Chapter 138 My girlfriend and my husband

Chapter 138 My girlfriend and my husband
Alexa’s POV 

The garden was in chaos. Beautiful, loud, completely overwhelming chaos of the kind that only a child’s birthday party could produce. Streamers that Maria had insisted on despite being already behind schedule. A balloon arrangement that had taken two of the hired staff forty minutes and that Aria had declared perfect before immediately running through it.

Eleven six year olds.

I stood in the middle of it and felt the specific joy of a woman who was exactly where she was supposed to be.

“Mummy.” Aria appeared at my elbow with the urgency of someone managing a crisis. “Sofia says the pink plates are nicer than the purple ones and I said purple is better but she won’t agree.”

“Both are nice,” I said.

She looked at me with the expression this answer deserved.

“Purple,” I said.

She nodded once, satisfied, and went back to Sofia with her verdict.

Maria appeared beside me, she had been running on since seven this morning when she had taken one look at the delivery timeline and decided everyone needed to move faster.

“The cake arrives in twenty minutes,” she said. “The face painting is set up by the hedge. I’ve redirected the balloon situation.” She paused. “Mrs. Ashford, the senior Mrs. Ashford and your mother are inside.”

I looked at the house.

Through the glass doors of the sitting room I could see them, Samantha and Catherine at the small table near the window, cups of tea between them, talking with the careful courtesy of two women who had been through enough together to have arrived at something approaching warmth.

This was new.

The last time those two had been in the same room they had been pointing observations at each other across a hospital bedside with the precise aim of women who knew exactly what they were doing.

But today, it was tea and conversation. Something that looked, from the garden, almost like ease.

I watched them for a moment and felt something quietly enormous in my chest.

Leon was in the chair he had claimed near the garden’s edge.

Far enough from the main chaos to have some structural dignity. Close enough that Aria could find him with her eyes at any moment, which she did, regularly, checking that he was still there and still paying attention, and each time she found him he was clapping or calling something to her and her face did what it always did when he gave her his attention.

Lit up.

I stood near the rose bed and watched him watch her and I thought about the dark room. The simultaneous turning. His arm moving toward me rather than away.

We hadn’t fixed everything.

That was the honest version. The morning after had been careful and quiet, both of us navigating the space between what had happened in the dark and what daylight required, which was more time, more patience and more of the slow honest work of repair. We were in the early stages of that work. Some mornings were easier than others. Some silences still had edges.

But we were in the same house. In the same room.

Last night I had woken at three, his arm was still around me and I had lain there in the dark and been grateful with everything I had.

I saw her before anyone else.

She came through the side gate, the one that opened to the street, unlatched, the party entrance, and she stood there for a moment taking in the garden. She had dressed carefully. Not formally, just carefully. The kind of dressing that said I thought about this, I know what this is, I am not here to disrupt anything.

Nora.

My heart did something immediate and complicated.

She found my eyes across the garden.

I crossed to her.

“You came,” I said quietly.

“I nearly didn’t,” she said honestly. “I drove past twice.”

“I’m glad you didn’t keep driving.”

She looked at the party, the balloons, the children, the streamers, Maria redirecting a small person away from the cake table with the patience of a saint.

“She’s beautiful,” she said. Looking at Aria.

“She is,” I said.

Leon saw her.

I felt it before I looked at his direction, the change in the quality of his stillness across the garden, the shift from relaxed to something more contained. I looked at him and found him looking at Nora with the cold assessment of a man running a rapid calculation.

I crossed to him.

Crouched beside his chair.

“She came to say sorry,” I said quietly. “That’s all. She’s not here to cause anything.”

He looked at me.

I held his eyes.

He looked back at Nora.

Something moved through his jaw. Then he looked at Aria, who had not noticed yet, who was currently explaining something to Sofia with considerable animation near the face painting station.

He nodded once.

It cost him something that he gave it anyway, and I loved him for it with the specific love of someone who understood exactly what it had cost.

Nora found Leon before she left.

I watched from across the garden, not close enough to hear, close enough to see. She stood in front of him with straight posture and said whatever she had decided to say. He listened with his arms crossed and his face giving nothing away.

Then she handed him a gift, a small one, wrapped simply and he took it. She turned to go.

But he said something that made her stopped. She looked back, and nodded once.

Then she walked to where Aria was. Aria looked up at her. The recognition moved across her face, the slight uncertain processing of a child placing someone from a context that was complicated. Then Nora crouched down and said something, and gave her a small separate gift that she must have been holding, Aria took it with the automatic politeness that Maria had instilled.

Then Nora stood.

Found my eyes one last time across the garden.

She smiled. A real full one that took her whole face.

I pressed my lips together. And she went through the gate.

I stood in the garden with my daughter, my husband and my daughter’s friends with the streamers and the balloons. I let the complicated real feeling of that departure move through me and settle.

It was Gratitude. For her.

For what she had given me by letting go.

The cake was a success.

Aria blew out the candles on the first attempt and looked so pleased with herself that the assembled six year olds burst into spontaneous applause. Maria cut and distributed like someone who had been mentally preparing for this specific moment since morning. Leon appeared at my side while it was happening and his hand found mine and held it.

I looked at him. He was looking at Aria.

But his hand was holding mine.

By the time the last small guest went home the garden looked like something had happened in it, which was accurate. Maria had already begun the restoration process with the focused authority of someone who would not be able to sleep until the garden reflected its pre-party state.

Inside, Samantha and Catherine had migrated to the dining room.

Leon went up to give Aria her bath and I could hear them from downstairs, his voice, her voice, the specific domestic music of a father and daughter at the end of a birthday.

I sat at the dining table.

Looked around at it.

Catherine on my left, Samantha across, the chair beside me where Leon would sit when he came back down, the chair where Aria would be installed once she had been extracted from the bath.

Maria came in with the first dishes and set them with the precision she always brought and then sat herself…at my invitation, as always, in the chair at the end that had been hers for years because she was family and the table knew it.

Leon came down with Aria in her pyjamas and birthday crown still on, she had refused to remove it and Leon had apparently decided this was not a hill, and settled her into her chair.

He sat beside me.

His arm along the back of my chair.

The way things were when they were finding their way back.

Catherine and Samantha were talking.

Actually talking. Not the careful courtesy of before, something warmer. Samantha had said something that made Catherine laugh, which was not easy to produce, and they were now in the middle of something that had the energy of two people discovering they had more common ground than expected.

I looked at them.

Then at Maria, who was helping Aria navigate the soup spoon with the patient guidance of someone who had been doing this for years.

Then at Leon beside me.

Then at Aria in her birthday crown.

And I thought…

No choice.

That was the truth of it. Not that the choice had been made correctly or that I had navigated any of it with the grace it deserved. I had made mistakes that had cost real people real things, and the repair of that was still ongoing, and was going to be ongoing for a long time.

But there was no choice between Nora and my family.

There had never been a choice. Both my ex girlfriend and my husband, they mean a lot to me.

Nora was in Harlow building something that was entirely hers. She was okay. She was entirely fine.

And I…I am here.

At this table.

With my family.

With my imperfect, complicated, real and present life that had been worth coming back to, worth repairing and worth every difficult honest conversation still ahead. Aria looked up from her soup and found my face.

“Best birthday,” she said. With the absolute authority of someone delivering a verdict.

I looked at my daughter.

“Best birthday,” I agreed.

Leon’s arm tightened slightly on the back of my chair.

And the table was loud, warm and full.