POV: Liam
Aurora was no longer a newborn in the way she had been.
The apartment had shifted with her. The constant vigilance of those first weeks had softened into something more ordinary.
She fed at predictable intervals. She slept in recognizable patterns. The mornings had started to have a shape.
She was settled when Jasmine came into the kitchen — fed, clean, arranged in the bouncer with that focused expression she'd started making at things she found interesting.
I was at the counter with coffee.
"Leo stopped by yesterday." I turned toward her. "While you were at Nora's. Drove in from the ranch."
She stopped in the doorway.
"He didn't come in." I nodded toward the counter. "He left something."
The small carved horse sitting beside Aurora's things — wooden, unpainted, clearly handmade.
Jasmine crossed to the counter and picked it up. Held it without speaking. Turned it in her hands.
I watched her do it — the small muscle in her jaw, the particular quality of her stillness — and understood she was doing several things at once. Processing Leo in one part of her mind while the rest of her stayed present in the kitchen, with Aurora, with the morning.
She set it back down carefully. Then moved to Aurora and bent to do the small check-in she did every time she entered a room.
"Did he say anything?" she asked, without turning around. "Before he left."
"Nothing verbal." I turned toward the window. "He looked at Aurora for a few minutes through the doorway. Didn't come in to hold her. Then he set the horse down and left."
She stayed by Aurora for a moment longer.
"He made it himself." She picked up Aurora, held her against her chest. "He learned woodworking at the ranch. Martha mentioned it in one of her messages."
"I know." She held Aurora for another minute.
"What do you think it means?" I asked. "Him coming."
"That he's thinking about her. That he wanted her to have something from him, even if he wasn't ready to be in the room." She looked at the horse on the counter. "He drove three hours to leave a piece of wood on a counter and drive back. That's not absence. That's someone who doesn't know how to be present yet."
"Do you want to call him?"
"Not yet." She set Aurora back down. "When he's ready, he'll come back to the room."
She let the morning continue around it. At some point she set down her coffee mug and looked at me.
"There's a showcase tonight." She set down her mug. "Small label. No connection to Cadence. No connection to any of this."
"Okay."
"I need to be in a professional room tonight and see if I still know how to read one." A pause. "I need to know it's still in me, in a room where nobody knows me."
Not a request for permission. The kind of thing you say when you need someone to hear it without making it something else.
"I've got Aurora. Take whatever time you need."
"Two hours."
"Then take the whole two hours. And whatever you need before and after."
She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. Confirmation that she'd been heard correctly.
She left at seven, dressed simply. No Cadence gravity in any of it. Just herself, walking into a room she had no history with.
She was back by nine-fifteen.
When she came through the door she was visibly different — present in a looser way, something that had been held tightly loosened without her having noticed it give.
She dropped her jacket over the back of the chair and sat across from me.
"How was it?"
"There was an A&R executive I'd never met." She leaned forward on her arms, color in her face that hadn't been there in a while. "One of the showcase acts came on and I had a reaction — didn't say anything, just had it on my face."
"And?"
"He turned to me and asked my opinion before I had said a single word to him. Before I'd introduced myself. Before anything." She looked at me. "Just because he caught my face during the performance."
"What did you tell him?"
"The honest version. That the vocalist was strong but the production was swallowing her. That she needed someone who understood what she actually was rather than what the trend required." She paused. "That the song she'd do it with hadn't been written yet, but when it was, it would be obvious."
"What was it like — walking into a room like that?"
"Strange." She looked at the table for a moment. "Good strange. Like remembering something I'd been telling myself I'd made up."
She looked at me directly.
"You know what the worst part of the last year has been? Not the scandal, not the lawsuit, not any of the visible things." She took a pause. "It's been not trusting my own reads anymore. Wondering if I was only useful inside this specific context, this specific set of people."
"And now?"
"Now I know."
"What did he say?" I asked. "The A&R executive."
"He wrote it down." A specific quiet. Not triumphant. Just the fact. "Didn't argue it. Didn't qualify it. Asked my name after, not before."
I stood up and came around to her side of the table. She watched me do it. I sat beside her instead of across from her.
"That has always been the case." I held her gaze. "That capacity. A room reads it before anyone's had time to explain the circumstances."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I needed to feel it in a room that had nothing to do with any of this."
"Not with you beside me. Not with a Cadence label on the building. Not with anyone who knew the story." She looked at the table between her hands. "I needed to know it was real outside of all of it."
"Is that what you found?"
"Yes." Clean. No qualifications.
"It lands differently when it's a room that doesn't know you." I stayed beside her. "I'm glad you went."
Aurora made a sound from the other room — the small exploratory noises she had started making, testing whether the world responded. Neither of us moved immediately.
We sat in the kitchen in the quiet of a Tuesday evening that had become more than it started as, and I let the moment have its weight.
She reached over and picked up the wooden horse from where she'd left it on the table. Held it briefly. Not the way she had that morning — without the working-through in it now.
Just holding it. Then she set it down and left it there between us.