POV: Jasmine
"Can you stop it?" I asked, because Priya's call had sat inside me through the morning.
She walked me through it in her clean, undecorated way — she had been talking to Jackson directly, they had agreed to keep it out of court for now, and she needed me to stay quiet and let her work.
Then a silence on the line. The kind that meant Priya had something else — something she had held back until the professional part was finished.
"One more thing," she said. "At the end of our last conversation, after everything was settled, Jackson asked how you were doing. How you and Aurora were."
She said it plainly. Just reported it, the way she reported everything — clean, factual, left for me to decide what it meant.
I did not want to decide what it meant. Because the alternative to Jackson playing an angle was Jackson having a feeling, and I did not have room inside me for that possibility alongside everything else he was doing.
I said nothing. Priya understood the silence correctly, and ended the call.
Finn was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with his coffee.
"Priya thinks she can keep it out of court," I said, setting my phone down. "Jackson is holding. And he asked about me. After the legal talk. How I was. How Aurora was."
Something twisted in my chest. A man threatening my daughter's future in one breath and asking about her well-being in the next.
Finn set his mug down. "What do you think it means?"
"I think the caring is part of the strategy," I said. "And I hate that I'm not sure."
He looked at me for a long moment. "You don't have to be sure. Let Priya handle it."
I gripped the counter. "I need to be sure. He's coming for my daughter."
"He's coming for the company," Finn said, his voice steady and precise. "Aurora is the path, not the destination. A man who actually wanted to see his grandchild would have called you. He wouldn't have gone through lawyers."
I crossed my arms. "And the question about how I'm doing?"
He picked up his mug and turned it between his hands. "Jackson lost all three of his sons. I'm not saying he's changed. I'm saying losing Liam might have cracked something open."
I studied him. "Since when do you give Jackson the benefit of the doubt?"
"I'm not giving him anything," he said. "I'm telling you a man with a crack in him is harder to predict than one who's solid all the way through. That's Priya's problem, not yours."
The nanny arrived and took Aurora to daycare. Aurora's shoes, Aurora's backpack, the front door opening and closing. The apartment went still.
Finn and I drove to Cadence together. Inside the building we separated — he went to his floor, I went to mine.
Everything in that building carried Liam. His name on the conference room whiteboard no one had erased. The corridor where he used to wait for me after late meetings, leaning against the wall with his coat on. I passed these things every day, and they did not hurt the way I expected. They were warm — evidence that he had been real, that he had built something here. Some days it was the only good feeling I had.
The day moved the way days moved now — meetings, emails, decisions that required the steady version of me. I made it through. I always made it through. That was the problem with being good at holding yourself together — people stopped checking whether you needed to fall apart.
When I came home that evening, Finn was already there. Jacket still on, scrolling through his phone. He stood when I walked in — as though coming back to my apartment after work was the natural end to his day.
I stopped in the doorway. "Why are you here, Finn?"
He looked at me without deflecting. "I'm here because I want to be near you."
The sentence landed in the centre of my chest and stayed there. I had been watching him do it for weeks — choosing this apartment over his own, choosing Aurora's bedtime over an empty house. Naming it made my chest tight, because naming it meant I had to look at it.
"That scares me," I said, and my voice came out quieter than I intended. "And it's not fair to you. Sitting on my couch every night, reading Aurora's books, waiting for something I might never be able to give."
He held my gaze. "I'm not waiting for anything. I'm here because this is where I want to be. That's the whole reason."
Not asking for permission. Not apologizing for the truth of it.
I dropped my bag by the door and walked past him into the kitchen.
The nanny brought Aurora home, ran through the evening routine, and left. The apartment emptied until it was just the three of us.
We put Aurora to bed together. She was in her pyjamas, three books fanned out on the blanket. She pointed to the one on the left — the bear who could not sleep. Same one all week.
Finn sat on the floor beside the bed. I sat on the edge of the mattress near Aurora's feet. She watched his face as he read, not the pages. She liked the way he did the voices — warm, unhurried, each character getting its own version of his attention.
He turned the last page. The bear fell asleep. Finn closed the book.
Aurora did not close her eyes. She lay there looking at the ceiling, her fingers picking at the edge of her blanket.
Finn kept his voice easy, light. "Do you want to go to the park tomorrow?"
Aurora's hands went still on the blanket. "Is Daddy coming?"
Finn's eyes moved to me. Not asking me to fix it. Asking what I wanted him to do.
I leaned forward and rested my hand on Aurora's ankle through the blanket. "Not tomorrow, baby."
Aurora pulled her ankle away. Not roughly — just the small, definite movement of a child deciding something for herself.
"Then I don't want to go," she said, and turned onto her side and pulled the blanket to her chin.
She looked at the wall.
Neither of us moved. She was not asleep. She wanted to be left alone.
Finn turned off the lamp. He stood slowly. I followed.
We stepped into the hallway. He pulled the door almost closed — a thin line of light across the floor, the way Aurora liked it.
I looked at the door.
"I don't know what to tell her," I said. Not asking for a solution. Just saying the truest thing I had to the only person close enough to hear it.
Finn stood beside me in the same helplessness. "I know," he said quietly.
We went to the kitchen. I filled a glass of water and stood at the counter. Finn leaned against the opposite wall.
Aurora was in her room, turned toward the wall, asking for a father who would never come to the park again.
"I need to explain it to her," I said, gripping the glass. "But I do not know how."