13. Lila
LILA
The day after
I keep to the back room and work around the sounds, feels, and sights, pale, soft, and obedient.
The mixer hums. Butter softens in the bowl.
I sift powdered sugar into a drift and wish snow could solve everything.
I tell myself it’s frosting, not nerves.
Out front, the bell rings in a steady rhythm that usually calls me to action.
Today, I let my mother handle all that, and it only counts the minutes I’m hiding.
“Lila, I need more boxes,” my mother calls, cheerful enough to pass for fine.
“In the rack by the door,” I answer, a little too fast. My hands do the old work.
Cream, scrape, fold. Roll the dough into even lengths and cut neat coins for shortbread.
It’s instinct and habit. Nothing wrong can come out of it.
It also keeps me from walking to the window and checking the street every thirty seconds.
Marco sings to himself upstairs, the sound drifting down the stairwell.
A made-up song about a truck that wants to be a dragon.
His voice lifts and dips. It tugs at me like a string.
I should go up and kiss his head, sit on the floor and listen.
I stay with the dough because I’m afraid of how hard that’ll be.
I can feel him out there, even when I cannot see him.
Matteo draws a line through a street just by standing on it.
He has the look of a man who refuses to bend.
Wrenleigh notices those men. They notice anything that arrives with city polish and a gaze that sweeps a room in one take.
Mrs. Doyle will tell the whole town over tea that he’s either a bodyguard or a lost prince. Her friends will lap up both.
“Your friend in that nice worsted coat wanted his coffee black,” my mother says, stacking the waxed sheets. “Tipped well, I’ll give him that. But he’s one of those who likes to face the door. I don’t think he ever just relaxes.”
“He isn’t my friend,” I mutter, chopping walnuts as if they offended me.
“No?” Her eyebrow asks the rest.
“No.” I drop the nuts into the bowl. “He’s a storm system.”
“Storms pass,” she counters, then changes the topic. “Bring me two trays when you’re ready.”
I hear the front in piecemeal. The soft scrape of chairs.
The low laugh that means Coach Ramirez told one of his stories.
The small gasps that mean the kids saw the sugar stars.
The guided tour tone my mother uses when someone new asks how long we’ve been here.
Always that answer, forever and also yesterday.
“Is she hiding?” Mrs. Doyle asks, voice just the right amount of loud.
“She’s baking,” my mother replies, patient as stone. “She’s also here for Christmas, not for autographs.”
“I never ask for autographs,” Mrs. Doyle sniffs. “I ask for receipts.”
I snort before I can stop myself. The laugh jumps out, then dies fast. I scrape the bowl clean and slide two trays onto the rack to chill.
The refrigerator door seals with a soft kiss.
I lean my forearms on the prep table and try to breathe like a normal person.
It feels like the room’s too small and the ceiling’s low enough to touch.
My hand moves to tuck a stray piece of hair behind my ear before I can whisper stop.
He left no name. No number. No English last name I could search at two in the morning when I was sick and scared and twelve weeks along.
No stupid message that said call me, nothing but a hotel notepad and a line that tried to be kind and failed.
Some things are too precious for my world.
Every time I found it at the back of a drawer, I wanted to set it on fire, and I wanted to sleep with it under my pillow.
Both truths lived in me and refused to move out.
So I chose. I came home. I turned my hands back to flour and sugar and the old way of counting days.
I learned how to lift a baby while pulling a tray.
I learned the trick of pinning my hair with one hand while Marco used the other as a pillow.
I learned that international stops matter less when your son claps for a cookie he iced himself.
Magazine covers look flat next to a four-year-old who grins at you like the sun decided to live in your kitchen.
He asked about a dad with the seriousness he saves for important things.
Why does Liam get picked up by his father?
Why do some men carry kids on their shoulders?
Do dads like gingerbread? I told stories that held for a while.
Every time I made up something, it hurt.
Yet I made the truth into something gentle, a running game we could play without bruises.
Then a box landed on my doormat and someone else decided to play with us. It bruised and left a scar.
Benedetti. The name has sat under hushed conversations in certain cities since my first casting.
Stylists whisper it with a shrug. Photographers avoid it by looking at the ceiling.
A brand pays a bill late, and the room goes cool.
That family likes to remind people the world's small.
In Milan the reminder came with a man who watched me dance with a stranger. He neither smiled nor looked away.
I should tell Matteo. I should stand in front of him and admit what’s true.
He’s smart enough to have guessed. He gathered facts while I was trying to forget who taught me to like whiskey on ice.
He looked at my boy, and he saw himself.
It’s in the set of their mouths. It’s in the stubborn line their chins make when they decide how something should be.
I could say it now and stop this sidestep that hurts more than a straight line.
The door chime rings again. My mother handles it. I stay with the trays. I pipe lemon glaze across the shortbread in a thin lattice and watch the lines cross. The urge to throw the piping bag at the wall comes and goes like a summer storm. I keep working.
