Chapter 6
The conversation they’d agreed to have happened the following morning, in a room with glass walls that looked out on the Alps in morning light, which was an unfair location for a conversation about one’s feelings because it was very difficult to be appropriately guarded about your interior life when the scenery was actively conspiring to make you believe the world was bigger and more extraordinary than you had previously considered.
Nia brought coffee. Jyn was already there, which she was beginning to understand was always his pattern — he arrived early to things as a function of never being unprepared, even to conversations he might reasonably have wanted to be unprepared for.
“You said three years,” she said, sitting across from him.
“Yes.”
“Tell me what that means. Because in my version of three years, there was a night that mattered and then a person who vanished and then there was a pregnancy that I managed alone and a baby that I am raising alone and a whole life that I have built for just me and him. And then you show up next door with a fortress and a dog and five million dollars, and I need to understand what your three years looked like.”
Jyn looked out the window for a moment. Then back at her.
“I came back to the hotel the next morning,” he said. “The emergency call was real — one of my port managers had been arrested in Hamburg, there was a legal situation that needed me physically present within hours. I left a note. The desk said you had already checked out.” A pause. “I asked for your information and was told the room was booked under a name that didn’t match any identification you’d given them, which meant you had been careful about your privacy in a way that was your right and which I respected, but which made finding you effectively impossible through normal means.”
“You could have stopped looking,” Nia said.
“I could have.”
“But?”
He looked at her with the directness that she had initially read as arrogance and was beginning to understand was simply how he operated — without deflection, without performance, just the thing itself.
“There have been many women in my life,” Jyn said. “Most of them were in my life because of what I represented — the name, the resources, the access. They wanted things. I understood this and accepted it as the nature of my position.” A pause. “You told me about your freelance business and your terrible landlord and your grandmother’s peppermint candy for two hours in a hotel bar. You asked me about my childhood. When I told you something honest, you listened instead of calculating what to do with the information.” He paused again. “And then you left before I came back, which I had never experienced before, and I realized I did not have enough of the conversation.”
Nia wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. “I didn’t leave because I wanted to disappear. I left because I had a flight and you were gone and I thought—” She stopped. “I thought it was what it was. One night. Extraordinary, but not something people built things on.”
“People build things on foundations all the time.”
“I didn’t know your name.”
“You knew I was called Mister.” Something crossed his face that she was starting to recognize as the version of humor that lived very close to the surface of him but rarely broke through — dry and quiet and slightly self-aware. “In retrospect, that was a significant gap in the information exchange.”
“Significant,” she agreed. “Yes.”
Leo’s voice drifted in from somewhere in the compound, narrating something to Thor with the authority of a small person who has decided a dog is an excellent audience. Thor’s silence in response was presumably his way of agreeing.
“I want to know him,” Jyn said. The lightness left his voice. “I understand I have no claim. I understand that legally, historically, practically — he is yours, you built him, you are the parent who was there. I am not trying to correct that balance. But I want to know him.” He looked at his hands. “And I want to know if there is a version of this where I am allowed to be his father.”
Nia looked at him.
She thought about every morning she had gotten Leo up and made breakfast and driven him to daycare and picked him up and made dinner and put him to bed and loved him with her entire exhausted body and done it all alone. She thought about the specific weight of that aloneness, the way it was not quite loneliness because she was never lonely when Leo was there, but it was something — the absence of someone to say did you see what he did today to, the absence of someone to share the exact specific joy of watching a particular child become a particular person.
She thought about Jyn watching Leo sleep in the car.
“Yes,” she said. “There is a version of that.”
