Chapter Twelve
Jackson
February
My birthday.
The one day, every four years, that I get to celebrate on the actual day I was born. The other three years I'm a man with an asterisk, splitting the difference between the last day of February and the first of March, and Rose used to text me on both.
Covering my bases, she'd say.
I've been working because it's a day like any other. Same as every year. Everyone's gone home now. I sent Emily packing about an hour ago over her objections, and I've spent most of the time since standing at the window watching the city light itself up without me.
It's been seven months and seventeen days since Rose left.
I've checked my phone all day.
Not compulsively.
Just at the top of every hour, the bottom of it and most of the minutes in between.
She has never once let my birthday pass without a message. Not when we were barely speaking. Not when I was married. Not the year she was in trial for six straight weeks and claimed she hadn't slept enough to remember her own address. Ever.
Some quiet, accountant part of my brain has already done the books on this. If midnight comes and that message doesn't, the account is closed. I'll have my answer, and it'll be the one I've spent seven months pretending I don't already have.
Dad's trial wrapped last week. It's been a public spectacle from the first filing, given the positions he held and the political circles he moved in, every network running the same footage of him climbing courthouse steps while reporters shouted questions he never answered.
The one mercy in all that coverage is what it shook loose.
Women started coming forward.
Harassment. Assault. Some with stories that went back decades, some with evidence Wesley clearly never imagined had survived him.
By the time the case reached the jury, Rose wasn't one terrible secret buried in his past anymore.
She was one name in a line of women he'd spent years assuming would stay quiet.
The verdict came back guilty last week. Sentencing is next month.
I sat in that courtroom every single day and never once looked at him.
I was there for the count.
Every woman who stood up and put her name on the record was another door closing behind him, and I wanted to hear every single one slam.
Rose knows all of it, I'm sure. Jade would've kept her informed wherever she is. I wonder sometimes what it gave her, if anything. Relief. Closure. Maybe just one less thing in the world she has to carry by herself.
My phone rings on the desk and yanks me out of the pity party.
Bennet.
"What's up?"
"Are you still in the building? I need your help."
"Yeah? What's going on?"
"It's an emergency. Get up here quick."
I'm out from behind my desk and crossing the floor before the phone's back in my pocket. Something doesn't sit right. Bennet doesn't hang up like that, the man narrates his own coffee order. Is it Blaire? Or…
Rose.
Maybe something happened. Maybe Jade heard from her. Maybe she stopped checking in, maybe she's hurt, maybe...
Fuck.
I hit the elevator button three times like that's ever made one come faster and spend the ride watching the numbers crawl upward with my stomach lodged somewhere in my throat, praying that whatever Bennet is waiting to tell me, it isn't the worst version my brain has already managed to build.
The doors open and I'm moving before they're fully apart. I sprint down the hallway toward his apartment, find the door cracked open an inch and shove through it.
"Ben! Bennet!"
"SURPRISE!"
I spin in a full circle. People are everywhere, the dining room packed with faces I know from every corner of my life, and my pulse is slamming so hard my lungs can't seem to decide what to do with any of it.
The adrenaline drains almost as fast as it flooded in, leaving my knees weak, and I bend over with my hands braced on them, trying to remember how breathing works.
Voices wash over me. Hands land on my back.
We got him good.
Happy birthday, Jackson.
When will I see you again? You won't.
And in a moment of absolute vulnerability, standing in a room full of everyone who came, the tears just come.
I straighten and look around at them. Bennet grinning like an asshole.
Blaire with both hands pressed over her mouth.
Emily. Jade. Samson. People from work, people from outside work, people who spent weeks conspiring and lying directly to my face for me, on the one day every four years that's actually mine.
I've spent seven months and seventeen days measuring everything I lost.
I forgot to count any of this.
I've never felt less alone than I do in this moment.
"Hey. Hey, man." Bennet gets to me first and pulls me into a hug, slapping my back the way men do when they're giving each other permission not to pretend for a minute.
I wrap my arms around my best friend and let myself cry right there in front of everybody, and not one person in the room makes it weird.
"Thank you." It comes out rough, meant for the whole room and nowhere near big enough for it.
Blaire gets to me next. Her hand cups my cheek and her thumb wipes the tears from my skin with all the tenderness of an actual sister.
"Pussy," she says through her own tears. "It's just a birthday party. Get ahold of yourself."
"Fuck off."
I laugh, a teary, undignified laugh, and haul her into a bear hug that lifts her off her feet. She squeaks and locks both arms around my neck, squeezing back twice as hard, and neither of us acknowledges that she's crying harder than I am.
I make my rounds after that. Someone presses a glass of champagne into my hand before I've finished the first, then another appears, and at some point I stop keeping track.
Food covers every table. Bennet went overboard, or more likely Blaire went overboard and let him take credit for it.
There's supposedly a cake hidden somewhere in the kitchen that I've been specifically threatened not to look at yet.
Emily hugs me and apologizes for lying to my face about going home, which I inform her will absolutely be reflected in her annual review.
Jade clinks her glass against mine with a look I can't quite read.
"Can I talk to you on the balcony for a sec?"
Something in her tone cuts through the noise enough that I nod without asking why.
She follows me outside, and the city rushes up around us while the party dims behind the glass into voices and movement.
It's cold, real February cold instead of whatever Los Angeles usually gets away with calling winter, and Jade wraps her arms around herself while I wait for her to say whatever she brought me out here to say.
She's the one who asked for the balcony.
She can suffer first.
"You look better than I expected," she finally says, studying me with the same face she probably uses when opposing counsel has said something stupid in writing. "Bennet had me half-convinced you'd wasted away into a sad little office ghost."
