PART 19:

I need to be in my kitchen while it happens. I need something that’s mine and not. She gestured vaguely at the space around them, meaning not just the apartment, but everything it represented. I need to be where I built something. Yes, he said. She looked at him. He was watching her with that expression she’d spent years trying to name and had finally given up naming because some things between people lived below the waterline of language, and the best you could do was acknowledge them without demanding they surface.

You started coming to Nocturn for the wrong reasons, she said. Yes. And you stayed for the right ones. Yes. And you spent 7 months doing something enormous that you should have told me about. Yes, he said. And I’m not going to apologize for it in a way that misrepresents what I’d do differently if I had it again.

I tell you sooner. I wouldn’t stop doing it. She looked at him for a long time. I know, she said. Outside the windows, the city had gone from afternoon gray to the specific dark blue of early winter evening, the moment before the lights became the dominant thing, when the buildings were still visible as shapes against the sky and hadn’t yet dissolved  into their own illumination.

The river was invisible now, but she knew it was there, moving south, constant, not waiting for anyone. The first time I made croissants, she said, I was 16. My mother was hosting a brunch and the caterer canled and she told me to figure something out. I’d never made croissants. I stayed up until 2:00 in the morning watching videos and trying to understand laminated dough and I ruined the first three batches.

The fourth batch was She paused. They weren’t perfect. But they were real. They tasted like I’d actually made them, not like I’d bought them somewhere and was pretending. Lucian said nothing. My mother looked at them on the table, Ava said, and then she looked around at her guests and said she’d found the most darling bakery in the village.

She let the silence sit for a moment. I was standing right there. The city outside continued darkening. I kept making things, she said. I don’t know if that’s resilience or if it’s just not knowing what else to be, but I kept making things. It’s not a small thing, he said, to keep making things. She looked at him. No, she said. I know.

She stayed that night. Not in the way that would have felt like surrender. Not in the way that erased the morning’s conversation or the 3 years before it or the specific complicated territory of what they were to each other. She slept in the same room she’d slept in the night before, with the river beyond the glass, and for the first time in longer than she could specifically locate, she slept without one ear tuned to the frequency of danger.

In the morning, she was up at 5:15. She found them already in the kitchen, which didn’t surprise her. Coffee made. He’d found eggs somewhere, and there was toast and the specific ordinary miracle of breakfast that someone had made before he woke up, which he registered and didn’t comment on because some things didn’t need commentary. She ate.

He drank his coffee and read something on his phone. And the kitchen was quiet in a way that wasn’t tense, but was simply the silence of two people who had run out of things to perform for each other. “I’m going to need a lawyer for the next few months,” she said. “Patricia is good, but she’s criminal defense.

I’m going to need someone for the civil side of whatever the family does when the indictment hits.” “I know someone. Not yours,” she said. “Not mine,” he agreed. “I’ll send you three names. Independent, your choice. She looked at her coffee. The bakery accounts, if the federal investigation references them, there’s going to be a period where your business is clean, he said.

Whatever shows up on the trust side, Nocturn’s current accounts are 8 years removed from any connection, and Patricia can document the gap clearly. He paused. You built something clean, Ava. That doesn’t disappear because of what your father did when you were 19. She looked at him. He held her gaze without adding anything to it. “Okay,” she said. She left at 6:30.

He walked her to the lobby because she didn’t tell him not to. The doorman had the same expression he’d had when she’d arrived two nights ago. Professional, uninflected, exactly no information given. Outside, it was dark still, the city in that pre-dawn mode of garbage trucks and early runners, and the particular population of people who began their day, while everyone else was still horizontal.

She stopped on the sidewalk. I’m going to be in the middle of a federal case for a year, she said. Maybe more. My family is going to be in the news in a way that my name is attached to it whether I want it to be or not. And you? She paused. Whatever Caruso’s investigation looks like from here, it’s not done. No. Lucian said, none of it is done.

So, I want to say something while it’s still morning, and I haven’t had enough time to talk myself out of it. He waited. I stopped because I was afraid. She said, “3 years ago, I told myself it was principle, but it was fear. I was afraid of what it meant to choose something that didn’t fit the version of myself I was trying to build.” She looked at him.

I was also afraid that if I stayed close enough to see what you actually were, not the surface of it, the actual thing, I might not be able to leave. And I didn’t know yet who I was without the option to leave. The street around them, the pre-dawn city, a cab passing without slowing. “Now I know,” she said. “And I’m still standing here.

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