Chapter Thirty-Six: Tender Is the Build

                                        

                                              

Six months later...
the scent of jasmine, sandalwood, and warm amber clung to my fingertips the way memories do, soft, stubborn, impossible to wash off. The perfume shop was finally open. Mine. Ours. Sunlight pooled across the terracotta tiles in the front room, catching on glass bottles and gilded labels, each scent a tiny universe I had blended by hand. Every shelf told a 온라인카지노게임: rain-drenched fig trees, burning oud in old churches, honeysuckle climbing an abandoned wall. People came in shyly at first, then lingered, drawn to the tenderness stitched into each blend.
It wasn't just a store. It was the life I never let myself dream of, not fully. I worked there most mornings, wearing linen and gloss, selling memory in a bottle and during my lunch break, I'd take a small vial and a sandwich, drive to the shelter, and sit with Thomas in the garden behind the kennels. We'd eat cross-legged on the grass, dogs napping nearby, and I'd place a new scent in his palm.
"Today's is cedar, blackcurrant, and the way your voice sounded the first time you said you missed me out loud."
He'd breathe it in slowly, always careful with things I made. "So basically, me in a bottle."
I smiled. "A little less arrogant."
We had built a rhythm again, different, deliberate. We were still going to individual therapy, still showing up to couples counseling like students learning how to speak. But we were trying. No, we were succeeding. The distance between us was no longer cold or barbed, but tender and navigable.
Thomas had moved back a few weeks after the shop opened. Not all at once. It was slow, intentional, like relearning how to live together without slipping back into old fractures. First, him sleeping on the couch. Then, his favorite mug reappeared in the cupboard. Then Lola reaching for him every morning like she always had, no hesitation in her tiny hands and Alice—so young, so decisive—announcing over breakfast, "Can Daddy stay forever now?" as if she were the one signing the lease on his return.
But Jimmy... Jimmy held back.
He didn't say much during those first few weeks. A silence that felt like a thousand questions he was too afraid to ask. He watched from the edges, polite and careful, as though he were tiptoeing across a bridge that had once collapsed beneath him. He was scared. Scared to believe it was safe to hope. Scared to hand us his heart again only to watch us drop it.
We brought it up in family counseling. We talked about how to move gently, to let the kids set the pace. We made it clear to Jimmy, without pressure, that this wasn't about pretending nothing had happened. It was about healing honestly, taking one step at a time. Slowly, those steps came. It wasn't a leap. It was a gradual, cautious drift toward trust. But each time Jimmy let himself lean a little closer, it felt like the most sacred kind of courage.
Then, one soft, unexpected afternoon, he brought Carissa over. His first girlfriend. She had black nail polish chipped at the edges and a silver ring on her thumb that she fidgeted with. Her eyeliner was smudged just enough to look accidental, and there was something in her eyes, sharp, tired, like she'd seen too much of the world already. But then Jimmy said something under his breath, and she laughed and it was like the entire hardness of her fell away for a second. She smiled when he smiled. It was instinctive. Like she couldn't help it.
And him, God, the way he looked at her. Not in that performative way teenagers sometimes adopt, but like she was his favorite secret. His safe place. He stood a little taller when she was around. A little less guarded. He pulled out chairs for her without realizing it, let her steal fries from his plate, and carried her bag like without her asking.