POV: Jasmine
Leo knocked on the door of our room before the sun had fully cleared the hills.
I was already up. I had not slept well. The dread from the terrace had settled in the back of my throat overnight, low and quiet, a thing I had not been able to swallow down with coffee.
Liam was still in bed, one arm thrown across the pillow on my side. I had not told him. I had meant to. I had not.
Today. Tonight. Before tomorrow morning.
I pulled the door open in the soft cardigan I had been pretending to read in.
"Walk with me," Leo said. "Through the town. The little shops. Bring Aurora."
I leaned on the doorframe. "That is a sentence, not a reason."
He shrugged, hands in his pockets. "I do not have a reason. I want to walk with my niece and my sister."
He was lying. I could read him the way I could read the bathroom mirror. He had the careful, pleased, slightly nervous quality of a man holding something against his ribs.
"Give me twenty minutes," I told him. "She has to be bribed into shoes."
He was already backing toward the stairs. "I will be in the kitchen."
She was bribed with the promise of one thing from one shop, your choice. She negotiated this up to two things and I let her win because the negotiation made her feel taller.
By the time we were down the hill the town was awake but slow. Leo walked between us with Aurora's small hand in his. She was telling him something serious about a snail she had seen near the gate.
He was answering her with the same gravity I had heard him use with me at her age, when the snail was a different snail and the hand was mine.
The love I felt for him in that second was complicated.
Pride, sharp and almost embarrassed, because I had spent years being his sister and his keeper at the same time and now I was just his sister.
Grief, low and old, for the version of him that had not made it — the one I had bought back with a body that was not for sale.
Aurora stopped at a stall hung with small stuffed animals. She pulled out a small, white, alarmingly fluffy rabbit and held it at arm's length, examining its face.
I crouched beside her. "Is this the one thing from the one shop?"
Aurora nodded without looking away from the rabbit. "Yes."
"You are sure?" I asked, brushing the hair from her face.
She pulled the rabbit against her chest. "I am sure, Mama."
"Then he is yours," I told her, and she tucked it firmly under her arm and did not take it out from there for the rest of the day.
We kept walking, and I noticed Leo was steering us. Two streets, a left, a narrow square with a fountain. He had a destination. He was pretending he did not.
He stopped in front of a small jewelry shop with a green-painted door, and looked at me.
"Okay," he said, squaring his shoulders. "I have to tell you something."
I crossed my arms. "You do."
He let out a short breath. "You already know."
"I have suspected since the boat," I said. "Tell me."
He looked young in that second. Not the young of his bad years — the clean young, the young of a man who had earned the right to be nervous about something good.
"I picked a ring," he said. "For Nora yesterday. I want you to look at it before I buy it. Mum is gone. Liam is the groom. You are the person."
The dread under my collarbone went quiet for a beat. Real love did that to it. Real love put it down for one minute at a time, and that minute was as much as I had ever asked for.
I took his hand. "Leo."
His eyes were already wet. "Do not cry. If you cry I am going to cry."
I squeezed his fingers hard. "I am not crying. Open the door."
He opened it. The bell rang. Aurora tightened her grip on the rabbit and went very quiet.
The shop was small and warm. The man behind the counter had been waiting for Leo. He reached under the case without being asked.
The ring he set on the velvet was simple. A round stone, not large, in a thin gold band with a small braid worked into the metal at the shoulders. The braid was the thing.
I pressed my hand flat on the glass. "It is the right ring."
Leo searched my face. "You think so?"
"Leo, it is the ring," I said. "The braid. She wears her hair like that on the days she is happy. You noticed."
He swallowed hard. "I noticed."
I pushed the velvet tray toward the shopkeeper. "Buy it before you talk yourself out of it."
Leo looked down at the ring one more time. His whole face opened — not just a smile, but the thing underneath a smile. Joy. Plain, uncomplicated, the kind he had not been allowed to have for so many years that I had forgotten what it looked like on him.
I watched my brother stand in that shop with his hands shaking and happiness all over his face, and I thought: I never believed I would see this. I fought for him, and I never let myself picture this moment, because picturing it would have broken me if it never came. But it came true.
He bought it.
The man wrapped the box in tissue and tied it with brown twine. Leo put it inside his jacket pocket, against his ribs, and I watched him put his hand over the pocket twice without realizing he was doing it.
We went out into the street, and Aurora looked up at Leo with full seriousness.
"Was that for Aunt Nora?"
Leo smoothed his hand over her hair. "Yes, baby."
"Good," she said, and adjusted the rabbit, and kept walking.
We sat at a table outside a restaurant on the corner of the square, with a basket of bread Aurora immediately took possession of.
Leo did not let go of his jacket pocket for the first ten minutes. He laughed at himself finally and put the box on the table and covered it with his napkin.
"Tell me how you decided," I said.
He leaned back and told me. "It was nothing big. It was a Tuesday. She came home from work and her hair was up in the braid and she was tired and she dropped her keys on the counter and she looked at me, just looked at me, the way she does — like nothing else needed to happen for the day to be okay — and I thought, if this is what the rest of my life looks like, I am not going to spend another year not asking her."
I reached across the table and touched his wrist. "That is a good reason."
He turned his hand over, held mine. "Why did you change your mind about asking here?"
He looked at me for a long beat.
"Because Liam is getting married this week," he said, "and I sat in that bachelor toast last night and I watched him and I thought — life moves. I am not going to be the brother who is always one step behind it. Not anymore."
The dread under my collarbone moved, sharp.
I did not let my face change. He earned this sentence. Do not put your weather on his sky.
"Leo," I said, even and warm. "Ask her tonight."
He nodded, slow. He looked, for the first time all day, exactly his age.
Aurora ripped the bread in half and handed me the bigger piece without looking up. The rabbit sat in her lap with its small white head propped against the edge of the table, watching the street as though it had been hired to.
The dread under my collarbone did not close.
I held my brother's hand across the table and smiled at him the way an older sister was supposed to smile, and I did not let him see anything else.