"Is that going to work?"
"With Miley? Probably. She has a weakness for men who try too hard and knock things over."
"I understand the appeal."
I looked at him. "You never knocked anything over."
"I sanitized my mouth after you kissed me. In front of you. In front of everyone." He paused. "I would argue that’s worse."
I laughed and took his hand. The ring caught the gallery light and scattered a tiny rainbow across his lapel.
Catherine and Richard were by the door—Catherine leaning on Richard’s arm—looking at the photographs. She stopped in front of Diane’s portrait for a long time. Richard put his hand on her back, and they stood together.
I watched them from across the room, and thought about the boy with the airplane in Catherine’s painting, the man he’d become, and the woman who never stopped worrying about him.
Miley appeared. "The show is a hit," she said. "Also, I’ve been talking to Mona and we’re best friends now and Jace should be afraid."
"I’ve been afraid since Mona learned to talk," Jace said.
Mona appeared beside us, Priya with her, their hands intertwined. "I heard that."
"You were meant to."
Miles appeared and put his arm around my shoulder. "Congrats on your huge success," he said.
Jace removed it. Physically. Lifted Miles’s arm off my shoulder and placed it back at Miles’s side.
"That was my arm," Miles said.
"And that is my fiancée."
"We’re family, Jace."
"Family can maintain appropriate distances."
"This is appropriate."
"Not for my brother and my future wife."
Mona leaned to Priya. "Are you getting this?" Priya held up her phone, recording.
I told Jace to behave. He said he was behaving. Then he kissed me, right there in the gallery, in front of everyone, his hand on my waist and his mouth warm against mine. I could hear Caleb groaning, Miley whooping, and Miles holding up both hands in surrender like a man who’d seen too much.
"Find your own woman, Miles," Jace said when he pulled back. "Stop living vicariously through mine."
"I’m not living vicariously." Miles grinned. "Also, you just kissed your fiancée in front of forty people. My work here is done."
I laughed. The sound filled the gallery and I let it. I was surrounded by people I loved, in a room full of my photographs, with the love of my life beside me holding my hand.
I glanced at my phone. Two missed calls from my parents. Mom and Dad, probably wanting to know how the opening went. I’d call them in the morning, tell them everything. Well. Most of everything. Some things a daughter keeps for herself.
Later that night. The gallery was emptying. Caterers packing up. My photographs still on the walls.
Jace stood in front of the last piece, the one I hadn’t told him about. Framed and lit at the end of the gallery where the eye lands last.
Black and white. A man in a window. Light falling across half his face. Glasses catching the glow. One hand resting on a Rubik’s cube on the windowsill. He wasn’t looking at the camera. He was looking at something off-frame, and whatever he saw had pulled an expression out of him that was unguarded, warm, and full of tenderness.
I’d taken it on a Sunday morning at the penthouse. He was at the window watching something on the street below, a fatherhelping a child onto a bicycle, and his face bloomed. I had my camera and I pressed the shutter once and captured it. He never heard it.