"I've been keeping busy."
"I've heard. Distressed assets." Her mouth twitches. "Cute."
"You didn't bring me out here to review my portfolio."
"No. I didn't."
She takes a breath, and something changes in her posture. The attorney drops away, and suddenly it's just Rose's best friend standing in front of me with something she's clearly been carrying for a while.
"I need you to understand the rules first."
Is that a palpitation?
"I'm not going to tell you where she is. I'm not going to tell you how she's doing beyond what she chooses to tell you herself. Don't ask me, because making me say no to you on your birthday is a shitty gift and I refuse to give it."
"Jade—"
"Second rule." She holds up one finger and steamrolls directly over me, and God, no wonder she and Rose found each other.
"Whatever's in it, you take it at face value.
You don't dissect it. You don't look for clues.
You don't start triangulating postmarks and building some lovesick FBI corkboard in your apartment. "
Despite everything, my mouth almost twitches.
"She gets to come back on her own schedule, in whatever shape that looks like. And you..." Her voice softens just slightly. "You get to be trusted with this because she trusts you. Don't make her wrong."
I can barely get the words out.
"What is it?"
Jade reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a card.
She looks at it for a second before handing it over, and an expression crosses her face that I can't quite figure out. Maybe just the weight of being the bridge between two people she loves who haven't been able to reach each other for seven months.
Then she places it in my hand like it's something breakable.
Rose's handwriting is on the envelope.
Everything inside me stops.
"She's been planning this for a month," Jade says quietly. "She wanted it here tonight. In your hands. On the actual day." A small smile touches her mouth. "She made me swear on my bar license."
I run my thumb over my name on the front.
Her handwriting.
My Rose.
"I wanted to give it to you in private. Take your time." Jade squeezes my arm once, which may be the most affection Jade Gallagher has ever voluntarily shown me. "I'll keep the vultures off the balcony."
She slips back inside and pulls the door shut behind her.
I'm alone with the only thing in the world I want. I've had nothing from Rose except the proof that she was still somewhere out there.
Now I'm holding something she touched.
Something she wrote for me.
On my birthday.
I have never torn anything open so fast in my life.
The first line is just my name. Jackson. And that's enough to start the tears all over again.
Not Marcus. Jackson.
I close my eyes, pull in a breath and read.
Jackson,
Thirty-one, huh? How are the bones feeling? Rickety? Since I'm not there to supervise your decline, I've written you some guidelines for getting old.
1. Increase your calcium intake. This is important for your bones.
2. Start taking yoga. It will help with flexibility. As you age, that's one of the first things to go.
I'm laughing through the tears now. Actually laughing out loud, alone on a balcony, while Rose bullies me about osteoporosis from wherever the hell she is.
Naturally, this is how she comes back into my life.
3. Live. Laugh. Love. Cliché? I know. But it's important to keep the heart soft. Mine has hardened so much over the years, but it was always soft with you.
Fuck.
I stop there for a second, thumb pressed against the edge of the card.
Then I keep going.
4. Don't wait for me. This whole healing thing is .
But it's needed. I need it, and I don't know how long I'll be gone.
I'm sorry I was cold to you. I can't imagine what it did to you, finding out what your father was.
I know your heart, Jackson. I know you were trying to protect me, and I'll always love you for it.
But live your life. Whatever we once were, whatever we could have been, it's no longer in the cards for us.
I have to stop reading. I look out at the city and breathe through it, because that's her lawyer's hand right there. It’s clean, final, signed and dated. And then I read number five.
5. Take care of yourself. I heard you're boring now. How dare you. I can't be associated with boring people, and I'll expect my best friend to be my best friend when I come home. And I am coming home, Jackson. I just won't be the same woman who left.
My eyes close.
When I come home.
Not if. When.
6. Enjoy your birthday. I'd bet money you worked all day because it's "any other day," so do something you love. Something just for you. I'll be on my balcony doing yoga at 5 a.m. if you want to join me. It would be nice to know you're doing it with me from across the ocean.
No matter where we are, I'll always love you.
Happy birthday, my love.
Missing you,
Rose
I read it again. Then again.
By the fourth time, I'm still standing in the cold with the party glowing through the glass behind me, but suddenly, breathing doesn't hurt quite as much.
Don't wait for me, she says.
I hear her.
I do.
But then, in the very same breath: I am coming home. Meet me on your balcony at five in the morning. My love.
She can write no longer in the cards in that steady attorney script all she wants.
She still dealt me one.
And maybe I'm a fucking idiot for holding onto it, but I've spent too many years loving this woman through every reason we couldn't be together.
Too young. Michael's best friend. Married.
Too much history, too much damage, too much everything.
I've heard no in every language Rose knows how to speak, and somehow there has always been an except hiding somewhere behind it.
Waiting?
Yeah.
I'm going to wait.
Not with my life on pause. She specifically told me to live it, and for once I'm going to try listening to the whole instruction instead of the part I like best. I'll work.
I'll build my company. I'll spend time with my people.
I'll laugh when Blaire calls me a pussy and let Bennet drag me into whatever fresh hell he's manufactured for himself.
And I'll love Rose while I do it.
Because I've been doing that anyway.
At least now I know she's coming home.
I slide the card into my breast pocket, over the exact cliché she'd mock me for, and go back inside to my people because she told me to enjoy my birthday, and I intend to obey.
And tomorrow, at 4:55 a.m., I'll be on my balcony with a yoga mat I don't own yet.
She can tell me not to wait all she wants.
Five o'clock says otherwise.