Page 31 of The Lion in the Library

Leo was looking at the framed photograph on the bookshelf. The one from the park, the same park where we’d been photographed, taken a week later when I had brought my own camera — deliberately, visibly, on our terms. In it, Luz was mid-leap off a low wall, León clutched under her arm, his warden badge still pinned to his ribbon. Pedro was blurred at the edge of the frame, clearly mid-run. Leo and I were looking at each other rather than the camera.

Miguel had framed it without asking and delivered it to the apartment. He had very limited boundaries in some respects but his instincts for the significant moment were, occasionally, exactly right.

“She’s already lobbying,” Leo said, nodding toward the children’s room, “for León to get an Aztecs jersey.”

“Luz lobbies for everything eventually,” I said. “It’s her primary skill.”

“She’s going to be formidable when she grows up.”

“She’s formidable now,” I said. “She’s just also six.”

He smiled and picked up the glasses, handing me one. He was staying in Los Angeles. The papers were signed. The thing that had been possible was now real, and real was different — heavier, more specific, more present than possible. I had been waiting, I realized, to feel afraid of this. To find the place where the happiness curdled into the familiar dread of things-that-were-too-good.

I was still waiting. It had not come.

“To new beginnings,” Leo said, lifting his glass.

I touched mine to his. “To staying,” I said. “Specifically.”

He looked at me over the rim. “To staying,” he agreed.

Outside, Los Angeles was doing what it did in the evenings — all light and motion, vast and indifferent and occasionally, in the right light, genuinely beautiful. Inside, the apartment was quiet in the particular way it got when the children were asleep, every small sound its own thing. The lamp. The city. The champagne. Leo, sitting beside me on the couch that I had bought second-hand when we first arrived, which had turned out to be more comfortable than it looked.

I had moved across a country with two children and very little certainty. I had rebuilt my career, enrolled my children in school, learned to navigate a city without a driver, attended an English conversation club at a public library, and fallen in love with a man who kept a stuffed lion in his bag and asked genuine follow-up questions about toy cars.

Some things, it turned out, could not be planned for.

“Leo,” I said.

“Yes?”

I had been going to say something measured. Something that acknowledged how much had changed without overclaiming what came next. Something careful and considered and appropriately hedged.

Instead I said, “I’m glad you sat down at my table.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I thought about it first. Whether it was the right thing to do.”

“And?”

“And you were the most interesting person in the room,” he said, “and I had been writing the same paragraph for an hour, and it seemed like a sign.”

“Very romantic,” I said.

“I’m a footballer, not a poet.”

“You’re writing a book.”

“I’m attempting to write a book,” he said. “It’s different.” He glanced toward the table where his notebook sat. “It was different, tonight. Something came loose.”

I had noticed him writing when I came in. The particular quality of stillness that meant it was going well, not the frustrated quality that meant it wasn’t. I had not asked, because some things you do not interrupt. But I had noticed.

“Good,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Good.”

We sat with that for a moment, the champagne and the lamp and the city outside. Then Leo set down his glass and reached over, and I took his hand, and we stayed there a long time, talking about nothing important and everything that mattered, while the stars did what they had always done and the city moved around us like a tide.

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