Chapter Twelve
Roberto
I take the long road by the water because I need the distance, the curve, the empty stretch that lets a man try to outdrive his own head. Headlights pull a pale ribbon across the guardrail.
The inlet is a dark thumbprint to my right, flat and black until the moon shoots a silver line across it. The wind comes in off the bay and gives the car a steady push, like it’s reminding me I’m small and insignificant.
I crack the window. Salt air cuts through the car, cold and clean. It smells like iron and tide grass and the soft rot of the marsh, the same way it has since I was a kid sneaking out here to think I had a secret no one else knew.
I take the curve I always take a little too fast, feel the tires bite, feel the body roll and settle. The engine hums. The asphalt ticks. A bar of red taillight from a truck up ahead bends and vanishes.
I tell myself I regret it.
That’s the first line my brain reaches for, like trying to put a lid on a boiling pot. I say it out loud to test the words in my mouth.
“I regret it.” The words sound reasonable, even.
They’re a lie.
I try again, dress it up. I regret losing control. I regret breaking a rule that exists for a reason. I regret letting heat decide what discipline should have crushed.
I can’t make it stick.
Not when my hands are on the wheel, and I can still feel the ghost of her skin on my palms. Not when my jaw tightens, and I know exactly what it’s remembering: the soft give at the place where her shoulder meets her neck, the taste of her there, the sound she made when I set my teeth into it and stopped pretending I was going to be careful.
The sound was not polite. I hear it now like she’s in the passenger seat, eyes tipped up at me, mouth parted.
I press my foot down and the car lifts, then I force myself to let it go again.
I do not regret touching her.
I regret the way I pulled away, the clean cut, the mask I reached for like a weapon. I regret the look that slid through her when I did it—confusion, then hurt, a flash of anger she swallowed because she thought she had to. I regret that more than any rule I broke. Decimated is more apt.
I tell myself excuses because that’s what I do for a living. I can stack them like bricks until a wall grows in front of the truth.
She works in a department that answers to my family. It exposes both of us. It’s reckless. If it got out, it could look like a power play, a favor, and she’s earned every inch of her place with her mind, not her body.
All of that is real.
None of it tastes like regret.
What I feel is a different thing: a knife-edged, bright certainty that I meant every kiss and every breath and every ‘yes’ I asked for and got.
That I would ask again if the world were different. That I would have kept asking if I hadn’t seen the future the way I always see it—fast, cold, and honest.
The way I was forced to see it when Maria was gone one day. I woke up one morning with my wife by my side. And I went to bed without her. Just like that.
No warning. Nothing to tell me that it would be our last morning, last breakfast. No little voice in my ear that something was wrong, and I should take her to the hospital.
A quiet August morning in the kitchen. She’s laughing at my attempt at drawing a heart in her latte. Mid-laugh, she stops, frowns. “Something’s wrong— my head—” Then she collapses.
She never regained consciousness. A ruptured intracranial aneurysm, they called it.
One moment, she’s fine. The next, she’s brain dead.
I flip the wiper once to clear the fine mist the wind throws up.
The glass squeaks and clicks. The moon glides beside me, then slips behind a low quilt of cloud.
I pass the old bait shop on the bend, closed for the season, its sign bleached to a ghost of itself.
The dock out front lists into the shallows like it’s tired of standing.
I grip the wheel at ten and two and breathe in for four, hold, out for six without counting the numbers.
I keep the breath steady until my lungs remember how to do it on their own. I loosen my grip and let the wheel sit lightly in my hands. The line in the center of the road eats itself under the headlights, steadying me.
I don’t regret it.
The thought sits there like a coin on my tongue. Heavy. Tastes like copper and truth.
What I do is run a diagnostic on myself, the way I do on a contract that looks clean at first glance. Find the weak clauses. Where does it fail? Where do I fail?
Rule one: Don’t touch what you can’t protect.
Rule two: Don’t touch what you oversee.
Rule three: Don’t lie to yourself and pretend that breaking one doesn’t lead to breaking the rest.
I broke them, one by one, without a fight worth the name.
I could say the dark made it different. The small box of an elevator. The way fear stripped both of us down to something honest and unpolished.
