Chapter 13
TWO DAYS.
The text has been sitting on my phone for two days, and I haven’t answered it.
Not because I don’t know the answer. I’ve known the answer since before I had words for it, since a girl in an alley pressed her back against a brick wall and drew circles to convince herself she was whole and thought, without language, without logic: whoever sent these men is mine.
I’ve known.
But the word sits in my phone—sposami, marry me—and every time I open the message to type back, my hands do the fast tight circles on the phone case and my chest fills with something too large for a one-word reply, and I close it again.
It’s Tuesday morning. I’m walking across the quad with my coffee in one hand and my bag on my shoulder and the April air is cool and damp and smells like wet earth, which is the closest New York gets to Nebraska in spring.
My phone is in my pocket. The weight of it’s absurd—it’s the same phone it was last week, same cracked case, same scratched screen, but it’s carrying a word in Italian that makes it feel like I’m walking around with a live grenade against my hip.
David is beside me, eating a protein bar with the single-minded focus of a man fueling for something athletic, his cap backward, his jersey from whatever team has his loyalty this week.
He’s been talking about Verniece for three blocks.
She made him a study playlist. This, in David’s metrics, is seismic.
“A playlist, Lively. A curated playlist. That’s not a study group move. That’s a move-move.”
“Maybe she just likes sharing music.”
“Nobody curates fourteen songs for someone they’re not interested in. I counted. Fourteen. That’s intentional. That’s a message.”
“David, I think you might be overthinking—”
“Says the girl who draws circles on things when she’s overthinking.” He grins sideways at me. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed they’re back, by the way.”
My finger, which is currently tracing a loop on the lid of my coffee cup, stills.
“They’re back,” he says, quieter. “That’s good. Right?”
I look at David, who noticed when my circles stopped and carried granola bars for me like medicine and dragged me to Bucky’s and wiped milkshake off my face and never once asked me to explain the thing he could see breaking me from the outside.
Who’s now asking if my circles coming back is good, because he understands, in his uncomplicated David way, that the circles are the barometer and their return means the weather has changed.
“It’s good,” I say.
He nods. Finishes his protein bar. We walk.
THE WOMAN IS STANDING near the campus gates.
I notice her because she doesn’t belong.
The same instinct that let me clock Luciano’s men in the lecture hall—the wrong shoes, the wrong stillness, the misfit between the person and the place—fires now, registering details before my conscious brain catches up.
She’s older than a student. Late twenties, maybe thirty.
Tall, sharp-featured, wearing a leather jacket and boots with heels that would snap on the cobblestone paths, and her hair is blown out with the kind of precision that costs money and time and says I came here to be seen.
She’s not alone. Two other women flank her, slightly behind, the formation of people who follow.
I’ve seen women like them before—at the edges of campus, at his public lectures, at the faculty events where Luciano stands behind his armor and they circle with their hungry eyes and their lip gloss.
The groupies. The ones who know who he was and find the danger attractive, who track him across the city like he’s something to be collected.
The woman in front sees me.
Her eyes do something fast—a scan, a calculation, the up-and-down that women do to other women when they’re measuring a threat. She takes in my cotton dress, my sensible flats, my coffee cup, my bag, my face. And her expression changes.
Recognition.
Not of me specifically. Of what I’m to him. Someone told her, or she saw something, or the network of people who orbit his public life passed along the information that the professor has been seen with a girl. A girl in a blue dress. A girl who doesn’t look like someone he would choose.
She steps forward. Onto the path. Into my way.
“You’re her.”
Her voice carries. It’s meant to. Two students walking past slow down, glance over. A boy on a bench looks up from his phone.
David, beside me, goes still. I feel his posture shift—the easy, slouching David replaced by the one who played defensive end and notices things.
“I’m sorry?” My voice is polite. Nebraska polite. The voice Martha Lively raised.
“You’re the girl.” The woman’s mouth curls. Not a smile. A shape that has contempt in it and something else underneath, something rawer. “Luciano Salvatore’s little farm girl. That’s what they’re saying.”
My circle stops. My finger presses flat against the coffee cup lid.
David takes a half-step forward. I put my hand on his arm. Light. A touch that says I’ve this.
He looks at me. I look back. He reads something on my face that makes him nod, once, and step back, and I love him for it—for the restraint, for the trust, for the understanding that this isn’t his fight even though every instinct in his body is telling him to step between me and this woman with her leather jacket and her sharp mouth.
“I’m Elsa,” I say.
“Charmaine.” She says it like it should mean something.
Like the name carries weight in rooms I haven’t been in.
“I’ve known Luciano for years. We all have.
” A gesture at the women behind her, who are watching with the attentive stillness of an audience.
“We know what he is. What his family was. We know the world he comes from.”
My hand tightens on my coffee cup. Not because I’m afraid. Because the way she says Luciano—his first name, familiar, possessive—makes something hot and sharp flare behind my ribs that I didn’t know lived there.
