CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Nadia — What I Choose
A year after the gallery opening that started everything, I had another show — a full year’s worth of new work, and for the first time in a decade, the water in my paintings had started, gradually, to hold still.
Marguerite hung the largest canvas in the same spot where the low-tide painting had hung the year before, and I stood in front of it on opening night the way I always did, half hiding in plain sight, watching strangers try to find words for something they mostly just felt.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Priya said, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of wine, exactly as she had a year earlier, in a callback I don’t think either of us planned but both of us felt the weight of.
“Old habits.”
“Better ones, this time, I think.” She nodded toward the painting — not black water this time, but something brighter, dawn light on a calm harbor, a piece I’d titled simply After. “It’s good, Nadia. It’s really good. I think it might be the best thing you’ve made.”
Kael found me twenty minutes later, the way he always did now, without the four years of hidden distance that used to define how he moved through any room I was in.
He’d stopped scanning exits quite so obviously.
He still did it, some nights, old habits dying slower than either of us liked, but he caught himself now, and I’d started to notice him catching himself, which felt like its own kind of victory.
“You never told me what you titled the big one,” he said, nodding at the harbor painting.
“After,” I said. “Because that’s what all of this is, now. Not before, not during — after. The part where we get to decide what we build instead of just surviving what was built around us.”
He was quiet for a moment, studying the painting with the same careful attention he brought to everything that mattered to him, and then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small velvet box that I recognized, the moment I saw it, would change the entire shape of the evening.
“I know we said slow,” he said, something vulnerable moving underneath the composure he still wore like armor most days.
“I know a year isn’t very long, considering everything, and I know I don’t have the cleanest history when it comes to deciding what’s right for you without asking first. So I’m asking.
Not deciding — asking. Whatever you want the answer to be, whatever pace you need, I’ll take it.
I just needed you to know that this is where I want to end up, eventually, whenever you’re ready to want it too. ”
I looked at the box, and at him, and at a gallery full of paintings that had finally, after a year of learning how to trust the man standing in front of me, started to hold still the way the rest of my life was learning to.
“Ask me properly,” I said, my voice not quite steady, “and I’ll give you a real answer.”
He got down on one knee, in the middle of my own gallery opening, in front of Priya and Marguerite and a room full of strangers who’d come to look at paintings and were about to witness something else entirely, and asked me the question I’d spent a year, without quite admitting it to myself, hoping he’d eventually find the courage to ask.
“Yes,” I said, before he’d even fully finished, laughing and crying in exactly the ratio those two things demand when they arrive together. “Yes, Kael. Ask me again in five years and I’ll still say it.”