Aglaya twirled back to him with the grace of a silk ribbon caught in wind. She grinned as she came to a stop, hand poised lightly on his chest, as though she'd never left at all.
"I hope you'll dance with me tonight," she said, voice dipped in honey and dare.
Leon arched a perfectly unimpressed eyebrow. "With a diva like you?"
He let the question hang between them, playful and faintly dangerous.
"I'd rather leave it to your boyfriend. What's his name again? Brain?"
Aglaya's laughter rang out, pure and delighted. "Brain? That's an organ, darling."
She leaned closer, her breath warm against his cheek. "Brian was three months ago. It's Jay now. Jazz singer. Very smooth. Very lyrical. Not as beautiful as you, of course."
Leon gave her a slow, theatrical sigh. "You flatter me. I dare say I was very attractive in my pre-Bronchiectasis era, possibly even devastating with eyeliner… but now I'm a little wasted. Hollowed out. Atmospheric."
"You are gorgeous, darling," Aglaya purred, slipping her arm around his like a ribbon being tied. "You look like you've just stepped out of a doomed 19th-century romance novel."
"I feel like I've stepped out of an urgent care."
"Even better," she whispered with a wink. "Tragedy makes cheekbones sharper."
Leon couldn't help but laugh, low and amused.
They moved like a myth through the shifting tides of bodies—Leon and Aglaya, radiant and slightly dangerous, parting the crowd not with force but with presence. The party whirled around them: velvet shadows, champagne flutes, basslines rising and falling like the breath of the house itself. Laughter cracked like static. Somewhere, Sanlu was performing an impromptu rap in Latin.
Leon's hand was at the small of Aglaya's back, his fingers slipping with lazy familiarity beneath the open dip of her satin gown. The gesture was subtle, scandalous, and entirely them—too intimate for friends, too careless for lovers, too deliberate to be anything ordinary.
Aglaya leaned her head slightly toward him, her voice purring just above the music.
"You staying in Paris for long?"
Leon's mouth curved into a lazy, ironic half-smile. "Unfortunately, no."
His voice was smooth and dry as ever, full of drawn-out syllables and weary charm.
"I'm here solely for Sanlu's birthday and yours. Making my rounds. Smiling at people I've slept with or ignored." His fingers pressed slightly into the silk at her spine. "I'll be back in London soon. Probably won't come back until November."
He paused, then added with a faint, wicked tilt to his voice,
"Unless, of course, you choose to summon me back again."
Aglaya looked over her shoulder at him, eyes like a flame held behind glass.
"Oh, Leon," she whispered, "I don't summon you. I compel you."
Leon laughed softly, as if it delighted him that she still believed that.
"By the by," Aglaya resumed, her voice lilting with wine and wicked amusement, "Sanlu and I have still not figured out the difference between the lung and the throat."
She giggled like a schoolgirl possessed by Voltaire, clutching Leon's arm with theatrical self-deprecation, as if her ignorance were part of some long-running joke with the cosmos.
Leon's eyes—already half-lidded from exhaustion or elegance, it was never clear which—shifted lazily toward her, his lips parting with the slow, deliberate grace of someone who treated words like they cost breath.
"It is a mercy," he murmured, voice smooth as velvet worn thin, "that you two did not attempt to rap about biology and medicine."
He paused, eyes flicking over the crowd like someone scanning for metaphors instead of faces.
"The damage to public health… would be irreparable."
Aglaya burst into another round of laughter, leaning her head on his shoulder. "Sanlu said the esophagus sounded like an opera house."
Leon exhaled faintly. "He wasn't entirely wrong."
They passed beneath a crystal chandelier that had never known peace, its pieces trembling from bass and heat. The crowd swallowed them again—two figures always on the edge of satire and sincerity, glowing with a kind of surreal magnetism that made people whisper even when they didn't know why.
And somewhere behind them, someone was already scribbling a lyric that would reference it all, badly.
Chris didn't look up from the screen—he was halfway through his 154th rewatch of Elizabethtown, mouthing along to the lines as if they were sacred text, a soft glow from his laptop lighting his face in cinematic devotion.
He took a bite of cereal without looking, still wrapped in the emotional climax of the film, and then said, offhandedly but perceptively:
"You look happy."
Jefrey, sitting on the window ledge with a book open but untouched on his lap, blinked.
He hadn't realized he was smiling.
Outside, the golden midsummer evening cast a soft blush over Reine's rooftops. The fjord shimmered like a secret.
Chris finally glanced over, one eyebrow raised, spoon still hovering.
Jefrey tried to shrug. Failed. Smiled instead—an expression that was half sheepish, half something else.
"I don't know," he said, looking back out the window. "Maybe I am."
Chris narrowed his eyes dramatically. "You only smile like that when you've either solved a particularly evil economic model… or Beth has done something."
Jefrey didn't answer right away.
But the smile lingered. And that was answer enough.
Chris turned back to his laptop, nodding slowly. "It's always the quiet ones," he muttered, and hit play.
The call came just after breakfast, when the scent of coffee still lingered in the air and the sky above Reine was that clear, pale blue that seemed to promise an endless summer.
But the moment Jefrey answered the phone, the shift was immediate. The color drained from his face so quickly that Amanda, sitting across from him with toast in hand, felt her stomach drop before she even knew why.
Chris appeared in the doorway moments later, hair messy from sleep, still in pajama pants. He didn't need to ask. One look at his brother's expression told him everything.
It was their mother.
Cancer.
Confirmed.
