Impactful Dilemma Part 1 Prologue and Act I The Architecture (1) (1)

IMPACTFUL DILEMMA

A Novel by Genues Shacon

To my sister, Preyandia Jones - may she rest amongst the angels. She was the strength in our family. Overwhelming, eternal strength. She never really knew how to tell her big brother no. She always loved me unconditionally. Until I’m winged, sis. Until I’m winged.

“We don’t betray the people we love. We betray ourselves - and call it sacrifice. The dilemma was never choosing between loyalty and freedom. It was learning that love charges interest on both.” - Genues Shacon

PROLOGUE: The Blown Kiss ROMAN

marble headstone with his suit soaked through to the skin beneath. Roman does not move. He stands the way a building stands - plumb, load-bearing, indifferent to weather because weather is not the thing that will bring him down. The headstone is simple. Soleil Marie Carver. Two dates. A dash between them that holds everything. She would have hated ornament. She would have hated flowers piled against the stone, petals rotting in equatorial heat. She would have hated the way mourners arrange performance around death, the way they turn loss into theater, the way they weep for audiences they pretend aren't there. So there are no flowers. There is no audience. There is Roman, the rain, and the stone. A building with no fire escape. That's what you said love was. You were right about the architecture, wrong about the fire. The fire wasn't the danger. The danger was me. Standing in the lobby, watching it burn, believing I could redesign the structure while the smoke filled the stairwell. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket. The laminated photograph lives there, has lived there for seven months, pressed against his chest like a second heartbeat he refuses to let stop. He pulls it free. The laminate is warm from his body. The image: Soleil in morning light, hair wrapped in a silk scarf the color of burnt sienna, a white coffee cup held in both hands, her eyes soft with the particular alertness of a woman who is always awake inside her calm. The private version. The one no camera was supposed to catch. He had taken it from the doorway of their kitchen in Tiong Bahru, and she had looked up, not smiling, not posing, just present - the way

He looks at the photograph. The rain beads on the laminate and runs off in clean rivulets. You were the frame that held the opening together. And I walked through you every day without stopping to understand that doorways only exist because someone built the walls on either side. Behind him, twenty feet back, Camille holds the baby under a black umbrella. The baby is seven weeks old. Seven pounds, two ounces at birth - a number Roman carries the way he carries the photograph, the way he carries the operational details of every job he has ever run, lodged in the architecture of memory where nothing gets lost because losing things is a luxury he was never permitted. The baby's name is not spoken here. Not at the grave. Names are identifiers, and identifiers are compromises, and compromises are what got them here. Camille does not speak. She has not spoken in eleven minutes. Roman knows this because he counts time the way he counts everything - in intervals, in rotations, in the spaces between exposure and cover. Camille stands with the umbrella tilted slightly forward to keep the rain off the child's face, and her own hair is wet, and her eyes are dry, and she holds the baby with the particular steadiness of a woman who has held things that mattered in places where holding on was the only verb that kept you alive. Roman lifts two fingers to his lips. The gesture is small. The gesture is everything. He presses the kiss to his fingertips - index and middle, together, the way she taught him - and extends them toward the stone. The blown kiss. Their private ritual. The thing they did across crowded rooms and empty hallways and the fifteen feet of distance between their bed and

His fingers hover in the air. The rain strikes the back of his hand. Then he does something he has never done in front of anyone. He places his open palm against his own stomach and rubs in a slow, circular motion. Clockwise. The way Soleil used to do when she thought no one was watching - standing in the kitchen, standing at the window, standing in the doorway of the bathroom with the pregnancy test still warm in her hand, tracing the curvature of the life she was carrying like a woman reading braille on a wall only she could touch. He didn't know then. He knows now. You were building a room inside yourself. A room I wasn't supposed to enter until the foundation was poured and the walls were up and the exits were marked. You were protecting me from the blueprint. The way you always protected everyone from the blueprint. The way you always carried the load and called it air. He drops his hand. He turns. Camille watches him approach. She does not offer words. She does not offer comfort. She offers the baby. Roman takes his daughter....