I could say the generator’s cough and the stuttering light, and that first panic left a door half open that I walked through.
None of that changes the facts.
I see her face in the thin light, the way her breath climbed and fell, first in fear, then something else. The way she trusted me with a body that wasn’t mine to hold, that I asked to hold anyway.
I told her I don’t touch what isn’t offered, and I meant it. She offered. I took. I took like a starving man at a table, and then I put the plate down and told myself it was for her own good.
Was it? Is it?
I try to believe it, and I can’t, not all the way. I can believe in caution. I can believe in consequences. I can believe in the hard limits a man sets when he knows what comes of love without brakes.
But I can’t convince myself that the way I put distance in my voice was mercy.
It was something else—habit, fear, the old armor I wear because it used to be the only thing that kept me standing.
I run a hand over my mouth. The night rushes in through the cracked window and licks at the heat on my neck. The car smells faintly of leather and salt. I roll my shoulders back until a knot lets go and another steps up to take its place.
Maria’s name is a small blade that I keep sharp. I don’t pull it out without reason. Tonight, it unsheathes itself. I don’t try to dull it.
People think grief is a season or a phase, and then becomes a story you tell better with each passing year. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s a shaky foundation that precariously holds everything up.
I live like a man waiting for the ground to crumble under me at any moment. Extra reinforcement. Redundant systems. Exits within reach. Don’t put your bed under the window.
Some of it comes from being a Conti. The rest of it is self-preservation.
Then Olivia stood at the head of a conference room and started speaking. She laid out a plan. Well-thought-out and intelligent, and everything broke down. I’m a sucker for competence and intelligence.
Her beauty and those long legs didn’t help the matter.
I take the turnout just past the marsh bridge because I always do when I need to make a decision.
Gravel crunches under the tires. The car noses toward the water and stops.
I kill the headlights. The world goes darker and deeper.
The dash throws a faint glow over my hands, then dims. I let the engine idle a minute longer, then turn the key and let the quiet take the car.
Wind moves through the eelgrass in a dry whisper. A buoy somewhere out in the inlet bobs and clanks lazily. The night is not empty.
I could pretend I’m choosing between two paths. That’s clean. I like clean.
But there aren’t really two. There’s just the one; it’s only a matter of whether I stop this now or I don’t. Either decision will cost. One costs her. The other costs me.
Either way, I’m paying.
I put my forearms on the wheel and let my head hang for a beat. Heat rises behind my eyes. I blink until it disappears.
She said everything. I want everything. She said it like a woman who understood the size and depth of the word and wanted it anyway.
It knocked something loose in me that I thought I’d cemented over.
Not because I think I know how to give everything, but because I haven’t wanted to try in a long time.
The bite I left on her—God help me. I picture it nestled in the sensitive skin where her shoulder meets her throat. That mark is a statement I had no right to make.
The part of me that wants to see it again tomorrow is the same part that earned every rule I wrote for myself. I’m old enough to know the difference between a man who is careful and a man who thinks he is.
I open the door and step out because the car feels too small for an argument with myself. Cold air hits the heat on my skin and makes both more obvious.
I stand at the guardrail and breathe the marsh—iron, salt, rot, life. The dark water holds light in thin, broken lines. My hands find the top bar without thinking. The metal is cold enough to bite. Good.
I count. Not numbers. I count the things I have to do.
I have to show up tomorrow and treat her like a colleague who is excellent at her job.
I have to keep my distance without being cold and obvious.
I have to keep my hands to myself.
I say the last one out loud. “Keep your hands to yourself.” The sound gets eaten by the wind before it can echo, and that feels appropriate.
I don’t trust myself with her.
I don’t regret it. Not the wanting or taking or the marks we put on each other. I regret the after, the impression I left her with. That it was a mistake. That I could walk away and file it under poor judgment. That I made her feel like she might be punished for it.
God. Are you going to fire me?
It cut me open in a place no one sees. I did that. I made her feel like she could be erased, disposed.
I look down at my hands. There are faint, thin lines on the backs where carpet bit, and when I tilt my wrist, I see the shallow arc a nail left earlier when digging in, already scabbed at the edges. My body looks like what happened. There’s no erasing that.