Treatment in London. Urgent.
No one cried—not then. The shock didn't allow it. There was only silence, followed by movement: calls made, bags packed, loose plans unspoken but understood. Reine, with its still waters and golden light, was now the background of a summer that had changed shape without warning.
Amanda quietly called their mother back in Oxford to tell her what had happened. Beth stood beside her, one hand on her shoulder, too stunned to speak. Her thoughts flickered briefly to Lenored—gone now, and irrelevant. Real life had come flooding back.
Grandma Sophie, eyes sad but steady, helped them fold clothes, cancel plans, wrap up the chapter that had been meant to last until late August.
By midday, the four of them—Chris, Jefrey, Amanda, and Beth—were on their way. Back to London. Back to hospitals and doctors and fear.
The holiday was over.
The story, however, was not.
The plane hummed steadily beneath them, its sound a low and constant drone—like distant wind or the ocean pressed behind glass. Outside, clouds drifted silently past the window, soft and unknowing. But inside, everything felt sharpened and small.
Chris sat by the window, hands clasped, head bowed, lips moving rapidly in a near-whisper—a litany, a plea. His fingers gripped the edges of the seat tray as though he were holding on to something stronger than metal and plastic—something ancient and invisible.
Jefrey sat beside him, still, composed on the outside, but with tension in the set of his jaw, in the way his hands lay rigid in his lap. He hadn't spoken much since the call. His face wore the polite, impassive mask he'd always used in school when he didn't want to be asked if he was okay.
Beth sat across the aisle from him, turned toward him slightly. Her lips didn't move. She said nothing.
But her eyes found his—and held.
In them was no pity, no easy comfort. Just quiet strength, unwavering presence. I'm here, they said. Whatever happens. However hard it gets. I'm here.
And Jefrey—who had always counted his feelings like currency, who never let anyone see what mattered most—nodded, just once.
Not as thanks.
Not as surrender.
But as trust.
Outside, the world carried on beneath them—small towns, highways, fields—but in that narrow space between seats and grief, a silent promise passed between them like something sacred.
Chris kept praying.
Jefrey kept breathing.
Beth kept watching.
The hospital room was filled with the sterile hush of machines and that particular kind of stillness that only seems to exist in places where life and fear hover too close together. But the light through the tall London windows was gentle, and Helena Wilson—frail in the bed, but still sharp-eyed—was smiling faintly.
Chris sat on the edge of the armchair, his knees bouncing nervously, fingers fidgeting with the ends of his hoodie strings. Jefrey stood by the window, arms folded tight across his chest, staring out at the gray sky.
Amanda sat by the foot of the bed, trying to look casual while holding Helena's hand. Beth hovered by the wall, quiet and watchful, her presence steady.
Helena's voice was soft but firm as she looked at them—all of them.
"I always dreamed," she said, eyes bright with warmth and something deeper, "that one of you boys would marry one of them... so we could truly be one family. Not just close. But tied. Bound together."
Chris, ever Chris, sat up straighter with theatrical shock. "Not me!" he declared, raising a hand as though warding off the idea like an exorcism. "No offense, but I have standards. Amanda and Beth are gorgeous, absolutely, but not—Orlando Bloom gorgeous."
Amanda groaned. "Thank you for that backhanded compliment-slash-insult."
Helena chuckled, a soft but real sound. "Christopher."
"I'm just saying," Chris added with a grin, "you marry someone, you have to look at their face every day. And unless either of you plan on joining the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm out."
Beth laughed under her breath. Jefrey gave a small, genuine smile—his first in a while.
Amanda rolled her eyes, but squeezed Helena's hand. "Don't worry. We'll find someone for him. Someone with elf ears and a sword."
"I'd take a good heart over a sword," Helena murmured.
Chris reached over and kissed her forehead. "You got both. You always were the warrior queen."
Helena smiled at him. But her eyes lingered on Jefrey—and then, on Beth. And for a fleeting moment, her smile deepened into something like hope.
"Absolutely," nodded Chris with theatrical conviction, arms crossed like a monk-vowed prince. "Place your hopes on them, Mama. I won't ever marry. Count on that. Unless—of course—someone who looks suspiciously like Legolas crosses my path. Then I'll consider a lifelong partnership. Preferably involving archery and moonlight."
He tapped his temple solemnly. "Otherwise, I'm seriously considering giving myself to God and the Church. I shall take a vow. Celibate and serene—like the saints, but with better Wi-Fi and a Blu-ray collection."
Helena laughed, hand pressed gently to her chest. "You always were dramatic."
Chris bowed his head as if accepting a knighthood. "A humble servant of the Lord and the extended director's cut."
Amanda rolled her eyes so hard it was nearly audible. "Don't ever expect me to date him," she huffed, flicking her hair back. "Jesus Christ, absorbed—which is good, obviously—but Orlando Bloom, absorbed—which is definitely bad. Brute."
"Orlando is an artist!" Chris shot back, indignant.
"He's a poster boy with cheekbones," Amanda replied coolly.
"He was a warrior elf, Amanda!"
"A brute. With conditioner."
Helena smiled faintly, watching the familiar rhythm of their sparring, the way their voices filled the room with something that almost—almost—felt like normal again.
Beth stayed quiet, but she looked at Jefrey, and he looked at her.
Neither of them spoke.
But Helena saw the glance—and she did not miss the way Jefrey's hand brushed against Beth's, just for a moment, on the armrest of the hospital chair.
And she smiled wider.
Hope, it seemed, was not wasted after all.