POV: Jackson
The morning arrived the way mornings arrive when you are not expected anywhere — quietly, without structure.
Leo and Nora's wedding. Today.
I was not invited. I did not expect to be. The wedding of my nephew was happening across the city, and I would learn about it the way I learned about everything now. Through Priya. After the fact. At a distance I had chosen and was still learning to hold.
I made coffee. Stood at the window. The city was bright and indifferent, the kind of morning that belonged to people with somewhere to be.
Priya had called last night. Not to check on me — Priya did not check on people. She shared.
"Aurora carried flowers at the rehearsal," she had said. "Held the basket with both hands and walked down the aisle with complete seriousness. She treated it like a mission."
I had closed my eyes.
"Jasmine looked steady. Not performing steadiness — actually steady. Finn and Asher were both there. Both with her."
Three words that described a family I had chosen to step away from. I felt two things at once. Loss — real, specific, sitting in my chest like a stone I had swallowed deliberately. And underneath it, the unfamiliar certainty that the loss was the right price.
Priya was the first cost I had paid without calculating the return.
The day passed. I did not work. I did not open the Cadence file. I sat in the chair where Eleanor used to sit and thought about what she would say — a man alone on the day of a family wedding, waiting for a woman to tell him what he missed.
Eleanor would have laughed. Not cruelly. With the sharp amusement of a woman who had spent thirty years watching me choose power over presence.
She would have said: it took you long enough.
Priya arrived in the evening. Dark green dress, simple, her hair down in a way I had never seen during working hours. She set her bag on the chair and sat across from me at the kitchen table. Shoes off. Posture softer than any boardroom had ever seen.
"Tell me," I said.
"The ceremony was short," she said. "Leo stumbled over one of his vows — the word 'cherish,' which he pronounced like he had never encountered it before. Nora laughed. Not politely. A real laugh, the kind that made the whole room relax."
She described it without performing happiness for me — without managing a fragile man's feelings. She told me what happened because I wanted to know and she respected me enough to tell it straight.
"Aurora sat in the front row between Finn and Asher," she said. "She held the rabbit from Italy in her lap. During the vows she leaned against Finn's arm and he put his hand on her head without looking down."
The image settled inside me. My granddaughter. The rabbit. The two men who had become her daily architecture.
"Did Jasmine look okay?" I asked.
Priya studied me. She knew I was not asking about composure. I was asking whether the family I had threatened was intact. Whether my absence had made room for something better.
"More than okay," she said.
The kitchen was quiet. The evening light caught the edge of Priya's jaw, the line of her collarbone above the green dress. I noticed these things with the bewildered attention of a man who had spent decades looking at people as positions on a board and was now looking at a woman as a woman.
"Do you regret the condition you gave me?" I asked.
"No."
"If I had said no — would you have walked away?"
"Yes." No hesitation. No breath between the question and the answer. Absolute, prepared in advance, delivered without flinching.
Something moved in my chest. Not pain. Recognition. She would have walked away. She would have closed the door and not looked back. And the fact that she could — that walking away from me was something she was entirely capable of — was the reason I had said yes.
"That is why I said yes," I told her.
She looked at me with those dark, steady eyes. Priya Mehta did not need me. She did not need my money, my influence, my history. She was here because she wanted to be, and the purity of that want — uncontaminated by strategy — terrified me more than any boardroom had ever managed.
"Eleanor would have done the same thing," I said. "Given the condition. Meant it. Walked away."
"I am not Eleanor," Priya said quietly.
"I know." I looked at her across the table — this woman who had dismantled me without raising her voice, who was sitting in my kitchen in a green dress with her shoes off and her guard down. "That is the point."
She stayed.
We sat together in the quiet apartment. The city darkened outside. The silence between us was the kind I had never shared with anyone — not strategic, not tense. Companionable. Two people who did not need to fill the air to justify their presence in each other's space.
"I do not know how to do this," I said.
The admission cost me something physical — a sensation in my sternum, the surrender of a man who had controlled every room he had ever entered and was now sitting in one he could not control and did not want to leave.
"Be with someone without it being strategic," I said. "Without calculating the outcome. I have never done this."
Priya looked at me. The faintest shift at the corner of her mouth — not a smile, not yet. The beginning of one. Something in her softening toward something in me, and she was allowing it to happen instead of managing it.
"You are already doing it," she said. "You just do not recognise it yet."