POV: Jasmine
I was near Liam.
He saw my face and went still — not the stillness of alarm but of a man who had learned the difference between a situation that required him to move and one that required him to wait, and had made his calculation.
I put the call on speaker and set the phone on the coffee table between us.
"I understand the timing is strange," the man said. He had not moved to fill the silence when I answered, had not pushed when I said nothing. He simply waited.
"I have been trying to reach you for weeks. Through other people. I decided to call directly because I believe I can put pieces of your father’s story."
I did not speak. The apartment was very quiet. Somewhere down the hall, Aurora made a small sound in her sleep and was still again.
"I am not asking you to meet me tonight," the man continued. "I am not asking for anything. I want to give you a number. You call it when you are ready, and not before." A pause, unhurried. "I will not call again."
He read out the number. Then he ended the call.
I sat with the phone in my hand and looked at it — at the screen going dark, at the call log with its unknown digits, at the specific blankness of a thing that had just delivered more than it had explained and was now simply an object.
Liam said nothing. He waited, the way he waited when he understood that the thing I needed from him was not words.
I set the phone on the coffee table. I looked at it for a moment longer, at the darkness of the screen. Then I looked at Liam, and I told him what I had decided before the man had even finished the call.
"I'm not returning it tonight." I said it clearly, without needing to think through the edges of it. "I'm not returning it until after we handle Jackson's statement."
Liam watched me.
"My father —" I stopped. Organised the sentence and began again.
"Whatever that man claims to know, whatever is in Leo's folder, whatever the ranch visitor came there to say — it has been there a long time. It can wait a little longer."
I felt the weight of that choice as I made it, the gravity of choosing to defer a question that had been deferred for most of my life.
"Eleanor will not wait. Jackson's window is days. That is the thing that has a clock on it."
Liam reached across and took both my hands.
He held them with the steadiness of a person who was not trying to fix anything, only to anchor. "I understand," he said. "And I'm with you. Whatever order you decide. Whatever comes first and whatever comes after."
He lifted my hands and pressed his mouth to one palm, then the other — unhurried, deliberate, a gesture with no performance in it. "Both of those things are yours. I am not going anywhere."
Both of those things are yours. He meant the statement and he meant the folder, but the sentence reached further than he aimed it.
It landed in the part of me that had been holding everything alone before I understood I did not have to — everything I had been afraid to let someone stand close to in case they found it too heavy or too complicated or too irreducibly mine.
He had never found it any of those things.
We sat on the couch for a long time, wrapped together in the dark of an apartment that had settled after a long night.
Inside, nothing needed to be said that had not already been said, and several things had been said that I was still unpacking.
Eventually the weight of the day found me in the way it always found me — not all at once but incrementally, the energy going out like a tide, the thinking slowing.
"I need to sleep," I said against his shoulder.
He did not respond with words. He stood, gathered me with the ease he brought to this — the physical sureness of a man who knew the weight of me and had never found it anything other than exactly right.
He carried me to the bedroom and laid me down and folded himself around me in the dark, his arm at my back, his chest warm beneath my cheek.
I was nearly gone.
His voice came quietly into my hair — not fully aloud, not quite a whisper either, the register of something said to a person you are not sure is still awake because you need to say it more than you need them to answer.
"I want us to get married."
Not a question. Not a speech. Not a moment with a presentation attached to it. Just Liam, in the dark, saying the true thing he had been holding until the quiet was large enough to say it in.
I did not move. My eyes did not open. The sentence moved through me slowly, from the outside in, and settled somewhere it fit — somewhere that had been arranged for it without my knowing, somewhere that received it not as a surprise but as a completion.
I felt his breath. I felt the rhythm of his chest.
I said nothing.
But my hand, resting against his sternum, turned over and found his and held on.