Page 119 of The Paradise Problem

“It isn’t what you think,” he says, taking my hand. “I mean it is—it’s your ring—but I’m not asking you to put it back on.”

“Is this you admitting that the nipple-sized diamond is real?”

Liam laughs. “Yeah. It’s real.”

“Fuck me,” I say on an awed exhale.

Smiling, he looks down at our joined hands. “This ring is yours, Anna. It’s yours whenever you want it. Or we can sell it and get a different ring, a more Anna-appropriate ring, a ring a Muppet would wear, with gemstones of every color or a chain of diamond daisies. Whatever engagement ring you want is yours. As is my grandmother’s wedding band. I can’t tell you how happy it would make me to put that on your finger.”

He takes a breath, puffing out his cheeks as he exhales, as if he’s not getting this quite right. He’s so fucking cute I want to lick his face.

“I know it’s soon,” he says more earnestly, meeting my eyes. “I know we’ve been married for five years but only together for five months. I know our lives are complicated and we don’t live near each other, and we’re still figuring out what we each want. But I love you. So much. I can’t fathom wanting someone else, anything else, the way I want you. There’s a ring in that box for me, too, when you’re ready for me to wear it. Whether it’s a month from now, a year. Shit, I’ll put it on tonight if you tell me to.” He frowns. “ ‘Never’ wouldn’t be my preferred answer, but I’d take that, too.” He winces at his sweet rambling. “When you’re ready—if you’re ever ready to be my wife for real, I’ll be here, ready to be your husband for real.”

I was joking on the plane months ago when I talked about the proposal of my dreams because to be honest, I never thought much about how that might look. The world tells girls we should want romantic, flashy grand gestures, and those can be great. But if I had given it deeper thought, I know I’d have dreamed up something just like this—an offer given with honesty and communication and mutual respect—over anything showy. So I kiss him. I keep kissing him until we’re both lost in it and push him back and sink down on him and tell him over and over as I move that I love him. I know someday I’ll be ready to wear a ring again, but right now, what we are is perfect.

The ring box goes in my dresser drawer for the time being, but the man and his love stay right at my side.

* * *

BY JANUARY, DR. WILLIAM Weston is no longer the only professor in this relationship!

Well, technically, I’m an instructor, and it is at a local city college, but it is a dream job. Teaching art to college kids on the path to figuring out what they want to do is amazing, as is being able to speak to that fear in them that they’ve chosen something impossible and elusive and will end up homeless eating apple cores out of the public garbage cans. I love, too, the older adults returning to school—the mom of newly graduated triplets finally finding time for herself, and the thirty-five-year-old dude raised by a shithead dad, who’s only now realizing that loving art won’t make him weak. My favorites are the two women in their seventies who met in a research lab years ago at Caltech and have a bet over which is the worse painter, so they took a class to find out.

I’m also painting like I’ve never painted before. Unless Liam and his Goddamn are around to distract me, or I am teaching, painting consumes my every waking moment. Which is good, I suppose, because after the two successful art shows last spring in Laguna and LA, more galleries want my work. Galleries in Berkeley and Santa Barbara. Galleries in San Diego and even Seattle. Galleries in San Francisco and Dallas. In February, I get a request for a solo showing at a small gallery in Boston, and Liam and I celebrate with a fancy dinner out in San Francisco when I’m up for the weekend… my treat.

I’m not the next art scene It kid, but it’s a start.

Liam decides to stay on as faculty at Stanford for the time being but takes a seat on the Weston Foods board to help guide the corporate culture overhaul. The current COO will be CEO in the interim—a woman who is apparently a badass with silver hair and balls of steel (a Capricorn, of course)—with the idea that when she retires in five to ten years, Liam will take over. Everyone seems happy with this plan, and although I know nothing about business culture of any kind, I can appreciate that Liam, at only thirty-one, didn’t feel entirely ready to step into the role. Look at that: a circumspect, mature Weston man. There may be hope for them after all.

And speaking of the Weston men, Alex and Jake remain where they are—as CFO and CMO, respectively—but have added twice-weekly therapy and intensive management training into their schedules. As of last summer, Ray was officially booted out of any role at the company. He’s been charged with insider trading for the shares he unloaded before leaking the PISA documents. His trial starts soon, and it won’t be the end of the mess for him: he’s under investigation for racketeering and other quasi-sports-sounding charges I only vaguely understand. When he lost his position, his power, and access to most of his money, he also lost his current mistress, who took her story straight to Janet. Yes, it’s wild that this is what it took for Janet to finally leave Ray, but we celebrate all the wins, even the bittersweet ones.

