Chapter 166 Growing

Chapter 166 Growing
The year turned.

Not with a rush. Years rarely did…  they arrived at the end of December with the same ordinary Tuesday quality that most significant transitions had if you were paying attention. One day the calendar said one thing. 

The next it said another. Everything in between had been the actual year.

This one had been full.

Callum Corporation closed its strongest year on record.

Not because of a single dramatic development, because of compounding. The correct decisions made in the correct sequence and allowed to develop at the rate that correct decisions developed when nobody was disrupting them. The Singapore project. Nadia’s proposal moving through its first implementation phase. The Foundation’s expanded programmes running at full capacity with Christine managing everything with the brisk warmth of someone who had found exactly the right work.

Morrow Enterprises had its own strong year.

Zael and I had developed a professional rhythm that was entirely ours… weekly alignment meetings that often became dinner because by the time we had covered everything the office was empty and it made more sense to continue at home. The line between professional and personal had not dissolved, it had become understood. We both knew where one ended and the other began. We had simply stopped pretending they didn’t influence each other.

Lisa was walking everywhere.

Not the tentative walk of first steps… the confident walk of someone who had been doing it for months and had decided that running was an interesting development to explore. She had opinions about everything. Strong ones. Delivered through the limited vocabulary of a fourteen-month-old which was expanding daily in ways that surprised us both.

She said Dada at eight months.

She said something that was clearly intended as Mama at nine months but sounded more like Maa which I accepted entirely.

She said Odette at eleven months… not the full word, but something close enough that Odette had received it with the expression of a woman who had been expecting it and was satisfied by the timing.

She had not yet said anything resembling Damien which Damien had decided was a developmental delay and had looked up with the focused concern of someone who had read the wrong section of the parenting literature.

Lena and Damien were in their second year of marriage.

The year had settled around them in the way that good years settled… not without difficulty, but with the particular texture of two people who had chosen correctly and were finding out daily what that meant in practice.

Lena had gone back to university in January.

Part time. Two evenings a week. A degree she had interrupted eight years ago when circumstances had required it and which she had been carrying as an intention ever since.

Damien had cleared his schedule on her first evening back.

Not announced. Just done it. She had come home from the first lecture to find him at the kitchen table with dinner already made and a notebook open at the page where she had told him… once, months ago: that she wanted to take a module.

He had read about the module.

Had questions.

She had told me this with the expression of a woman who was still occasionally surprised by the ways someone could love you without performing the love.

Her pregnancy was progressing.

Six months. The visible stage that made strangers in lifts smile and which Lena navigated with the composure of someone who had decided to be entirely herself through the process regardless of what the process required of her physically.

Damien had produced a spreadsheet in week four.

Odette had been right.

Margaux came to family dinners.

The first one she had been uncertain. She had called me the afternoon before and asked whether she was expected or invited and I had said those were the same thing, she had come and had sat at the table with the composure of someone who was present without assuming they deserved to be.

By the fourth dinner she had stopped asking.

By the eighth she had brought something… a dish she had made, carried from her apartment in the careful way she carried things that mattered. Zael had eaten two portions and said nothing really but had eaten two portions which was sufficient.

She came now the way family came… without announcement, with food, with the ease of someone who had found somewhere they were received properly and had allowed themselves to receive it.

I watched her with Lisa sometimes.

The way she held her. The way she talked to her… directly, clearly, the way you talked to someone you took seriously regardless of how recently they had learned to walk. Lisa responded to Margaux with the same concentrated assessment she brought to everyone.

They had developed something.

I couldn’t fully name it.

But it was there.

A Tuesday afternoon in February.

Lisa was napping. Zael at Morrow Enterprises. Priya had sent the afternoon review documents and I was working through them at the kitchen table with tea that was still warm, I had been remembering the coffee more often lately.

My phone rang.

Unknown number.

International prefix.

I almost let it go to voicemail.

I didn’t.

“Hello?” I said.

A pause.

“Seraphine.” The voice was familiar in the way that voices were when you had heard them in circumstances and never expected to hear them again. Warm. Slightly different from before… more settled, the way voices sounded when the person behind them had stopped fixing something and had started simply being.

“Vivienne,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered. “I’m sorry for calling without warning.” A beat. “I’ve been trying to find the right moment for a while.” Another beat. “I’m somewhere warm. Portugal, actually.” A small sound that was almost a laugh. “Different part from where Gerald was. I checked.” She paused. “I’ve been here eight months. Building something.” Another pause. “It’s going well.”

“I’m glad.”

“I am too,” she said. “Genuinely.” Silence for a moment. “I have a question. One question. I’ve been carrying it for a while and I think you’re the only person I can ask it honestly.”

“Ask it.”

“I will,” she said. “I just…” She stopped. “It’s about Gerald,” she said. “And I’m not sure how you’ll feel about me asking.” A pause. “But I need to know the answer and I think you might be the only person who actually knows it.”

A beat of silence.

“Alright then, go on and ask.”