Page 29 of Claimed By my Father's Enemies
"Okay," I say eventually, because my thoughts and the silence are starting to weigh on me. "I have to ask. How do you knowabout grounding? That's not very aligned with the legal eagle lawyer image."
He laughs. The real one, not the flirtatious one. "Is that how you see me?"
"I mean…" I look at him sideways. "A little."
"That's fair." He doesn't seem bothered by it. "I'm a lot of things."
"Clearly."
He's looking at the pond now. The easy expression is still there but something underneath it has shifted.
"There was a time I would try anything." His voice sounds different.
I wait.
It's costing him to continue. I can see that. The way his jaw moves once before he speaks, the way his eyes stay on the water.
"Thymus cancer." He says it plainly. "Caught early." A pause. "Found it in a routine scan. One of those things…." He turns a small stone in his free hand, sets it down beside him. "Did chemo. And everything else that might help. Came out the other side." He looks at me. "I'm three months away from the five-year mark."
The garden is suddenly very quiet.
I look at him. I don’t know how to react to this information.
He's watching my face, with a careful manner. Like he's waiting for my reaction to this reveal to let him know whether he made a mistake.
"Okay," he says, with a dry half-smile. "Go ahead. Let's get all the clichés out of the way."
I look at him in confusion. "What?"
"You know." A glance at the sky, reciting: "Everything happens for a reason. God only gives you what you can handle. You look good, you don't even seem sick."
I think about it for a second.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger?" I offer.
A beat. Maybe this is the wrong thing to say.
He laughs.
Then I do too, which is ridiculous and exactly right. Here in the Japanese Garden at nearly five in the morning with damp grass under our feet and the long night behind us.
It dies down slowly.
What's left is the two of us. His hand still holding mine. Eyes shinning with tears. Laugh tears. Definitely laugh. The morning coming in grey and soft through the trees, the koi pond moving, the cedar smell and the cold.
Sometimes you don't need to do anything. You don't need to fix anything or help carry the load. Sometimes you just need to be present.
I reach over with my other hand and close both of mine around his. I hold on.
He looks down at our hands.
Then up at me.
The light is changing. The grey warming by degrees toward something that will eventually be gold. His face in it, close and unguarded, is the most honest version I've seen of him.
He reaches up.
His hand finds my face, his fingers at my jaw, and the touch is slow and certain and I'm not moving away from it. He guides me forward and his mouth finds mine and the kiss is quiet and deep and it has the feeling of something that was always going to happen. The specific feeling of an inevitability finally arriving.
