Chapter 5
THREE WEEKS.
That’s how long a person can go without something they didn’t know they needed and still function.
Three weeks of Professor Salvatore standing behind his podium and looking through me, past me, around me, his gaze moving across the lecture hall with that impersonal sweep that used to be normal and is now a blade.
Three weeks of clinical classes and cancelled office hours and a voice that wraps around words like firewall and redundancy and failsafe and never once, not once, settles on the girl in the third row.
He treats me like air.
I should be used to it. For two years before the recognition, I was invisible to him, and I was fine with that.
Content, even. A girl with her circles and her quiet distance and her safe, impossible crush.
But that was before he pressed his hand against a door above my head and said my name in Italian.
Before he kissed me in a golden office and his hand shook against his desk and his voice cracked on I’m sorry.
You can’t unknow what his mouth feels like. You can’t go back to being furniture after someone has kissed you like you were the last real thing in the world.
And yet.
Tuesday. Third row. Notebook open. Circle moving on the margin, and I can feel every rotation in my wrist now, a small repetitive ache that I probably deserve.
He enters at two minutes past the hour. He doesn’t look at me.
He lectures on access protocols and his voice is immaculate and his suit is navy and his sleeves aren’t rolled up today and I hate that I notice, I hate that I’ve catalogued every variation of this man’s forearms over the course of two years and can now add withdrawn to the taxonomy.
David passes me a note. Coffee after?
I write back: Sure.
We go to the coffee shop. Joe is behind the counter, dark hair, wrong shoes, the build of a man who should be doing something other than making lattes.
He makes mine without asking. I don’t comment on this anymore.
It’s been weeks since I clocked him as one of Luciano’s men, and the fact that he’s still here, still watching, still making my coffee exactly right, is simultaneously the most comforting and most excruciating detail of my current existence.
He’s still watching me. Luciano is still sending his men to watch me. He’s pretending I’m air, but he can’t stop making sure the air is safe.
I sit across from David and wrap my hands around my cup and David talks about his batting average and a girl in his economics class who may or may not have smiled at him and I nod in the right places and I’m so tired.
“You’re doing it again,” David says.
“Doing what?”
“That thing where you nod and your eyes go somewhere else.” He puts his coffee down. “Elsa. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You’ve lost weight.”
I haven’t weighed myself. I don’t own a scale. But my dresses are looser than they were a month ago, and my face in the bathroom mirror this morning had a sharpness that wasn’t there before, cheekbones more pronounced, shadows under my eyes that no amount of Martha’s mail-order concealer can fix.
“I’m fine, David.”
“You say that a lot.”
“Because it’s true a lot.”
He looks at me across the table with that open, worried face that makes me want to tell him everything and also makes me want to cry, because David is the sort of friend who would listen to the whole impossible story and then offer to carry my books and buy me a sandwich, and I don’t deserve that kind of uncomplicated goodness right now.
“Eat something,” he says. “Please.”
I eat a muffin. It tastes like nothing. David watches me chew with the focused concern of a person who has decided that my caloric intake is now his responsibility, and I let him, because letting David worry about me is easier than thinking about the man who kissed me and then turned me into a ghost.
SUNDAY.
My phone rings at exactly 1:15 PM, because church in Nebraska lets out at 12:45 and it takes Mama thirty minutes to get home and get Daddy settled in his chair and put the kettle on and pick up the phone. I know this schedule the way I know my own heartbeat. It hasn’t changed in twenty years.
“Baby girl.” Mama’s voice, warm and Nebraska-flat and so familiar that my eyes sting before she’s finished the second word. “How’s my city mouse?”
“Good, Mama. How’s the farm?”
“Oh, same as always. Your daddy fixed the fence by the east pasture but it took him twice as long because his hip’s acting up again and you know he won’t admit it. I caught him limping and he told me he was walking with character.”
I almost smile. Almost. “Walking with character.”
“That’s what he said. Man’s sixty-seven years old and stubborn as the day I married him.
” A pause. The kettle whistles. I can hear it through the phone, three thousand miles away, and the sound is so specific, so home, that my throat closes.
“And how are your studies, sweetheart? That thesis of yours?”
“It’s coming along.” The lie sits in my mouth like a stone.
My thesis has been stalled for two weeks because my advisor keeps redirecting me to Professor Cuthbert for approval, and Professor Cuthbert hasn’t responded to a single email since her scholarship review summons, and the one person who gave me real, useful feedback on my proposal is currently pretending I don’t exist.
“Are people being kind to you?”
