They flew back to Los Angeles in late August.
Robert had the window seat and spent most of the flight reading. Diana lasted about forty minutes before she started talking — about nothing in particular, about everything, the way she did when she was content and didn't need a reason to fill the air.
Ethan had the middle seat and spent the flight the way he spent most journeys. Watching people.
The flight attendant doing her rounds with cheerful efficiency, eight hours into a twelve-hour shift, having decided professionalism was the answer and sticking to it. The man across the aisle who'd fallen asleep before takeoff and was snoring with complete commitment. The kid two rows up who kept turning around to stare at Ethan until Ethan crossed his eyes at him, which made the kid dissolve into helpless giggles and duck behind the seat.
Diana saw that last part.
"Don't encourage him," she said.
"He started it," Ethan said.
Robert turned a page without looking up.
"He did start it," Robert said.
Diana looked at her husband. Then at her son.
"I'm outvoted," she said. "Again."
"Democratically," Ethan said.
Robert made a sound that might have been a laugh. He turned another page.
Diana shook her head and went back to her magazine, but she was smiling when she did it.
Heathrow to LAX was eleven hours of Atlantic and cloud cover and the particular quality of recycled air that made time feel slightly elastic.
Diana talked for most of it. About London, about the visit, about Margaret and Paul, about things she'd noticed and things she wanted to go back and see properly next time. She talked about Arthur twice — once when she was telling Robert about something Paul had said, once when she was quiet for a moment and then said, almost to herself, "He would have liked you."
Robert looked up from his book.
"Arthur?" he said.
"He would have liked both of you," Diana said. "He was good with people who paid attention."
Robert looked at Ethan.
Ethan looked out the window at the clouds.
Nobody said anything else about it, but it sat in the cabin with them for the rest of the flight. The specific way that things sit when they've been said and don't need expanding.
Home felt familiar in the way that things feel familiar after you've been somewhere that made you see them differently.
The house on the quiet Silver Lake street. The particular quality of LA light — flat and bright and constant, nothing like London's grey, everything like itself.
Robert went back to work. Diana went back to her routines — British radio in the kitchen in the mornings, tea made correctly, the house running the way it ran when they weren't travelling.
She was fully herself here too. Just a different register of it.
Ethan went back to being almost-four, which he was genuinely good at by this point.
School started in September. Marcus had new material he'd been workshopping over the summer — a bit about his older brother that was actually quite good, which Ethan told him, and Marcus received this information with the specific delight of someone who needed to hear it from someone who meant it.
Clara had filled two sketchbooks and started a third. She showed him a drawing she'd done of Upper Street from a photograph Diana had sent her — she'd asked Ethan to ask Diana for photographs of London and Diana had sent six, and Clara had drawn all of them, and this one was the best.
"It looks exactly right," Ethan said.
"I know," Clara said. "That's the point."
Danny had spent the summer perfecting a new batting stance and needed Ethan to watch him demonstrate it approximately forty times across the first weekend back.
Ethan watched all forty demonstrations.
He had the time.
October arrived and the light shifted.
Not dramatically — LA seasons didn't do drama. Just something in the angle of the afternoon sun that changed slightly, and mornings got cooler, and Diana started making soup on weekends in the specific way she did when the temperature dropped below what she privately considered reasonable.
The Saturday it happened started completely normally.
Diana was running errands. Ethan was in the back seat watching the Silver Lake streets go past, legs swinging because his feet still didn't reach the floor, which he found mildly annoying but had accepted as a temporary condition.
Diana had the radio on. A station she liked — one that played older things, classic pop and standards and the kind of music that had been popular before popular meant something different.
Then What A Wonderful World came on.
Louis Armstrong. The 1967 recording.
He knew this song the way you know songs that have been in the air around you forever — not because you learned them, just because they were simply there, part of the atmosphere of existing in the world. He'd loved it his whole previous life. Something about the simplicity of it. The way it said something enormous in the quietest possible voice, like it wasn't trying to convince you of anything, just telling you what it saw.
