POV: Jasmine
Nora called the next morning with a voice I barely recognised — bright, unguarded, stripped of every professional layer she usually carried. She invited all four of us to dinner. She did not say why. She did not need to.
The dinner was at Leo and Nora's apartment. Candles on the table — not too many, exactly the way I had told him. Music from somewhere in the kitchen, something Nora had chosen. Leo had cooked, and the food was better than I expected, which meant he had been practising longer than three weeks.
We ate. Aurora was home with the nanny, already asleep by the time we arrived. The conversation moved easily — Finn teasing Leo about the sauce, Asher asking Nora about a case, Leo watching Nora with the quiet, barely contained joy of a man holding a secret that was about to stop being one.
After the main course, Leo stood. His hands were shaking. Nora looked up at him.
He did not make a speech. He did not perform it. He reached into his pocket, opened the box, and held it in front of her.
"I should have done this in Italy," he said, and his voice was unsteady in the way only honest voices were unsteady. "I should have done it a year ago. But I am doing it now because someone I loved very much told me to stop waiting."
He swallowed. His eyes were wet and he did not wipe them.
"You are the reason I got better, Nora," he said. "Not the rehab. Not the programme. You. You walked into a room I had destroyed and you did not leave. You sat on the floor with me when I could not get off it. You held my hand through the worst year of my life and you did not let go, and I have spent every day since trying to be the man you saw in me before I could see him in myself."
His voice cracked. He steadied it.
"I want to spend the rest of my life earning that. I want Tuesdays with you. I want the ordinary ones. Will you marry me?"
Nora's hand was over her mouth. Her eyes were full. She looked at the ring, then at Leo, then at me — and the look she gave me said she already knew who had helped him, already understood the invisible threads connecting this moment to every conversation we had ever had about what love was supposed to look like.
"Yes," she said, and her voice broke on the word. "Yes."
Leo slid the ring onto her finger. She pulled him down and kissed him, and I watched my brother hold the woman he loved and felt something crack open in my chest that was entirely joy and entirely grief at the same time — because Liam should have been at this table, and he was not, and the empty chair where he should have sat was the loudest thing in the room.
Nora turned to me with tears still on her face.
"I knew," I said, and let myself smile. "I helped him pick the ring."
She went quiet. Then she laughed — a real laugh, wet and messy and full of everything she had been holding. "Of course you did," she said. "Of course you did."
We talked for a long time after that. About the proposal, about Italy, about how Leo had almost backed out twice and called me both times. Finn found a bottle of wine and poured two glasses — one for Nora, one for me — while he and Asher and Leo stood by the kitchen counter talking about something that made all three of them laugh at once.
I watched Finn pour. His hands were steady. His sleeves were rolled to his forearms. And I noticed — the way I had been noticing for weeks, the way I could no longer pretend I was not noticing — the careful attention he gave to everything. The glass placed in front of me without being asked. The angle of his body, always slightly turned toward wherever I was in the room.
We went home later that night. Asher left first — he kissed my cheek, then looked at Finn with something deliberate in his expression. Not a warning. Not permission. Something between the two that belonged only to them. Then he turned and walked to the elevator without looking back.
Finn and I sat in the living room. The apartment was dark except for the kitchen light.
He found another bottle of wine. I should have said no. It was late — past midnight, the kind of hour where everything becomes more honest than it should be. But I held out my glass and he filled it and we sat on opposite ends of the couch and drank.
"How are you?" he asked, and the question carried the specific weight of a man who expected the truth and would not accept anything less.
"Some days I forget for a few minutes," I said. "That he's gone. I'll reach for my phone to text him something, or I'll hear Aurora say a word that sounds like him, and for a second he's still here. Then I remember."
He was quiet. "Does that get easier?"
"No," I said. "It gets different. The forgetting lasts longer. The remembering hurts the same."
The wine was doing its work — softening the edges, loosening the careful structure I had built around every feeling I carried.
"I think about the phone call," Finn said, and his voice dropped into the register where the guilt lived. "The one I was on when they left. I think about what would have happened if I had hung up. If I had been in the car."
I set my glass down. "Don't."
He looked at the floor. "I can't help it. I was supposed to be there."
"You were supposed to be exactly where you were," I said, and the words came out before I could measure them. "Because if you had been in that car, Aurora would have lost everyone. And I would have lost you."
Finn looked at me.
"You are important to me," I said. "You need to know that. Not because of Liam, not because of Aurora. You. You have been here every single night, and you have held this family together, and you matter to me more than I have been willing to say."
His glass stopped halfway to his mouth. He set it down. "Do you mean that?"
"Every word," I told him.
He stood. The space between us changed — not smaller, not yet, but charged. He crossed the distance slowly. Stood in front of me. Then he took my face in both hands.
His palms were warm. His thumbs rested just below my cheekbones. He looked at me the way he had been looking at me for weeks — but now there was nothing between us. No deflection. No careful distance.
He did not kiss me.
"I'm memorising this," he said, and his voice was barely above a whisper.
My pulse was in my throat. "Why?"
"In case you change your mind," he said, and the honesty of it hit me somewhere deep — the vulnerability of a man who had loved me long enough to be afraid of it, who was standing in my living room holding my face and preparing himself for the possibility that this moment was all he was going to get.
"I won't," I said.
His thumbs moved once, a slow brush across my skin, and then he stepped back. He picked up his wine. He looked at me over the rim.
"Good," he said quietly.
That was all he said.