POV: Jasmine
"I'm not angry with anyone," I said. "Start at the beginning."
Nora looked at Leo. Leo looked at the table. Then Nora set her wine glass down and started.
The victory dinner at the villa, she said. The night Eleanor was named into the record. The salsa — she said it without looking at me, and I understood she remembered I had been in the room.
A laugh Leo gave her. A laugh she said she had not had in years. She said it quietly, and it landed harder than the things that announced themselves.
A text she sent two days later, meant as a joke. He called her about it the same evening. They talked for four hours without meaning to — starting with the joke, moving through everything else, and arriving somewhere neither of them had planned to be. By the time they hung up, something had changed between them. Neither of them said so. Both of them understood what it was.
"Six months," Nora said, meeting my eyes. "We have been together for six months."
I went back through six months in my mind — every dinner where I had been in the same room as both of them and had not seen it.
Every call with Nora where she had asked about him casually enough that I had not thought to listen for anything underneath it. Every visit Leo had made to the city.
Every time I had relayed news between them without registering the way his voice changed when I said her name.
I sat with all of it and let it land, because my reaction was not the most important thing at this table.
Leo picked up from there, cleanly, without hedging — clear-eyed in a way I had not seen from him in a long time.
He told me he had pushed to say something sooner, that Nora had asked him to wait, and he had waited because she asked him to. Not because he had been told to. Because she asked, and that was a different thing, and he knew the difference.
He said he would make the same choice again because her comfort mattered to him more than the timing. He said it without looking at Nora. He said it to me, directly — giving me the version that did not require her to vouch for it, that stood on its own.
I sat with it, then looked at Nora.
She was watching me with the expression she wore when bracing for something she could not deflect — jaw level, eyes steady, nothing in her face performing composure because this was past the point where composure helped.
I had seen it in courtrooms, before verdicts she could not control.
I had never seen it directed at me across a restaurant table.
‘She had been carrying this for six months and had been afraid of me the entire time.’
"The age," I said. "You're worried about it."
"Yes." No qualification, no softening, just the word.
"I am older than him. I have more money, a career that is fully built." She held my eyes. "I was afraid you would think I was taking something from someone who had just gotten himself back."
I thought about Leo at the farm — hollow-eyed and furious and refusing help until he suddenly wasn't.
I thought about six months of him choosing, every day, a woman who was afraid of her own wanting.
"I trust his judgment," I said. "He has taken a long time to earn it from me, and he has earned it."
"And I know how you are with the people who matter to you. I have been watching that for long enough to know what it means when you decide someone is worth being afraid for."
Leo had gone very still across the table — not the restless stillness of someone suppressing something, but the quiet forward attention of someone who had decided not to crowd the moment.
"And I trust your heart," I told Nora. "Those are the only two things that matter. I do not care about the number."
Nora exhaled — a long, slow breath, the kind that comes out when a person finally puts something down that had been getting heavier for months.
"I'm still letting you babysit tomorrow," I added. "I want that on record."
Nora laughed — not the polished version she produced in professional rooms, but the real one, unguarded and slightly undone.
Leo was smiling at his plate, quiet and private. That. That was what he had seen at that dinner.
The tension came down in increments. We ordered dessert. Conversation returned to its normal shape. Nora's hand found mine somewhere in the middle of a story about Aurora's daycare and stayed there.
"There is one more thing," she said, her grip tightening slightly as she said it.
"Leo is thinking about moving to the city. Full time. Into my apartment."
The words took a moment to arrange themselves into what they actually meant — not the logistics, but everything underneath them.
Leo, who I had raised in a two-bedroom apartment with secondhand furniture.
Leo, moving into a life he had built himself, toward a person he had chosen himself, without me arranging any part of it.
Without me being the reason or the occasion or the thing that made it possible.
I looked at him. He was already watching me — patient, undefended, not asking me to perform a reaction.
Waiting the way he used to wait at the kitchen table as a boy, not yet sure whether I was going to fix it or be angry.
He nodded, and held the look — his own answer, separate from Nora's, without borrowing her certainty.
I looked at our hands on the table — mine and Nora's — and I did not say anything for a moment.
The thing moving through me was too large and too quiet to put into words quickly, and I had learned a long time ago not to force it.
But I did not let go of her hand.
And across the table, Leo saw that, and his shoulders dropped a fraction, and that was its own kind of answer.