I see trees of green, red roses too.
He wasn't thinking.
That was the thing. He wasn't monitoring himself or calibrating or doing any of the low-level management he usually kept running in the background. He was just in the back seat with his feet not reaching the floor, watching October Silver Lake go past, and the song was playing.
And he sang.
Properly. Full voice. The way the song wanted to be sung — warmly, without fuss, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Because in that moment it was.
I see them bloom, for me and you. And I think to myself — what a wonderful world.
Diana's hands shifted on the wheel.
He kept going because stopping mid-song felt wrong and honestly it felt good — genuinely, simply good, the specific pleasure of singing something you love when you're not doing it for any reason except that you love it.
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white. The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night.
He got all the way through.
The radio moved on to something else.
The car was quiet. Diana was just driving. But with a completely different quality of attention than she'd had thirty seconds ago — present in the car in a new way, like someone had suddenly turned up the volume on something she hadn't realised was playing.
He watched her in the rearview mirror.
She was doing the expression. The one he'd seen developing for a while — the one that sat between recognition and something larger. But bigger than he'd seen it before. Like something had finally tipped all the way over from suspected into confirmed, and the confirmation was larger than the suspicion had prepared her for.
Nobody said anything for a full minute.
The streets kept going past.
"Ethan," Diana said.
"Yeah?"
A pause. Like she was choosing the right question from several available ones.
"How long have you been able to do that?"
He thought about it.
"Always, kind of," he said. Which was true, in the way that things can be true without being complete.
Diana was quiet again.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
"I don't know," he said. Which was the most honest answer he had. He genuinely hadn't made a decision about it — it had just been there, the way things are there when you're not thinking about them as things yet.
Diana laughed.
Not the polite one. The real one — surprised out of her, lower than she meant.
"You don't know," she said.
"It just came out," he said. "I wasn't really thinking about it."
"Clearly," she said.
She was smiling. He could see it from the back seat even with her facing forward.
They pulled into the driveway and she parked and sat for a moment with the engine off. Just sat there, hands still on the wheel, looking at the garage door.
Then she turned around properly and looked at him.
"Ethan. Is there anything else you can do that I don't know about?"
He considered this genuinely.
"Probably," he said.
Diana stared at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed again — bigger this time, the kind that took over her whole face.
"Probably," she repeated. "Right. Of course. Probably."
She got out of the car still laughing quietly to herself.
He followed her in, went to the kitchen, got himself a glass of water and drank it standing at the counter because that's what you did after errands.
Diana was already on the phone in the hallway.
He could hear her tone — excited, careful, trying to explain something that didn't quite have the right words yet.
He put his glass on the drying rack and went to find Danny, because it was Saturday and there was still daylight and Danny had been promising a rematch since Thursday.
The phone call could handle itself.
That night he lay in bed looking at the ceiling.
Captain Buttons on the pillow beside him.
What A Wonderful World still somewhere in his head — not intrusively, just there, the way songs stay when you've just sung them properly.
He thought about the session with Paul. The singer's third take on the bridge, the one they'd kept, the specific feeling of hearing something click into place that had been slightly wrong before.
I want to make things that sound like that.
He thought about Arthur. Backstage, laughing. The work invisible.
He thought about Margaret's face when she said he was very good at listening. Really listening — not waiting for his turn to talk.
He wasn't planning anything. He wasn't building a sequence or mapping a trajectory.
He was just lying in bed at almost-four years old, thinking about music and theatre and invisible work and a grandfather he'd never meet, and feeling something that was warm and didn't have a name yet.
Outside the window, the Silver Lake night was doing its thing — quiet streets, distant traffic, the occasional dog somewhere down the block.
Whatever was coming next was coming.
He didn't need to rush it.
≪ SYSTEM UPDATE ≫Music Fans: 1 / 1,000,000Acting Fans: 0 / 1,000,000
Diana Cross — Fan #1.
He looked at the numbers in the dark.
Fine, he thought. We'll get there.
He went to sleep.