Chapter 276: Chapter 278: Telling Richard About His Plans
"There’s a restaurant," she said. "On the West Side. Aria took me there in February and I’ve been thinking about it since." She picked her cup back up. "The fish is extraordinary apparently."
Alexander turned to look at her.
She looked at the garden.
"I don’t know when I’m free," she said. "I’d have to check."
"Of course."
"And I’m not..." She paused. "This is not me saying anything except that the fish was supposed to be very good."
"I understand," he said.
"Alexander."
"Just the fish," he said. "Nothing more than that."
She looked at him then.
He met her eyes and didn’t look away and didn’t try to make it into more than she’d offered and didn’t fill the silence with reassurance or pressure or any of the things he used to fill silences with.
Just....waited.
She nodded once.
They finished their tea.
The afternoon kept going the way afternoons did, unbothered, the garden going from gold to the first suggestion of dusk. Aria appeared at the back door at some point and looked at the two of them at the table and visibly registered something but said nothing except that Mrs Abel wanted to know if people were staying for dinner.
Mei looked at Alexander.
"I should get home," he said. He stood, straightened his jacket. Looked at Mei. "I’ll call."
"You have my number," she said.
He did. He’d had it for three months and used it carefully and not too often, which she’d noticed.
He said goodbye to Aria and walked around the side of the house toward his car.
Aria came and sat in the chair he’d vacated and looked at her mother with the expression she’d inherited directly from Mei and that Mei therefore couldn’t hide from.
"Mum," she said.
"Don’t," Mei said.
"I didn’t say anything."
"You were about to say several things."
Aria pressed her lips together.
"The fish is supposed to be good," Mei said, before she could say anything. "At that restaurant you took me to in February."
Aria looked at her for a long moment.
"It’s excellent," she said carefully. "You should go."
"I might."
"The sea bass especially."
"Aria."
"I’m just saying."
Mei looked at the garden where her daughter’s father had been sitting ten minutes ago, and thought about twenty four years, and the kitchen table, and a four year old who had decided what she was for and never wavered.
She thought about a man who had learned, at sixty, to leave a door open and wait.
She picked up the last of her tea.
"Go and help Mrs Chen," she said.
Aria went, and Mei sat alone in the garden for a few more minutes, and didn’t think too hard about anything.
Just the garden. The last of the light.
That was enough for now.
***
DAMIEN’S POV
He’d been thinking about it for three weeks before he did anything about it.
Not because he wasn’t certain. He was certain. Had been certain for longer than he was entirely comfortable admitting, in the way that you’re certain about something before you’re ready to say it out loud because saying it out loud makes it real and real things can go wrong.
He was certain.
He just needed to do it correctly.
He drove to his grandfather’s estate on a Thursday.
Didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Told Marcus he had a personal errand and Marcus had looked at him with the eyes of a man who had learned not to ask and had said yes boss and left it alone.
The drive was forty minutes.
He spent most of it not thinking about what he was going to say, which was unusual for him. He was a man who prepared for conversations. Who went in knowing the variables and the possible responses and the most efficient path through. He’d built a company on that quality.
He had nothing prepared for this.
The housekeeper let him in and told him grandfather was in the study.
He knocked on the study door.
"Come in," Richard said.
The study smelled like old books and the specific pipe tobacco Richard had stopped smoking fifteen years ago but that had apparently embedded itself permanently into the walls. Damien had spent a significant portion of his childhood in this room. He knew every shelf.
Richard was at his desk. He looked up when Damien came in and looked at his face and put his pen down.
"Sit down," he said.
Damien sat.
Richard looked at him with the particular attention of a man who had been reading people accurately for seventy years and was currently reading one very clearly.
"Well," Richard said.
"I’m going to ask Aria to marry me," Damien said.
The study was quiet.
Richard looked at him for a long moment.
"Good," he said.
That was it. Just....good. Delivered with the complete absence of drama that was Richard Blackwood’s version of profound approval.
Damien looked at him. "That’s all you have."
"What else do you want me to say." Richard picked his pen back up. "You love her. She loves you. You’ve both survived enough to know what the other one is made of." He looked at Damien over his glasses. "Good seems accurate."
"I came here for more than good."
"You came here because you needed to say it out loud to someone before you lost your nerve." Richard set the pen back down. "Which tells me everything I need to know about how much she matters to you." He paused. "You’ve never lost your nerve for anything."
Damien said nothing.
"She’ll say yes," Richard said.
"I know."
"Then what are you here for."
Damien looked at the desk. At the pen Richard had put down. At the framed photograph on the shelf behind him....three generations of Blackwood men at some estate function, Damien maybe twelve, his grandfather behind him with one hand on his shoulder.
"I want your ring," he said.
Richard was very still.
The ring had been his grandmother’s. Eleanor Blackwood, dead twenty years, who Damien remembered as warmth and gardening gloves and the smell of something baking. Richard had kept the ring in his desk drawer since the funeral. Damien knew because he’d seen it once, years ago, when he was looking for something else entirely and Richard had closed the drawer without comment and they’d never spoken about it.
"That ring," Richard said, "has not left that drawer in twenty years."
"I know."
"Your grandmother wore it for forty three years."
"I know."
Richard looked at him.
"Eleanor would have liked her," Damien said. "Aria. She would have.....she would have liked her a great deal."
The study was very quiet.
Richard opened the desk drawer.
He set the ring on the desk between them without a word. It was simple.....a single stone, oval, the kind of thing that had been chosen by a man who understood that the woman he was buying it for didn’t need anything loud. Elegant and certain and completely itself.
Damien looked at it.
"She might want something different," Richard said. "She has opinions."
"She does."
"If she wants something different, get her something different." Richard paused. "But show her this first."
Damien picked it up.
It was lighter than he expected.
He sat there for a moment holding it and thought about his grandmother and forty three years and what it meant to give someone something that had already held that much.
He put it in his pocket.
"Thank you," he said.
Richard picked up his pen.
"Stay for lunch," he said. "Mrs Hartley has made something."
It wasn’t a question.
Damien stayed for lunch and left shortly after because he has an engagement to plan.
