's been—" she counts briefly, "—about nine weeks since I left and six weeks since I filed. "
"And you're — "
"Building something," she says. "Trying to. The apartment, the job with you if that works out, the—" she gestures loosely — "the self." She almost smiles. "I'm working on the self."
"The self seems to be doing well," I say.
She looks at me, and this time the smile arrives completely.
"Jayceon," she says.
"Yeah."
"I like talking to you."
"I like talking to you too."
We don't lean into it. We don't rush the moment into something it isn't yet.
We just sit with it, the warmth of it, and finish our dinner, and the conversation wanders back to the Lantern project and then to her ideas about the redesign and then to my grandfather's workshop where I learned to work wood and what it felt like the first time a piece came out exactly the way I'd imagined it.
When we leave, I walk her to her car.
She turns on the sidewalk and the light from the restaurant catches the side of her face and she is so precisely herself in this moment — not performing, not hiding, just standing there in the cool Nashville evening being exactly who she is — that something in my chest goes very quiet and very certain at the same time.
"Wednesday," she says. "Ten o'clock."
"I'll have the coffee ready."
She nods. Gets in her car. And when she pulls out of the lot I stay standing on the sidewalk for longer than is probably rational, and I don't try to talk myself out of what I'm feeling.
I am not in the habit of lying to myself.