Chapter 135 Can’t keep avoiding her

Chapter 135 Can’t keep avoiding her
Leon’s POV 

The office was exactly as I needed it to be.

Structured. Purposeful. Full of things that required specific attention and produced measurable outcomes. I walked in at eleven, nodded at James who fell into step beside me with the morning’s updates delivered in the efficient shorthand we had developed over years, and went straight to my desk.

I sat down. Opened the Henderson contract.

Read the same paragraph four times.

The words were there. The meaning was also there and clear. My brain understood individually that each sentence contained information relevant to the meeting and collectively that the information mattered. But the processing wasn’t connecting. The words arrived and scattered before they could accumulate into anything useful.

I turned to the Brennan file instead.

Same result.

I pulled up the emails James had flagged as requiring my direct attention. Eleven of them. I opened the first one and read it and then realized I had read it without retaining a single word. I read it again with the focused deliberateness of someone trying to read in a language they were slightly rusty in.

Her face on the staircase last night.

Her hand reaching for my arm this morning.

The sound of her crying after.

I closed the email and pressed my fingers against my eyes for a moment.

Then I called James in.

He appeared in the doorway with the immediate availability of someone who had been nearby on purpose.

“The noon meeting,” I said.

“Richards and the timeline,” he confirmed.

“You handle it.”

A beat. “Sir?”

“You know the position. You’ve been in every conversation about it. Handle it.” I looked at him. “I’ll review whatever comes out of it this evening.”

James looked at me for one second with the expression he used when he was registering something he was not going to comment on.

“Of course,” he said. “Anything else?”

“Hold everything non-urgent until tomorrow.”

He nodded and went.

I sat at my desk for another twenty minutes doing nothing productive. Then I picked up my jacket and left.

My mother’s house was twenty minutes from the office.

She was in the garden when I arrived late autumn and she was still finding reasons to be in the garden, which was entirely characteristic. She looked up when she heard the gate and took in my face with the instant accuracy she had been applying to my face since I was born.

She said nothing.

Came inside.

Put the kettle on.

I sat at the kitchen table and she made tea and set it in front of me, sat across and waited with the patience of someone who had been doing this for thirty-seven years and had calibrated exactly how long to wait.

“Rough day,” I said.

“I can see that.”

“I miss her.” The words came out before I had decided to say them. I looked at the tea. “I don’t mean… I’m not saying I want her back. I’m saying I miss what was there. Before all of it.” I paused. “I miss the version of things that existed before.”

My mother was quiet.

“Which is pointless,” I said. “Missing a version of something that may not have been real.”

“Leon…”

“The marriage was built on her feelings for someone else,” I said flatly. “That’s the conclusion I keep arriving at. Everything we had …the twelve years, Aria, all of it….ran alongside something she never resolved. Something she was always carrying.” I looked at my hands. “Which means I was always second.”

My mother looked at me with the expression she kept for things she disagreed with but was choosing not to argue about directly.

She got up and heated the food she had apparently made earlier…. not asking whether I was hungry, correctly determining that the question was irrelevant…and set it on the table.

I ate.

It helped in the physical way food helped when you had been running on something less substantial since morning.

After, she cleared the plates and I sat back in the chair and felt the specific heaviness of a man who had managed himself past his own capacity for the day.

“I might stay,” I said. “Just tonight.”

She looked at me.

“I need somewhere quiet,” I said. “One night.”

She nodded and I pushed back from the table and took my jacket from the chair and headed for the stairs.

“Leon.”

Her voice. The particular tone of it….not the gentle one, not the firm one. The one that was both at the same time and that I had never successfully walked away from.

I stopped.

“Don’t tell me you’re spending the night here,” she said. “Again.”

I turned around. “I just want a quiet night.”

She looked at me steadily from the kitchen table with her hands around her cup and her reading glasses pushed up on her head and the expression she wore when she had information and was deciding how to deploy it.

“Are you avoiding Alexa?” she said.

The kitchen was very still.

I looked at her.

She looked back with the composure of someone who had asked a question they already knew the answer to and were waiting for confirmation rather than information.

“How did you…” I stopped.

She said nothing.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at my mother and thought about her network — the calls, the contacts, the eleven years of Maria in our house, the conversation at Catherine Howthorn’s kitchen table in the early morning weeks ago. My mother had been present for the edges of this and my mother was not someone who lost threads.

Hoped, briefly and without real conviction, that she didn’t know the full shape of it. Why Alexa had left. The specifics of what had happened in the weeks between the day I came home from the office and found the house missing her and tonight.

Alexa’s reputation.

The thought arrived and I looked at it with some surprise because it was the last thing I had expected to be protecting.

She had chosen someone else. She had told me with full clarity. She had walked out of a front door.

And my first instinct standing in my mother’s kitchen was to ensure my mother didn’t have information that would change how she thought of her.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

Whether it was love still, stubborn and inconvenient, or just the habit of twelve years of being the person who protected her, or both, or something else entirely that I didn’t have a name for yet.

What I did know was that I was not having this conversation tonight.

“No,” I said. “I’m not avoiding anyone.”

My mother looked at me.

“I have work early,” I said. “It made more sense to…”

“Leon.”

“Goodnight,” I said.

She made the sound. The one that communicated comprehensive skepticism delivered with complete composure.

I turned to go.

“Two weeks,” I said. I stopped at the doorway without turning around. “Aria’s birthday is in two weeks. I want to do something proper for her.” A pause. “She’s had enough disruption. She deserves a proper birthday.”

My mother was quiet for a moment.

“She does,” she said.

I nodded once.

And left.

The drive home took eleven minutes.

The same eleven minutes it always took. The same route, the same junctions, the same third-stair house at the end of it with its lights and its occupied rooms and its specific complicated weight.

I sat in the driveway, looking at the house.

She was in there somewhere. In the house I had come back to after forty-eight hours in a forest and a hospital corridor and weeks of managing something that had apparently not been manageable after all.

The light in the upstairs window.

I sat there for a long time.

Then I went in.

Because it was my house.

And Aria was in it.

And whatever else was true, whatever the rest of this looked like and however long the repair of it took if repair was even possible, that was not something that changed.