Mama asks this every week. It’s her version of are you safe, filtered through Nebraska manners and a mother’s instinct for the things her daughter isn’t saying.
“Everyone’s real kind, Mama.”
“You sure?” A shift in her voice. Martha Lively didn’t raise a fool, and she didn’t raise a daughter she can’t read through a phone line. “You sound a little thin, baby.”
“I’m fine. Just busy.”
“Busy.” She lets the word sit. “You eating enough?”
“David makes me eat muffins.”
“That nice boy who carries your books?”
“That’s the one.”
“Well, you tell David I said thank you.” Another pause.
Longer this time. I can hear Daddy in the background, the creak of his chair, and I know he’s listening even though he won’t take the phone.
That’s how Robert Lively loves: from three feet away, with his ears open and his trust in his daughter like a rope he’s holding with both hands.
“Elsa, honey. You’d tell me if something was wrong? ”
I close my eyes. My finger presses harder against my knee.
“Of course I would, Mama.”
The lie is so clean it barely costs me anything, and that’s how I know I’m in trouble, because lying to Martha Lively used to be the hardest thing in the world and today it slides out smooth as butter and I don’t even flinch.
THURSDAY. WEEK THREE.
The lecture hall is the same. The podium is the same.
His voice is the same. I sit in the third row and take perfect notes and my handwriting has never been neater, because if I focus on the shape of each letter I don’t have to think about the shape of his mouth or the pressure of his hand in my hair or the sound he made when he kissed me, the sound that was lower and rougher than mine, trapped behind his teeth, the sound I hear every night before I fall asleep and every morning when I wake up.
My circles have changed. They’re tighter now. Faster. Small furious loops on the margin that wear through the paper. David noticed. Joe at the coffee counter noticed. I noticed, and I can’t stop.
After class, I go to the library. I stay until it closes, because my apartment is too quiet and the quiet fills up with things I don’t want to think about.
I work on my thesis. The modular inventory framework is good.
The scalability model is good. The section on security integration needs work, and the one person qualified to help me with it has cancelled his office hours for the third consecutive week, and I won’t ask him, I won’t go to his door, I won’t be the girl who begs.
He told me to get out. He said he was sorry. Both things were true at the same time, and I don’t know what to do with that.
The library closes at eleven. I pack my bag. I zip my coat, the one my parents sold a tractor to buy, thick and warm and too expensive for a farmer’s daughter and exactly right for a New York night in early spring when the wind comes off the river with teeth.
I push through the library doors and the cold hits my face and I start walking.
His car is at the curb.
Black. Long. Idling. The exhaust a pale ghost in the streetlight. I’ve never seen this car before, but I know whose it is the way I know things about him: instantly, in my body, before my brain catches up.
I stop. My bag is heavy on my shoulder. My coat is warm.
My circle-drawing finger is pressed against the strap, and my heart is doing something fast and reckless and I think, for one wild second, that he’s inside.
That he’s come for me. That three weeks of nothing was too much for him the way it’s been too much for me, and he’s here.
The back window rolls down.
Not Luciano. Joe.
His face is half in shadow, half in streetlight, and I recognize him immediately.
Same dark hair, same build that doesn’t fit behind a coffee counter.
He’s not wearing the barista apron. He’s wearing a suit.
The suit fits him better than the apron did, and the wrongness of the coffee shop slides into a rightness that makes my stomach drop, because this is who Joe actually is. Not a barista. A soldier.
“Miss Lively.” His voice is polite. Careful. The same careful from the alley, two years ago, when a different man in a different suit said our boss saw you were having trouble. “The professor wanted to make sure you got home safely.”
I stare at the car. At the empty back seat. At the space where Luciano isn’t.
He sent his men. He cancelled his office hours and erased me from his lecture hall and treated me like air for three weeks, and then he sent his men to make sure I got home safe at eleven PM on a Thursday.
“Tell the professor,” I say, and my voice is even, my back is straight, and I’m my father’s daughter, “that I’ve been walking home alone for two years and I’ll manage.”
Joe looks at me. Something passes across his face. Not pity. Something closer to recognition, or maybe respect.
“Yes, miss.”
I turn. I walk. My flats hit the sidewalk in a rhythm that I force to stay even, step step step, and behind me the car idles and I know it’s going to follow me home because that’s what Luciano’s men do, they follow and they watch and they protect, and he won’t stop sending them no matter what I say.
Two blocks before my eyes blur.
Three blocks before I whisper, into the cold, to no one:
“Then why won’t you come yourself?”