POV: Jasmine
The parking garage had the particular stillness of a place that existed between things.
A door somewhere, the hum of fluorescent strips overhead. But still. The kind that came from being underground and off the clock and temporarily unheld by any obligation.
I'd pulled in twenty minutes ago and hadn't moved.
I was performing calm about this. I'd been doing it for three days, and I was good enough at it that Liam probably hadn't clocked the gap between the performance and the thing underneath. Probably.
I called Nora.
She picked up on the first ring, which meant she'd been waiting and had decided not to say so.
"You're in your car," she noted, not waiting to confirm it. It wasn't a question.
"Cadence parking garage," I replied. "Lunch break. Which I have not actually taken yet."
"Because home isn't safe for this conversation anymore," she answered, arriving there before I could.
"Home is fine," I said, and heard myself do it — the automatic deflection, the small grammatical lie.
"He's not there yet. But the apartment has a different quality now that the room is made up, and I needed — " I stopped and started again. "I needed to be somewhere that wasn't inside it."
"Okay." Her voice carried the particular neutrality she deployed when she was giving me room to arrive somewhere on my own. "Tell me."
"Asher's coming back." I watched a car nose slowly down the ramp. "He sent me five words on Tuesday. Direct to me, not through Liam. 'I need to come back.'"
"And what did you actually do with that?" Nora pressed. "After you sat with it — what happened?"
"I told Liam. Then I sat with the piano for an hour and didn't finish the piece, same as every other night for four months."
I pressed my back harder into the seat. "Then I started acting calm about it — what I do when I haven't located what I actually feel yet."
"So locate it," she replied calmly. "Right now. Out loud, to me, with no editing whatsoever."
The fluorescent strip above my car flickered once and held.
She was the only person I let do this — reach through the managed surface and pull, because she understood what it cost me to carry things I hadn't named yet.
"I don't know what I feel," I admitted. "Or — I know I feel something. I just can't tell if what I feel is actually about Asher or about the version of myself that existed when all three of us were in the same room. Those feel like different things. I can't separate them yet."
A beat.
"Do you still have feelings for him?" Nora asked. Flat and clean. No cushioning around the edges.
I sat with it long enough that the question got the treatment it deserved.
"I don't know if what I feel for him qualifies as feelings the way you mean that word," I said carefully.
"There's recognition. There's — history in my body, the kind you can't reason out of yourself just because enough time has passed."
"There's also anger that I have never fully named out loud because naming it felt like admitting it still had weight," I continued, exhaling slowly.
"And underneath all of that, there's this sense that the whole thing is finished. Genuinely finished. And I can't figure out how all three of those can be true at the same time without one of them being a lie."
"Because you think emotions work like math," she replied. "They don't. Wanting something and being furious about it and also having it be completely over — those can all be true simultaneously. None of them cancel the others out."
"That's genuinely not comforting," I noted. "That's the opposite of what I was hoping to hear."
"It's not supposed to be comforting," she answered. "It's supposed to be accurate. All three being true isn't a contradiction to resolve. It's information. It tells you where you actually are, not where you wish you were standing."
I looked at my hands in my lap.
She was right — always precisely, infuriatingly right. The infuriating part wasn't the accuracy: I usually already knew before I called. Calling her was how I made myself say it out loud.
"There's also the music," I said. "I haven't figured out how to talk about it yet."
"Tell me," she replied without hesitation. "Start with what you know and let the rest follow."
"The piece in the second bedroom. I've been stuck on the same chord for four months. Every night I sit down and it takes me to the same place and stops."
"And I've been treating that like a technical problem — like there's a compositional solution I haven't found yet." I paused. "But it's not a technical problem."
"No," she agreed, and the word landed flat and clean. "It most certainly isn't."
"It's waiting for information I don't have yet," I told her. "A resolution I haven't been given. A reckoning I haven't had. I don't know which one it's asking for."
"Some things can't finish," Nora answered, her voice shifting — still direct, but warmer underneath the precision now, "until the right people are back in the room."
The words landed with the weight of things that were obvious the moment someone else said them and completely invisible until they did.
I'd been circling that truth for months — sitting at the piano wondering why the chord wouldn't resolve, as if the answer were in the instrument rather than in the person I'd been the last time all three of us occupied the same room.
That person had left a conversation half-said. And music, unlike legal contracts and professional titles, did not accept managed resolution.
"I hate that you're always right about these things," I told her, and meant it in both directions.
"You called me because I'm right," she replied. "You have a whole apartment full of people who love you too much to say the hard thing first. That's not what I'm for."
"You're very pleased with your function," I pointed out. "It's a little alarming, honestly."
"Extremely," she answered. "Now go eat something. You called me instead of lunch."
I laughed — actually laughed, the real kind, not performed for anyone's benefit. "I'll eat."
"Call me after he arrives," she said. "Not to report on anything. Just — call me."
"I will," I answered. "I'll call you before I've even fully processed it, probably."
She hung up first. I sat in the stillness for one more moment, listening to the fluorescent overhead. Then I started the car.
My phone buzzed against the center console before I'd touched the gearshift — before I'd shifted out of park.
A calendar notification. Set three weeks ago by a version of me that needed something concrete while she waited.
Asher — confirms arrival date.
I looked at it for a full moment — at the small, precise record of a decision I'd already made before I was ready to admit I'd made it.
Then I dismissed it.
There was nothing left to confirm.