“Nah,” Micah said from the landing, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, that usual air of quiet precision wrapped around him like armor. “They’re teaching him peace. Look at him — he’s glowing.”
“Man’s practically floating,” Cairo added from the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame, a half-eaten apple in his hand and mischief written all over his face. “That retreat life got you soft, bro?”
I groaned. “You two really rehearsed this?”
My father laughed — the sound looser than it used to be, lighter. “You can always tell when a man’s been changed by love. He walks like he’s holding something worth protecting.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Love had changed everything about how I moved through the world.
There was a time when I mistook stillness for weakness — when I believed the only way to matter was tomove, to win, to conquer. Or at least I knew my father believed that and I tried not to disappoint him. But Naima had undone that. Not by taming me, but by teaching me that peace didn’t mean complacency. It meant knowing where to set your fire and where to rest it.
She taught me that strength wasn’t in how loud I roared but in how gently I could stay. And not just stay, but to be my true self unabashedly.
And maybe that’s what my father saw — not a son gone soft, but a man finally unburdened.
We gathered in the sitting room, sunlight sliding across dark oak and leather. The faint crackle of a record filled the quiet—one of my mother’s. Sarah Vaughan, if I wasn’t mistaken. My father had pulled out her collection after years of pretending it didn’t exist. The sound gave the room a pulse, something soft beating beneath all that polish and control.
Micah and Cairo sank into the couch, their banter easy, while I stood near the fireplace, hands in my pockets.
“So,” Cairo said, “this ball thing. Dad said you got an invite?”
“‘Got’ is putting it lightly,” I said. “It’s Hallow Noir—half masquerade, half myth. Invite-only. No one knows the hosts, but every creative in Pittsburgh wants to be there.”
Micah’s brows lifted. “That’s the Hansel and Gretel one, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Dad pulled strings to get me in.”
They both looked at him—Alan Gold, the man who’d once measured worth by output—now sitting back, brandy in hand, pretending to study the pattern of the rug while Sarah’s voice floated through the room like memory come home.
“Why?” I asked.
He set the glass down, gaze steady but gentler than I remembered. “Because it’s time you showed that woman off. You’ve been hiding in them woods too long. Let the world see what peace looks like when a man finds it.”
Cairo whistled low. “Translation: he’s proud.”
Alan side-eyed him. “Watch your mouth.”
We laughed—the kind of laughter that built bridges over old distances.
I dropped into the chair across from them, the leather sighing under my weight. “You could’ve just said that, Pops.”
He smiled, faint but true. “Wouldn’t sound like me if I did.”
The old rhythm returned, but it didn’t hit the same. There was ease now, a pulse under the polish. Micah talked about Gold Ventures—how the new expansion deal was closing ahead of schedule, his tone all precision and promise. Cairo added color to it, describing the campaign he was developing for one of their portfolio brands. Same firm, different gears. They moved in sync—one by numbers, one by intuition.
They were their father’s sons—sharp, ambitious, tireless. The empire lived in their language.
And I was my mother’s—the quiet one who found profit in peace. The son who walked away from the tower to remember what the ground felt like.
I caught my father watching me more than once. Not with the old judgment that used to hum under his silences—but with curiosity. Like he was trying to understand how stillness could look like strength.
When Cairo scrolled through his phone and stopped on a photo of Naima in the garden, laughter caught midair, the whole room paused.
“She’s beautiful, man,” he said softly.
“She is,” Micah added. “She’s got that kind of energy that keeps people centered.”