LIAM

IF IT HAD BEEN up to me, Anna would have spent that first night in Palo Alto and stayed for every single night after. If it had been up to me, Anna would never have taken off the ring. But it wasn’t up to me, and thank God, because where we landed is so much better than anything I could have imagined.

To my absolute delight, once Anna has her first few shows in the Bay Area, she admits that the Northern California art scene suits her much better than the one in LA. The more time she spends up near me, the more friends she collects: at a local studio, at the coffee shop, at a park when she’s walking my neighbor’s dog. Gradually, all of these people become my friends, too, until we have a full, lively, and interesting community all around us.

By the time the following May rolls around, and we celebrate one real year together, Anna tells me she’s ready to move in with me. It takes every bit of willpower to not call my Realtor the second the words are out of her mouth. To quote a movie my girlfriend has made me watch at least five times, “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

When the inheritance came into my name last September, I dedicated eighty percent to the foundation and put the rest in various savings and investment accounts. Which means, of course, that with my salary from Stanford and my Weston board duties, I can buy us any house we want. But at Anna’s insistence, and with her art career growing quickly, she contributes a chunk toward the down payment on the four-bedroom home we close on in July. It’s somehow both polished and funky, with an asymmetrical, trilevel architecture that pleases Anna’s need for nonconformity and contemporary accents that please my need for clean lines and modern decor. There’s an office on the first floor for me, a small art studio in the backyard for her, a room upstairs with two sets of bunk beds for my niece and nephews, a master suite with space for a giant bed, and a room right down the hall for whatever comes next.

Anna does make one financial concession, however. Sticking to her rule that she can be selfish for the people she loves, she lets me buy her father a house nearby, a small two-bedroom bungalow with a giant garage, so that David Green can retire, tinker with cars, and enjoy the life he fought so hard to live, and his daughter never has to be more than five minutes away from him again.

* * *

BUT WITH DAVID MOVING close to us, my expectations about what a family can be shifts, too. He is everything Anna said and more; David is warm and affectionate, proud and loyal, devoted and protective. The first time we met over a year ago, I went to shake his hand and he pulled me in for a long hug, thanking me for making his daughter so happy. I was overcome; his easy acceptance and affection hit me in a surprisingly tender place, and I spent the entire next day feeling out of sorts and like I’d messed up somehow, realizing only later when I talked it out with Anna that I’d never been hugged like that by a father figure before. I hadn’t known how to respond.

Over time, I figured it out. Hugging David when he walks into our house feels completely normal now. His hand warmly cupping my shoulder when I’m stressed about work is calming, reassuring. I no longer stare at Anna chatting obliviously at the ceiling, with her head in her father’s lap on the couch and think it looks a little weird. I think if I watch David Green and his daughter enough, I might not make a terrible father myself one day.

I want that same closeness with my family, but we’re all broken in similar but opposing ways, and I have to be realistic about what that means for forming bonds of trust and vulnerability. We have group therapy every other month or so. I have lunch with Jake and Alex the first Tuesday of every month; I talk to Charlie frequently. I see my mother every other Sunday. But the night that Anna invites everyone over for dinner at our new house is the first time outside of group therapy that the whole family will be in one room since our time on the island.

Not the whole family, I mentally amend. Because only a month ago, in July, just over a year after everything blew apart, my father was sentenced to eleven years in prison and fined five million dollars for dumping stock before going to the press. There are more charges coming—not to mention whatever the IRS finds when they finish combing through his finances. It wasn’t the maximum sentence, but it wasn’t far off, and the severity of it took the business world—and our family—by surprise. As part of our deal with Dad not to challenge the terms of Grandpa’s trust, I was present in the courtroom, along with Jake and Charlie. Alex was noticeably absent, and I was deeply proud of him for that.

I always knew our father was toxic, but even I didn’t realize how his behavior colored every one of us until he was excised like some kind of festering tumor. Mom is newly divorced, and less passive-aggressive. With access to most of their accounts frozen, she also has considerably less money now but seems happier for it. Jake and I are slowly finding our way back to each other, and it’s taken work on my part not to let that final thing he said to me before PISA hit the fan reshape our entire relationship. Without Dad bankrolling his life, Jake has learned to live on what he makes as CMO, which is fucking plenty. He also seems to have zero interest in getting access to his trust. A part of me wonders if it’s a form of personal penance for the mistakes he’s made, but he’ll have to work through that on his own.

But the idea of having everyone over… of letting them into our new home that feels warm and safe and light and ours is suddenly terrifying. Anna watches me arrange and then rearrange and then re-rearrange fresh veggies on a platter and moves to wrap her arms around my waist, resting her head on my back.

“It’s going to be okay, you know.”

---