39. Nico
NICO
The house is too quiet for a place that just got both of us back.
Five days in a holding cell leave a residue a shower doesn't touch.
My jaw is rough, three days past a razor.
My knuckles are split from a cinderblock wall I put them into when a guard mentioned her name and I couldn't stand still for it.
Under all of it, faint, I can still smell driftwood and salt on my own collar, the one thing about me tonight that hasn't changed.
Lydia stands by the window with her arms crossed over her ribs, holding herself together with her own hands because nobody else has offered to do it for her. She hasn't looked at me since I walked in. I let her have that. I've had five days to think about what I owe her, and none of it was silence.
I sit down across from her, not close enough to crowd her, close enough that she knows I'm not leaving.
My hands won't stay still. I press them flat against my knees to make them behave.
"I knew," I say. "About Harry Mitchell. I knew since the night you told me his name yourself, at the club, days before you ever found those papers on your own.
You asked me in that kitchen if I was ever going to tell you.
I didn't answer you then because I didn't have an answer I could live with.
I don't know if I ever would have told you.
That's the truth, and it's an ugly one. You deserve to hear it plain instead of me dressing it up as something gentler. "
She turns her head. Just that.
"I want to say I kept it from you to protect you," I say. "That's the lie I had ready. I've had it ready since yesterday, polished up nice, and I'm not going to hand it to you tonight."
The words come slower than I want them to. Slower than anything I usually let myself say.
I spent five days on a concrete bench thinking about all the ways I could say this to her and make it sound like less than it was. I threw every version out. She's earned better than a story I built to survive telling it.
"I called it protection. It was cowardice.
I didn't tell you because telling you meant watching your face break, and I didn't want to be the one who broke it.
So I said nothing. And every day after that, I kept touching you.
Kept sleeping next to you. Kept building this," I say, and I gesture at the space between us, at the house, at all of it, "without ever giving you the one thing that would've let you decide what to do with any of it. "
Her jaw tightens. She doesn't speak.
I get up and cross the room, then stop myself two feet from her, because this isn't about closing distance yet. It's about closing the distance between what I say and what actually happened.
"You asked me once if you were chosen or just convenient," I say. "Back when this whole thing was a contract and nothing else. I never answered you straight. I'm answering you now."
I make myself hold her eyes.
"You were never convenient. Not that first week, not any week after it.
Convenient is easy. You have never once been easy.
I chose you then because it solved a problem, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But somewhere in the middle of all of it, the reason changed, and I let myself pretend it hadn't, because admitting it meant admitting how much I had to lose. "
"And now?" Her voice comes out small and careful, each word placed one at a time, testing the floor before she puts her weight on it.
"Now I know exactly what losing you feels like," I say. "I've had it. For real, this time, not hypothetical. And I'm telling you, with nothing left to gain from lying to you, that I choose you. Still. Now. Knowing everything you did and everything I did back."
She looks away first, toward the window, toward the dark glass that's giving her back her own reflection instead of the street.
"There's more," I say, because I promised myself I wouldn't stop halfway. "That night. After we tore each other apart in the worst way either of us knows how. I heard you crying. Through the door."
Her shoulders go rigid.
"I stood there," I say. "And I didn't go in."
I let that sit in the room instead of rushing past it.
"I told myself you needed space. That's the same cowardice again.
The truth is I didn't know how to walk into that room and be the reason you were crying and also be the one who held you through it.
So I did the easy thing. I walked away. And I've spent this whole marriage terrified of turning into a man who walks away from the people he's supposed to protect. That night, I did exactly that."
She's crying now, quiet, not looking at me.
"You told me I was my father's son," I say. "That night. And my mother told me the same thing, months ago, in Italy, in almost the same words. Neither of you has ever met. You said the same sentence anyway."
A wet, broken sound that's almost a laugh comes out of her.
"I'm not going to argue with either of you," I say.
"Not with words. Words are cheap, and I've spent too many of them already.
My blood runs the same as his did. I can't undo that and I'm done pretending I can.
But blood isn't the whole account. What I do with it decides the rest. I keep choosing you.
Every day that mattered, since the day I met you, I chose you, even on the days I did it badly, even the day I chose silence instead of your face breaking.
That's not nothing. That's the only proof either of us is ever going to get that I'm not him. "
"I've spent this whole marriage waiting to catch myself becoming him," I say.
"Watching my own hands for it. Every time I raised my voice, every time I made a call I knew would cost someone something, I held it up next to what I remember of him and measured the distance.
I'm done doing that too. I don't get to spend my life proving a negative.
All I get is today, and what I do in it. "
I reach across the space between us, slow, so she can move away if she wants to.
She doesn't move away.