Chapter 46 After the Park

Chapter 46 After the Park
"She made you jollof before you left?"

"She made enough for the drive back and then some." Caleb is on speaker, his voice filling my car as I pull out of Aunt B's street.

"I had to tell her I'd come back."

"She'll hold you to that."

"I know." A pause. "I meant it, though."

I keep my eyes on the road and feel the warmth of the afternoon sitting in my chest still the park, the pond light, his hand finding mine like a sentence continuing. I've been replaying it in small pieces since he drove away an hour ago, not obsessively, just the way you return to something that felt right to make sure it was real.

It was real.

"Rowan texted me," I say.

"What." His voice shifts surprised, almost alarmed. "How does she have your number."

"She apparently got it from your phone at some point in the last three months."

"Mira, I'm so sorry—"

"She sent me a voice note." I'm almost laughing now. "She sang me a song about the stuffed animal she named after me. It was four minutes long. She harmonized with herself."

A beat of silence. Then Caleb “She's been working on that song for two weeks," he says. "I didn't know she was going to….I would have warned you—"

"I loved it," I say. "Don't apologize."

"You loved a four-minute song about a stuffed rabbit."

"It was very heartfelt."

"She's going to be impossible about this." But his voice is warm with it the specific pride of someone who thinks his little sister is the most extraordinary person in the building and can't quite hide it.

"She should be," I say. "The bridge was genuinely impressive."

He laughs again. We fall into the easy rhythm that's been building since October…not the careful navigation of something new, but the comfort of something already familiar, already shaped to fit. That's what these months have done. Not built the feeling… the feeling was always there, loud and inconvenient, from the very first time I tried to hate him in a calc lecture and couldn't quite close the door on it. What the months built was the ground underneath it. The place is solid enough to stand on.

"Mira," he says.

"Yeah."

"Today was good."

"Today was good," I agree.

"I'm not going to make it into more than it is," he says. "I just wanted to say it out loud once."

I think about the park, the pond, the way he said I'm in like it was the simplest thing in the world when I know how much it cost him to stay quiet this long and let me get there myself. "It was more than good," I say. "You can say that too."

A pause that feels like a smile. "It was more than good."

"Okay then."

"Okay."

I reach the highway on-ramp and merge into traffic, and we talk for the rest of my drive about Rowans song,about the orgo midterm I have in three weeks that I'm already quietly confident about and won't say so out loud because that's how you jinx things. He tells me his counselor said something this week that he's still thinking about. He doesn't say what it is, exactly, just that he's sitting with it. I don't push.

When I get to Aunt Bisi's I sit in the parked car for five extra minutes, not ready to end the call.

"You're sitting in the driveway," he says.

"How do you know."

"Because you went quiet the way you go quiet when you've arrived somewhere and don't want to acknowledge it yet."

I stare at my windshield. "You know me too well."

"I really do." Warmth in his voice. "Go inside, Mira. Eat something. Text me later."

"That's a lot of instructions."

"You like instructions when they make sense."

This is also true and I refuse to confirm it. "Goodnight, Hart."

"Night, Lawson."

I go inside. Aunt Bisi is in the kitchen with the radio on, and she looks up when I come through the door, and something in my face must say everything, because she just nods once, satisfied and turns back to the stove.

"Sit down," she says. "There's still pepper soup."

I sit down. I eat. I feel like myself, fully and without reservation, in a way that used to feel like something I had to work for.

Tonight it's just there.



Monday morning Dara appears at the library table, sets down her bag, and says: "You're glowing."

"I'm not glowing."

"Mira." She sits across from me and opens her notebook with the air of someone settling in for important business. "You are visibly, measurably glowing. I am a pre-nursing student. I notice physiological presentations."

"That's not a physiological—"

"How was Saturday?"

I look at her. "How did you know about Saturday."

"I didn't," she says serenely, "until just now."

I stare at the table. Then I start laughing, and it surprises me — the fullness of it, how easily it comes. Dara watches me with something that isn't quite a smile but is adjacent to one, the expression she has when she's pleased about something and won't overdo it.

"Good," she says simply. "You deserved a good Saturday."

Zion arrives three minutes later, takes his seat, looks between us once, and opens his textbook without comment. But when I glance up twenty minutes later, he's got the almost-smile at the corner of his mouth. Just briefly. Then it's gone and he's back in his mechanism.

I go back to mine.

The morning settles into its rhythm notes and coffee and the quiet industry of people who have things to figure out and I sit inside it and feel the particular satisfaction of a life that is, right now, holding everything I've put into it.