Chapter 11
She sat back down. She picked up her book. She read four pages and retained nothing from them, because she was watching Jyn sit with his sleeping son and look at him with the expression of a man who had missed something for two and a half years and was trying to understand the exact dimensions of what was missing and was also, she thought, trying to understand whether it was too late to find what he had lost.
It was not too late. She knew this.
She just wasn’t sure he did yet.
Zoe arrived on day fourteen with two suitcases, an entire wheel of good parmesan, and immediate opinions about the compound’s aesthetic potential.
“This place could be incredible,” she said, walking through the main hall with her phone raised at forty-five degrees to capture the architecture. “You just need some throw pillows. And plants. Do you have plants? You need plants. Places this formal need something living.”
“We have a dog,” Nia said.
“Plants and a dog. Perfect.” Zoe lowered her phone and looked at Nia with the specific expression she used when she had been thinking about something for two weeks and was about to bring it up as if it had just occurred to her. “So. The ring.”
“Zoe.”
“I’m just asking.”
“I know you are.”
“Have you tried it on?”
Nia said nothing.
“Nia.”
“I looked at it.”
Zoe made a sound that communicated everything she was declining to say out loud. She put her arm through Nia’s and steered her toward the kitchen. “Walk me through the last two weeks. Leave out nothing.”
The case against Vincent Chong broke open on day thirty-seven.
Jyn appeared at Nia’s workroom door at 7:30 in the morning with the expression of a man who has been awake since at least three and has been working toward a specific moment and has arrived at it.
“We have what we need,” he said.
She pushed her laptop aside. “Tell me.”
He told her. The attorneys had been building toward a filing in three jurisdictions simultaneously — US, Hong Kong, and EU — based on evidence of financial fraud that, when presented alongside testimony from two port officials who had cooperated with investigators, created a picture of the Chong family’s operations that no legitimate judge could dismiss. Vincent Chong had been arrested in Hong Kong at 4:00 a.m. local time. Two of his senior lieutenants had been arrested in the US within the hour.
The threat was not gone — it was never entirely gone, in the world Jyn lived in. But the specific threat to Leo, the organized effort to use him as leverage, had been decapitated.
“It’s over,” Nia said.
“The immediate danger. Yes.”
She looked at him. “What does that mean for us?”
“It means you can go home,” Jyn said carefully.
“I know what it means practically,” she said. “I’m asking what it means for us.”
He stood in the doorway of her workroom with the Alps visible through the window behind him and he looked at her with the expression she had been watching evolve over thirty-seven days from impenetrable to something quite different — not less controlled, but controlled for different reasons. Controlled because he cared about the outcome of what he said next, not because he was trying to protect himself from caring.
“It means whatever you decide it means,” he said. “I told you I would not press you. I will not.”
“But.”
“But I would like it to mean something,” he said. “I would like it to mean that Leo knows who his father is and that you are not doing this alone.” He paused. “I would like it to mean more than that, eventually, if you are willing.”
Nia looked at her hands. Then at him.
“I don’t want to go home,” she said.
He went still.
“I mean — I want to go home eventually. I miss my city and my actual neighborhood and the bodega guy with the loud laugh. And Marcus needs to go back to his job before he resigns entirely to become a professional security consultant for your compound, which he mentioned to me as a possibility yesterday and which I told him was premature.” She paused. “But I don’t want to go home and go back to the version of this where you’re next door and we’re managing around each other. I want the version where Leo knows you. Where you come to dinner because you’re supposed to be there, not because you happened to be nearby.”
“That is a version I want,” Jyn said.
“And eventually,” she said, and she kept her eyes on him because he deserved to have her looking at him when she said it, “I think I want the ring version. Not yet. Not until it’s something we’ve built and not something we’ve survived into. But eventually.”
He crossed the room.
He stopped in front of her, and she stood up to meet him, and he took her face in both hands with the gentleness that she had watched him apply to Thor and to Leo and to exactly nothing else in the world, and he kissed her.
It was not the first time. It had been three years ago in a hotel bar when she had thought it was the best and only time. She had been wrong about that, it turned out.
It was considerably better now, which was possibly something to do with thirty-seven days in a Swiss compound and a lot of morning coffee and a small person who had climbed into his lap and decided the matter for both of them.
