POV: Jasmine
Leo called at two in the afternoon.
I heard it before he got there — the questions about Aurora, the ranch update, the tone of someone clearing space around the real thing. I moved my notes aside and waited.
I had learned, with Leo, that you did not meet him at the edge of what he was circling. You let him take the full route. He needed the approach as much as he needed the arrival.
"Can I ask you something that might be a weird question?"
"Ask."
"Someone at the ranch asked about my family. About our dad." A pause. "I started to answer and I realized I had nothing. Not a story. Not a version. Just a space where a person should have been. Do you think what we were told is the whole story?"
"No. I don't think it's close to the whole story. I think what we were told is the version that required the least from the people who were supposed to tell us more."
Silence. Then: "Okay. That's what I thought. I just needed to hear someone else say it."
"How long have you been sitting on this?"
"A few weeks. Since the ranch guy asked." A beat. "Do you want to know? About him. Is that somewhere you want to go?"
I looked at the ordinary domestic landscape in front of me — the clean counter, Aurora's cup still on the drying rack, the city doing its indifferent afternoon outside the window.
A life I had built from the ground up, specifically because there had been no foundation to inherit. I had made peace with building on nothing. I was not sure I had made peace with someone having chosen that nothing for me.
"I don't know. I might want to know. I might decide that getting there costs more than what arrives. I haven't sorted out which is true yet." A pause. "Is that where you are too?"
"Yeah. Exactly. I wasn't asking for a plan. I was asking if you were in the same place."
"I'm in the same place."
"That helps. That actually helps a lot."
"Good. When you decide what you want to do — we figure it out together."
"Yeah." A beat. "Thanks, Jasmine."
"Don't thank me. That's not what we are."
A short pause. Then a surprised laugh. "Right. Sorry."
"Don't apologize either."
"Hanging up before I do something else wrong."
Midway through the call, before the lighter end of it, Leo had said the thing that stayed with me longest:
"The thing that gets me is I used to think the absence was the story. Like the absence was the whole answer. And now I think — no. The absence is a symptom. Someone made a choice. That's different."
"That's very different."
"Right. So now I want to know whose choice it was. And why."
I had let that sit. It was the right question. It was the question I had been circling without naming for thirty years — dressed differently at different ages, folded into different grievances, mislabeled as ambition or self-sufficiency or simply the particular way I had learned to stop needing things I had decided I could not have.
The absence had not been the story. Someone had written us out of it. That was not the same as having no story. That was a story with an author.
I did not know yet if I wanted to find that author.
What I knew was that it was no longer sitting comfortably in the place where I had filed it.
That evening I told Liam.
I waited until Aurora was down and the apartment had gone quiet — the specific quiet of a home after a small person has been put to sleep, the air softer somehow, the rooms returned to the adults who held them. I found him at the kitchen counter with his laptop. I sat across from him.
"Leo asked me today whether I think what we were told about our father is the complete story. I told him no. I told him I hadn't decided if I wanted to know more."
Liam closed the laptop.
"What does Leo want to do?"
"He doesn't know yet. Neither do I. We're in the same place." I paused. "I needed to say it out loud to someone who would understand the weight of it."
He was still for a moment — not absent, not filling silence with the wrong thing. Deciding what to offer that would actually land rather than what would be easiest to give.
"Jackson told us what he wanted us to know about our mother too."
No pivot, no elaboration. He put his version beside mine — flat and plain — and let it be what it was. Not a comparison. Not an attempt to equate the two losses.
Just the acknowledgment that he understood this specific kind of curated absence, the inheritance of managed information, the particular loneliness of growing up inside a story someone else had edited.
"I know." I reached across the counter and touched the back of his hand. He turned it over and held mine.
"Do you want to know?" Direct, across the counter, no softening in it. "About your father. Is that where you're going?"
"I don't know yet. But having Leo in the same place makes it feel less like something I'm carrying alone."
"You're not carrying it alone."
"You don't have to decide tonight."
"I know that too."
"I'm just here." He looked at me steadily. "That's all I was trying to say from the beginning. No urgency from my end. No waiting on a decision. When you know what you want to do — if you want to look for answers, or if you decide you don't — I'm here for both."
"It shouldn't be complicated at all and it still is," I said. "That's the thing. It shouldn't take this long to sort out whether a question is worth asking."
"Some questions take as long as they take."
I looked at him — the precise look I gave when I had received something real and needed him to know it had landed without making a ceremony of the landing.
"I know that," I said.
I didn't let go of his hand. The kitchen held the quiet of a Tuesday evening, ordinary and specific and ours.
Neither of us needed it to be more than it was.