Was he right? Malcolm thought about it honestly. You carry things close, he said. That's not the same as being alone. But yeah, sometimes it looks like you're not letting anyone share the weight.
She looked at him sideways. You've thought about this. You've been in my orbit for 3 years. I observe things. Jerome said you were perceptive.
Jerome says a lot of things. He said, "You've been watching out for the people around you so long that you've forgotten how to let anyone watch out for you." Malcolm went quiet. That one landed squarely, and they both knew it. "Jerome should mind his business," he said.
"He loves you," she said simply. "It comes out sideways sometimes." They stood there for a moment, both of them carrying the afternoon's weight. And then Jaden appeared from around the corner demanding to know if they were going to the pool or not because Jerome had promised the pool and it was getting late and promises meant something. Pool, Malcolm said.
Go find your room key. Jaden disappeared at full speed. Malcolm looked at Viven. Come to the pool, he said. She raised an eyebrow.
That's an invitation. That's an invitation. Something shifted in her expression. Small and warm and real. "Okay," she said.
That was the afternoon. Easy and unscheduled in the way that good things sometimes are when you stop trying to architect them and just let them happen. Jaden in the water doing increasingly elaborate cannonballs. Jerome and his family at the shallow end. Viven sitting beside Malcolm on the pool deck with their feet in the water talking the way people talk when they've decided to stop being careful about small things about real things moving between the two without announcement.
She told him about growing up in Atlanta with a mother who worked three jobs and a grandmother who told her the same thing every morning before school. You are going to matter, not become famous, not make money, matter. She'd spent 40 years trying to understand the difference. He told her about Denise. Not just that she'd died.
He never minded telling people that part because people expected it. It had its shape and its edges and it fit in a sentence. He told her about who Denise had been. Her laugh. The way she argued with him about anything that mattered because she believed he was strong enough to be disagreed with and she was right.
The way she used to put her cold feet on his legs in bed and refused to acknowledge she was doing it. The way Jaden had her eyes and her stubbornness and her particular form of fearlessness and how sometimes that was the hardest thing in the world and sometimes it was the most beautiful. Viven listened to all of it with complete stillness. When he finished, she said, "She sounds like someone worth the grief." She was, he said, "And Jaden is worth everything.