Page 86 of Take Two

I laugh despite myself, low and helpless. “Unbelievable.”

“So.” His voice softens just slightly, the laughter stepping back to make room for something more sincere. “You finally made a decision.”

“I did,” I confirm.

“Se-attle,” he draws out, playfully, making two syllables of it.

“Seattle,” I confirm, and saying it out loud on this particular stretch of road, heading toward the house I grew up in, feels unexpectedly significant. “I’ve already started talking to realtors. I need to sit down with Jasper and work out my schedule going forward. But it’s happening. The penthouse will sell fast.”

Julian’s horn sounds again through the speakers, brief and irritable, then he refocuses. “He’ll fight you on changing things up so abruptly. He’ll give you the whole career trajectory speech because that’s literally what you pay him for. Stand your ground.”

“This is my life,” I say simply, lifting a shoulder even though he can’t see me. “I’ll still travel. I’ll still make movies. I’ll still disappear for months at a stretch when a role demands it. None of that is changing.”

I pause for a moment as I signal and ease off the highway. “I’m just done letting work be the one who decides where home is.”

Julian doesn’t interrupt. He just hums, low and steady, the sound of someone who understands and approves.

“I’m making Seattle my base,” I say, and I smile through every word of it. “My home. My life is there.”

A quiet chuckle comes through the speakers. “I’m proud of you, Cy,” Julian says, and the simplicity of it lands somewhere deep. “Dad is going to absolutely love this.”

Yeah, he is, I think, as I turn onto the road that leads back to where everything began.

The neighborhood comes into view gradually, and with it, the particular weight of memories I’d spent years convincing myself I’d processed and set down.

Palm trees sway gently above quiet, sun-bleached streets lined with immaculate California homes, their stucco walls throw back the late afternoon light in shades of warm amber and dusty gold. Children ride bicycles along the wide sidewalks, weaving in lazy arcs past each other while sprinklers tick and hiss across neatly cut lawns, filling the still warm air with the smell of wet grass and earth, a smell so specific to Sunday afternoons in this neighborhood that it immediately reaches down into some part of me I’d thought I’d locked up. At the far end of the street, the white steeple of the church where Momma spent more Sundays than I could ever count rises above the surrounding rooftops, unhurried, unchanged, exactly as it has always been.

Somehow, everything looks exactly the same.

Julian’s truck turns onto the street ahead of me, and I follow him without thinking, the same way I always did.

The house appears a few seconds later. Every bit as pristine as the day I left it, as though the years between then and now simply didn’t happen to the building, even if they happened everywhere else. The beige stucco walls glow beneath the California sun, the dark brown trim and terracotta roof unchanged. The lawn is manicured to within an inch of its life, the edges sharp and deliberate in the way that has always told me something about the woman who lives here. The red roses beside the front walkway have been shaped into the same careful, symmetrical clusters I remember from childhood, and the small wooden cross beside the front door remains in its place, weathered now by years of sun and salt air, but never removed, never moved.

It feels strange that so much time can pass while a place simply refuses to change with it.

Julian pulls into the driveway and I park directly behind him, switching off the engine. For a moment, neither of us moves. We just sit there in our separate vehicles, looking at the house that raised us, letting it sit with us for a second before we have to walk toward it.

Then my door opens and I step out into the warm afternoon, and Julian does the same, coming around the front of his truck and waiting beside it as I make my way over. He doesn’t say anything at first. He just studies my face, the way he always has, reading whatever I’m trying not to show, before he steps forward and pulls me into a quick, firm hug, one hand landing solidly between my shoulder blades.

“You good?” he asks quietly as we separate, the question not entirely about today.

I let out a breath that feels like it has been sitting compressed in my chest since the moment my mother’s text arrived, sitting in my phone like something that needed careful handling.

“Not even close,” I admit, but I’m smiling as I say it, which is something.

He glances toward the front door before his eyes come back to mine. “Whatever happens in there. . .”

“I know,” I reply, sliding my hands into my pockets.

“We walk through it together,” Julian says, tilting his head toward the house.

I nod once. “Like always.”

Side by side, we make our way up the path.

We’re only halfway to the porch when the front door opens.

Our mother stands in the doorway. She is dressed exactly the way I remember from every Sunday of my childhood without exception, a modest navy dress, a single strand of pearls at her throat, her salt-and-pepper braids pinned neatly back into place. Every part of her is as carefully assembled as ever, put together with the same care that defined the household we grew up in. Except her hands. Her hands are clasped so tightly together in front of her that her knuckles have gone white, twisting and pressing against each other over and over the way they do when she has nowhere to put the feeling and doesn’t know what else to do with herself.