Chapter 8: What the Video Said
Julian watched the video alone, late on a Thursday night, in the small sitting room off the kitchen.
Claire had recorded it on her phone, propped against a stack of books on a kitchen table he didn't recognize.
She was wearing a gray sweater.
Her hair was loose.
She looked healthy and calm, which was the thing that undid him most completely — not the grief in what she said, but the ordinary peace of how she looked while she said it.
She spoke for eleven minutes.
She told Lily that she was wanted.
That she had been wanted from the first moment Claire had known she existed, before there was anything to know yet, before there was certainty or a name or a plan.
She said that wanting her had been the easiest thing she had ever done.
She talked about Julian for three of those minutes.
She said he was a man who had been handed a life he hadn't chosen and was trying, quietly and without much credit, to become someone better than what he'd inherited.
She said she had loved him for exactly that — not for the power or the name, but for the trying.
She said she hoped Lily would find her way to him someday.
She said she believed she would.
She said she was sorry she couldn't be there to see it.
At the end, she did the bluebird turn.
Standing in her kitchen, in a gray sweater, with no music, she did it perfectly — one arm curved over her head, the other low and open, two spins, the lifted heel, the pause, as if listening for something just beyond the frame.
Then she laughed, a little embarrassed, and said, "I taught your aunt Nora that when we were girls and she still can't do it.
Don't tell her I said so."
The video ended.
Julian sat in the quiet room for a long time.
Then he went upstairs, walked down the service corridor, and knocked softly on Nora's door.
She opened it.
She took one look at his face and stepped back to let him in.
She sat on the edge of the desk chair.
He sat on the floor with his back against the wall, which was not something Julian DeLuca had ever done in his life, and he told her everything Claire had said.
Not a summary.
Everything.
Word by word, as close as he could hold it.
Nora listened without interrupting.
When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"She did the turn at the end," Nora said.
"Yes."
"She always did that.
Whenever she said something that mattered, she'd do something silly right after so you wouldn't cry." Nora pressed her fingers to her mouth.
"She hated it when people cried."
"She succeeded," Julian said.
"I laughed."
"Good." Nora's voice broke on the word, just slightly.
"That's good."
They sat in the small room for a while longer.
The house was quiet.
Down the hall, Lily was asleep with the stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm.
"I want to be in her life," Julian said.
"Not as an event.
Not as a visitor.
I want to be someone she knows."
"I know you do."
"I don't know how to do that without disrupting everything you've built for her."
"Then we figure it out slowly." Nora looked at him.
"She already likes you.
She told me this morning that you were right about the apricot jam and that you seemed like someone who knew things."
Julian was quiet for a moment.
"High praise."
"From a four-year-old, it's the highest."
He stood.
At the door, he paused.
"Claire said you still can't do the bluebird turn."
Nora's eyes went wide.
"She did not."
"She said don't tell you."
"She has been g0ne for four years and she is still—" Nora stopped.
A sound came out of her that was half laugh and half something else entirely, and she covered her face with both hands.
May you like
Julian left her to it.
He walked back down the corridor, and for the first time in four years, the house felt like something other than a fortress.