“And you.” Charmaine takes another step. Close now. Close enough that I can smell her perfume, something heavy and floral that’s nothing like old books and Italian warmth and clean cotton. “Some hick farm girl from nowhere? You think you’re what he needs? Luciano Salvatore could have anyone.”
The quad has gone quiet around us. More students have stopped.
A cluster near the science building, two girls on the path behind Charmaine, the boy on the bench now fully watching.
This is what Charmaine wanted—the audience, the public spectacle, the stage where she can perform her outrage and make me small.
I look at her.
She’s beautiful. Striking in a way that demands attention, with cheekbones that could cut glass and eyes lined in dark pencil and a mouth that knows exactly how to wound.
She’s everything I’m not—polished, sharp, dressed for battle—and she’s standing in front of me telling me I’m not enough for the man who pressed his face into my neck and shook and let me hold him through it.
Something settles in my chest. Not anger. Not hurt. Something quieter, something that feels like the moment you step off a porch into weather you’ve been watching through a window and discover it’s not as cold as it looked.
“I’m sorry you’re hurting,” I say.
Charmaine’s face flickers. A crack in the performance, fast, sealed. “Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry you’re hurting.” My voice is even.
Warm, even. The voice of a girl who grew up watching her father talk to frightened animals—calm, certain, no sudden movements.
“I can see that you care about him. And I understand what it feels like to want someone who doesn’t see you. I lived in that for two years.”
“You don’t know anything about—”
“But he’s not a trophy.” I don’t raise my voice.
I don’t need to. The quad is so quiet I can hear the breeze moving through the trees that are just starting to remember what leaves are.
“He’s not a name or a legacy or a dangerous man you can collect.
He’s a person. He’s the best person I’ve ever known. And I love him.”
The words come out the way true things do—from the place beneath thought, beneath planning, from the same place that said you’re the man who saved me on a garden bench with his fist closed around my circle.
I love him.
I’ve never said it out loud before. Not to David, not to Martha, not to the ceiling that looks like Iowa, not to Luciano himself. The word has lived inside me for so long that saying it now, here, to a stranger on a Tuesday, feels like setting something free that I didn’t know I was caging.
Charmaine stares at me.
Her mouth opens. Closes. The contempt on her face is fighting something, and losing, because Charmaine came here prepared for a fight—for defensiveness, for tears, for the satisfying spectacle of a small-town girl crumbling—and instead she got sincerity, and sincerity is the one weapon she has no counter for.
“You—” She stops. Her jaw works. The women behind her shift, uncertain, the audience realizing the show has gone off-script.
“I hope you find someone who sees you,” I say. “You deserve that.”
Charmaine’s eyes go bright. Not with tears—she’s not the kind of woman who cries in public—but with something that flashes through before she can catch it.
Surprise. And beneath the surprise, in the half-second before she rebuilds her armor: the look of a person who has just been treated with a kindness they didn’t expect and don’t know what to do with.
She turns on her expensive heel. The two women follow. They walk toward the campus gates, and Charmaine’s spine is rigid and her stride is fast and she doesn’t look back.
The quad exhales. Students start moving again. The boy on the bench goes back to his phone. The world resumes its normal business, and I’m standing on a path with my coffee going cold and my hand still resting on David’s arm and my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my wrists.
“Holy Toledo,” I whisper.
David is looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him during all our months of friendship. Something that looks like admiration and amusement and a deep, uncomplicated pride.
“Lively.”
“Burnes.”
“For a girl who doesn’t curse, you sure know how to destroy someone.”
A laugh comes out of me. Shaky, startled, real. The kind that hurts in the best way, like stretching a muscle that’s been tight for weeks.
“I didn’t destroy anyone.”
“You told her you hoped she finds someone who sees her. While she was trying to rip you apart in front of thirty people.” David shakes his head.
His grin has arrived, full and wide and David.
“That’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen a guy strike out on three pitches at the bottom of the ninth. ”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing. Total annihilation delivered with grace.” He picks up his bag. Adjusts his cap. “Also—did you just tell that woman you love Professor Salvatore?”
My face goes hot. My circle, which had started again on the coffee cup at some point during the conversation, speeds up.
“I need to go.”
“That’s not a denial, Lively.”
“Goodbye, David.”
“That’s also not a denial!”
I’m already walking. Across the quad, past the science building, past the bench where the boy has resumed his phone-scrolling. I just said I love him out loud, in public, on a Tuesday, to a stranger, and it’s true. It’s been true since before I had words for it.
I sit on my bed with the phone in my hand. The screen still shows Sunday’s message, still open, still unanswered, the word that has been living against my hip for two days.
Sposami.
I said the English of it today out loud, in public, to a stranger, and the sky didn’t fall. I didn’t combust from the sheer reckless honesty of it.
My circle moves on the phone case. Slow now. Wide. The rhythm of peace.
I look at his word, the language his heart speaks when his control fails, and I type one word.
Yes.