Mr. Farrell leans on the counter to complain about the plow. He prefers the old driver. The new one leaves a ridge that trips him when he carries wood to the shed. My mother half listens. She guesses something's off. She’s not afraid to ask. She’s just waiting for me to open the right door.
The twins from the mill ask if Marco can come make snow forts later.
Mrs. Brewster wants to know if I’ll donate a cake for the pageant raffle.
She asks as if I might say no but expects a yes.
She gets a yes. When the timer dings, I pull a tray and set it to cool. My hands shake just enough to annoy me.
It’s midafternoon, that slow slice of day when the snow looks flat and the storefronts blink like they need coffee. I wipe my hands on a towel and tell my mother I’m taking the trash to the alley. It’s an excuse, and she knows it.
“Take a minute,” she replies from the counter.
“I will.”
“Walk to the corner and back,” she adds.
“I will.”
“Do not pick a fight unless you mean to finish it,” she says with a fine laugh as if nothing’s wrong here.
“I never start fights.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I tie the trash, push through the back door, and stand in the narrow slice of cold behind the shop.
The alley smells like wet cardboard and clean snow.
The sky has that pewter look that means more will fall by dark.
I set the bag in the bin and keep going.
The block’s half my childhood and half my present—same bricks, different signs.
The florist’s lights glow in the window, a little village under glass.
The hardware store’s got snow shovels stacked like a parade.
The diner’s got steam on the windows and a waitress with a pencil behind her ear.
Nothing’s changed, and everything’s changed.
I step around to Main. He’s there, leaning on a lamppost across the street like he has belonged to it his whole life. Shoulders straight, mouth curled just enough to look like a smile, as if he’s not watching everything, just his phone feed. Men like him pretend to have no work. They do.
I walk straight across and stop in front of him. I don’t touch him because that would be a different conversation. I fold my arms and stand close enough that he has to tip his chin down a fraction to meet my eyes.
“Stay away from my son,” I tell him, voice low and sharp.
He listens. He always has that skill, the stillness that reads as control and not indifference. A muscle tics in his jaw and smooths. His gaze doesn’t flinch.
“I will not come up the stairs,” he answers, measured, “if that is what you want.”
“How about leaving us alone?” I push.
“I will not leave you unsafe.” There is no heat in it, only iron. “Not until this is finished.”
“You get to decide when a thing is finished, do you?” My voice is off-key, dangerous. I know I’m running into peril here.
“I do when I know the ones who start playing it foolishly.”
“You think you own this town because you can place two vans and buy three coffees.”
“I think I can read a pattern,” he replies. “And I think the pattern says a car will slow today, and a man will look where he should not, and that will be the beginning if I am not here to make it the end.”
“Always the general,” I mutter. In a flash, I remember Marco being called one, one time too many.
“Always the man who cleans messes I do not make,” he corrects.
“You made this,” I cut in. “You walked into my life and left a shadow I had to live with. Then you show up like a solution and expect me to say thank you.”
“No,” he returns, calm. “I expect you to stay standing. I expect you to keep your boy fed and warm and stubborn. I expect you to hate me if that helps you keep your head clear.” He lets his voice rise a shade. “I do not require your gratitude.”
Anger flares and fades faster than I want. He stands there absorbing it like he’s had practice. It makes me want to hit him, and it makes me want to lean into him.
“You always speak like you are in a briefing,” I tell him. “Do you ever use words that do not sound like orders?” I tilt my head. “Or is that classified?”
He looks at my mouth just once, quick and clean, then back to my eyes. “With you,” he says, softer, “yes.”
I hate that my pulse notices that. I hate that a memory slips in anyway, as if a door slides open and I can see a woman in a green dress on the balcony one night in Milan, a man’s hand on her back that felt like a choice I had wanted for years without knowing it.
“This isn’t Milan,” I remind him.
“No,” he agrees. “This is a town with one main street and a bakery that smells like the thing we both want.”
“What’s that?”
“Ordinary.”
The word hits me in the sternum. It’s exactly what sounds like a gift I tried to wrap around my child. Ordinary is the thing that makes some men itch. It’s also the life I made on purpose.
I glance at the churchyard. I glance past the small park where metal benches catch the cold and the lamps wear glass shades etched with roses. None of it belongs to the kind of story we’re in.
“Do you understand what ordinary means?” I ask him. “It’s exactly why I want you off my steps, and my son’s. Do you understand?”
He holds my gaze. “I do,” he says quietly. “I’ll honor those steps.”
The words land softer than they should, and that’s what catches. I turn because if I stand there any longer, I’ll say something I can’t take back. I head for the crosswalk. A truck passes, tires throwing brown slush in a lazy arc. I wait for it to clear and step into the street.
The black SUV slides into the far lane. It swerves too close, then jerks off the curb with a shriek of tires.
I stumble back into a bush, heart hammering against my ribs.
The driver wears a cap low over his eyes and a coat that isn’t local.
He checks the mirrors once, and his gaze lingers on my face—no smile, no frown, just notice.
Then the car glides on, taillights dull against the snow.