Cairo smiled faintly. “She’d like this. Seeing us like this.”
“She’d like knowing we learned something from her,” Micah said.
My dad nodded, his voice roughened by something close to emotion. “She’d like knowing love found its way back into this family.”
24
NAIMA
He came back different.
Not changed in a way the eye could name—his shoulders were still broad and easy beneath his hoodie, his locs still kissed by gold, his voice still low enough to make my pulse forget its rhythm—but something in him had quieted.
The kind of quiet that doesn’t come from silence, but from understanding.
When I first saw him step out of the truck that morning, bag slung over one shoulder, city dust still clinging to his boots, I knew something had shifted. He wasn’t carrying the same heaviness he’d left with. The sharp edges of tension that used to live between his brows were gone, replaced by something I didn’t recognize at first. Peace.
And that peace—it scared me a little.
Because for so long, Lennox Gold had been a man in motion, driven by ghosts and expectation. Always reaching, always trying to earn what should’ve been freely given. But now, standing there on the porch with the morning sun warming his skin, he looked like someone who’d finally stopped fighting. Likesomeone who’d gone home, looked his past in the eye, and made peace with it.
He smiled when he saw me—slow and real, the kind of smile that makes the air change shape. “Miss me?”
“Maybe,” I teased, though my chest said otherwise.
He kissed me on the forehead first, then the lips—soft, certain. “My father sends his love,” he said against my mouth.
That startled me more than the kiss. Alan Gold didn’t send love. Not freely. Not easily.
“What happened?” I asked, watching the way his gaze drifted to the trees, to the place where the mountain met the horizon.
“Conversation,” he said. “And closure. The kind I didn’t think we’d ever have.”
He told me pieces then—how they’d sat listening to Sarah Vaughan on an old record player that used to belong to his mother, how his father had looked smaller somehow, less armor and more man. How he’d surprised him with softness, with understanding. And how, before he left, Alan had handed him two black envelopes.
“Two?” I asked.
He nodded. “One for Tasha and one for Selena. He gave Micah and Cairo invites, too. Apparently, my old man’s gone sentimental in his golden years.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “Sentimental or strategic?”
“Both,” he said, grinning. “But I think this time, his strategy has more heart than agenda. He said he wanted all his sons to have what he had with my mother.”
That admission sat between us like light through smoke—soft, unexpected, real.
“And Selena and Tasha?” I asked, already suspecting the answer.
“He called it networking, but I think he’s matchmaking.”
I laughed outright then, the sound bubbling through me like relief. “So your father invited my best friends to a masquerade?”
“Seems that way.”
“Well,” I said, looping my arms around his neck, “maybe love really is contagious.”
He smiled down at me, that peace still radiating off him like a quiet halo. “Then I hope I never recover.”
When he kissed me again, I could taste the difference in him—the calm, the confidence, the quiet faith. It filled the room the way sunlight fills space, slow and complete.
