Julian is doing better now, almost a year removed from that wedding day. He’s dating someone new, slowly and carefully this time, someone he met through mutual friends rather than the strange, accelerated circumstances that brought Preston into his life. I’ve met him twice now, and something in my chest, that same old instinct that flagged Preston as strange from the very first introduction, stays quiet and settled every single time.
⸻
I still run my business out of the same house I paid off years ago, the trust still fully intact, still waiting for the day Julian’s actually ready to take it on, on his own timeline, for his own reasons, built on nothing except twenty years of a mother and son figuring out, together, exactly how to build something worth protecting in the first place.
