Chapter 62: December

December arrived the way December always arrived in New York.

Without apology.

One morning you woke up and the city had made a decision about itself and the decision was cold and permanent and the particular quality of the light had changed overnight into something lower and more honest that stripped the last warmth from the streets and left everything clear and precise and slightly more itself than it had been in November.

I stood at the north facing windows on the first morning of December and felt it through the glass.

Noah felt it differently.

He appeared at breakfast in his winter coat already buttoned to the top with Gerald under his arm and the announcement that December meant Christmas which meant a tree which meant the tree needed to happen today.

Damien looked at me over his study coffee.

I looked at him.

“Today,” Damien said carefully. “Is a Monday.”

“Yes,” Noah said. “Trees do not care about Mondays.”

“Gerald’s position on trees,” Damien said.

Noah looked at Gerald with the focused attention of someone conducting a rapid consultation.

“He is in favor,” Noah said.

“Of course he is,” Damien said.

We got a tree on Monday.

Not because Noah’s logic was sound but because Damien Cole who restructured boards and faced Senators and navigated regulatory investigations across four jurisdictions was apparently entirely unable to maintain a position against a four year old with a rabbit and a seasonal argument.

The tree was large.

Considerably larger than the apartment strictly required.

Noah had selected it with the focused authority of someone for whom size was a primary consideration and sufficiency was not a concept that applied to Christmas trees.

It stood in the corner of the living room and dominated the space with the cheerful unapologetic presence of something that knew exactly what it was.

Eleanor came on Wednesday to help decorate it.

She arrived with a box of ornaments that she had been keeping in Brooklyn for twenty two years waiting for the right tree and she unpacked them at the kitchen table with the careful reverence of someone handling things that had history attached to them.

Noah examined each ornament with the serious thoroughness of a curator assessing acquisitions.

Some were approved immediately.

Some required deliberation.

One small silver bird was subjected to a consultation with Gerald before being cleared for placement.

Eleanor watched her grandson conduct the assessment with the expression she wore when she was moved and did not intend to show it.

She was showing it completely.

Marcus arrived Thursday evening.

He had not been invited specifically. He called at four and said he was passing by which was not geographically accurate since his apartment was in a different direction entirely and everyone including Marcus understood that passing by meant I want to come and I am not yet entirely certain how to simply say that so I am offering a logistical fiction instead.

“Come for dinner,” Damien said.

He came.

He brought wine and a small wooden dinosaur he had found somewhere that he presented to Noah with the careful seriousness of someone who understood the weight of the gift.

Noah examined it.

He looked at Marcus.

“It is a Triceratops,” Noah said.

“Yes,” Marcus said.

“It is accurate,” Noah said. With the gravity of an expert confirming an identification.

Something moved across Marcus’s face.

“Thank you,” he said.

Noah placed the Triceratops in the honored position beside the Brachiosaurus without further ceremony and Marcus sat at the dinner table with the slightly dazed expression of someone who had just been accepted into something they had not known they were applying for.

Victoria came on Saturday.

Not to the apartment. To Rosa’s place in the West Village where I had been spending mornings preparing the paintings for transport to Paris in January. Careful documentation. Condition reports. The particular meticulous work of moving something fragile and irreplaceable from one place to another without losing anything essential in the process.

She knocked at eleven.

She was showing now. Not dramatically. The early visible stage of a pregnancy that had moved past being private and was beginning to announce itself in the particular way of things that could no longer be contained.

She looked at the paintings.

She had not seen them before.

She stood in front of them for a long time without speaking and I let her because the paintings deserved that quality of attention and Victoria was giving it completely.

“She never stopped,” Victoria said quietly.

“No,” I said.

“Even when everything said to stop,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

Victoria looked at the eleventh painting.

Just the light.

“I want to be like that,” she said. Not to me. More to the room. The particular statement of someone arriving at something privately and finding the words for it in the presence of a witness.

I did not respond because it did not require a response.

She stayed for an hour.

Before she left she stood in the doorway and looked back at the paintings one more time.

“Marcus told me about January,” she said. “Paris.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Will there be room,” she said carefully.

I looked at her.

“For everyone who wants to come,” I said. “Yes.”

She nodded.

She left.

I stood in Rosa Santos’s apartment alone for a moment after she went and thought about Victoria choosing honesty over management for perhaps the first time in the year I had known her and what that meant for the person she was becoming and the child she was carrying.

My phone buzzed.

Damien.

Noah has declared that Gerald also needs a Christmas ornament. I need backup.

I smiled.

I locked the apartment and went home.

The December days accumulated.

Each one bringing its specific ordinary contents. Noah’s school Christmas performance which he approached with the seriousness of a professional engagement and in which he played a narrator with three lines that he delivered with the measured authority of someone who considered the material important and intended to honor it.

Damien sat in the front row with his phone recording and his expression the unmanaged one.

Eleanor beside him with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes very bright.

Marcus on the other side of Eleanor looking at the stage with the expression of someone encountering something they had not known was available to them and finding it was.

The regulatory investigation moved through its process.

Not loudly. The machinery of large investigations operated in the particular register of things that were thorough rather than dramatic and the news arrived in careful official language that said a great deal while sounding like very little.

Halliwell’s cooperation was confirmed.

The Singapore connection was formally established.

The federal judge whose name had appeared in Daniel’s documents stepped down on a Tuesday with a statement that was two paragraphs of careful language and a great deal of reading between the lines.

Catherine called each time something significant moved.

She reported efficiently and without drama and each call ended with the particular satisfaction of someone watching something they had spent eight years building toward arriving exactly where it was supposed to.

On December fifteenth I woke early.

I lay in the dark and let the date sit in my mind.

December fifteenth.

The date that had been the horizon of this story for months. The auction. Gregory’s original plan. The date everything was supposed to end.

Instead it was a Tuesday in December with frost on the park below and Noah asking at breakfast whether Christmas trees had feelings and Damien explaining patiently that they did not and Noah looking at Gerald for a second opinion.

The auction happened without us.

Victoria and Marcus attended.

She wore something simple and dark and stood beside him with the particular quality of someone who had decided what they were and was done performing anything else.

Marcus sent a photograph afterward.

The two of them at the entrance.

Her hand in his.

Both of them looking at the camera with the expression of people who had come through something and were still standing.

I showed it to Damien.

He looked at it for a moment.

“They are going to be alright,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at me.

“We are going to be alright,” he said.

“We are already alright,” I said.

He held my gaze.

“Better than alright,” he said quietly.

I looked at him in the December morning light coming through the kitchen window.

At this man who had come to a rainy street and stayed because he wanted to and had been choosing to stay every day since in the small specific ways that choosing happened.

Pancakes. North facing windows. A hand over mine in the dark.

Every day.

Chosen.

“Yes,” I said. “Better than alright.”

He reached across the table and covered my hand with his.

Warm and certain.

There.

Noah looked at our hands.

“Gerald wants to know if we can get more gnocchi tonight,” he said.

“Gerald is a rabbit,” Damien said.

“A hungry rabbit,” Noah said.

And December went on around us warm and ordinary and entirely ours.

Say “Next” for Chapter 63 where the week before Christmas brings something completely unexpected and a conversation between Mia and Damien on Christmas Eve becomes the most romantic and honest moment this story has produced so far! 🖊️