Chapter 4 #2
The gap feels intentional. A test. Everything is a test with this man, I’m learning. Even oxygen in his vicinity seems to require his permission.
I push it open, holding my breath like I’m about to dive underwater.
Inside: a hallway that’s aggressively nondescript.
Beige walls. Beige tile. Beige existence.
Empty except for another door at the far end—because of course there is.
This isn’t a job interview; it’s a Russian nesting doll of anxiety.
Sister Margaret’s “Good luck” echoes in my head, less like encouragement and more like the ominous warning before the heroine enters the haunted house in every horror movie ever made. The subtext was clear: Don’t come crawling back when this fails spectacularly.
I approach the second door—metal again, heavier-looking. Three sharp knocks that sound like gunshots in the silent hallway. My heart is doing the cha-cha slide in my chest cavity.
The pause that follows is geological in length. Civilizations could rise and fall in this silence.
Then: “Come in.” Two words. Calm. Precise. Inevitable.
So I do. Because girls who sleep in shelters and wear other people’s discarded clothes don’t have the luxury of hesitation. Girls with twenty-one days until homelessness follow voices into unknown rooms.
I turn the handle and enter what I assume will be an office—some sterile corporate hellscape with filing cabinets and a sad fern dying in the corner.
Wrong again, Emmaleen. Wrong as always.
This isn’t an office. It’s a statement piece.
Dark hardwood floors gleam like they’ve never known the indignity of footprints.
A leather sectional—definitely not from IKEA—stretches across one wall, looking about as inviting as walking through a spider web.
Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the pathetic Riverview skyline like Giovanni personally owns each miserable building below.
The space is brutally minimalist. No family photos. No houseplants desperately seeking therapy. No evidence that a human being with actual emotions has ever existed here. Just clean lines, cold surfaces, and the overwhelming scent of espresso and unspoken judgment.
And there he is. Giovanni Bavga. Sleeves rolled with mathematical precision to his mid-forearms. Top buttons undone but somehow still radiating more formality than a royal wedding.
No tie, no jacket, just the kind of effortless perfection that makes my carefully curated thrift-store ensemble feel like I’m wearing a costume made of garbage bags.
He doesn’t acknowledge me. Just pours coffee from a stainless-steel French press with the focused intensity of someone dismantling a bomb. Every movement calculated, deliberate. Like caffeine is a sacred ritual and I’m the uninvited heathen who wandered into the temple.
My boots betray me with a squeak on his immaculate floor. My yellow cardigan suddenly feels like a hazmat violation in this monochromatic shrine to masculine austerity.
“Do you live here?” The words escape before my brain can tackle them to the ground.
Instant regret. The kind that makes your soul want to curl into the fetal position. Of course he lives here. Everything about this space screams Giovanni Bavga in seventy-two-point Helvetica.
I should say more. Apologize. Explain. But then his eyes lift to mine.
Slowly. Deliberately. And they’re terrifyingly empty.
No irritation. No amusement. No warmth. Just pure calculation.
I’ve been assessed, categorized, and filed under “irrelevant” faster than ’s algorithm recommends therapy books after you search “why am I like this.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice flat as a closed door. “But the offer has been rescinded.”
The world tilts. I grip the doorframe to stay upright. “What?” It slips out—cracked, thin, barely a word at all. Like maybe if I say it softly enough, it won’t count.
Giovanni sets the French press down with mechanical calm, as if this entire moment has been choreographed. “You’re late. Not just late. Eight minutes late.”
My heart stutters. “The restaurant was closed,” I blurt, words tumbling out too fast, too desperate. “I was here at seven forty-five, but—”
He raises a hand. Not a full gesture. Just a flick of his fingers, like I’m not worth the effort of a complete dismissal. It silences me harder than a shout.
“I don’t need eight-minute people,” he says, voice flat. “I need dependable people.” A pause. Then the kill shot: “And you, Miss Take, are not dependable.”
Miss Take. It lands like he’s been waiting to use it again. Like my entire life was just setup for this punchline. My cheeks burn. My brain blanks. Of course he set me up—no number, no access, no instructions. Just locked doors and an invisible line I didn’t know not to cross.
My thoughts spiral—three weeks left at the shelter. The bakery won’t rehire me. The hotel blacklisted me. I’m about to lose everything. Over eight minutes.
Eight minutes in a game I didn’t even know I was playing.
“I was here,” I say, voice like a rubber band about to snap. “I got here early.”
Giovanni doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t argue. Just lifts the mug to his lips and takes a slow sip, like my impending homelessness is a particularly bland Netflix documentary he’s half-watching. “And yet,” he says calmly, “here you are. Eight minutes late.”
Something in me breaks. Not gracefully. Not cleanly. Like a porcelain figurine thrown into a wood chipper.
“You didn’t tell me where to go!” The words erupt from me like I’m auditioning for the role of Unhinged Woman #3 in a psychological thriller. “You didn’t tell me anything! The restaurant was locked. Both doors. What was I supposed to do—materialize through walls? Pick the lock? Break a window?”
My arms flail in yellow cardigan semaphore, international distress signal for “woman having public meltdown.” I rant about the hours.
The fact that his luxury Lambo sat in the alley like a Bond villain Easter egg while I tried not to cry through plate glass.
Every word feels like evidence for my defense in the Court of Not My Fault.
But then—mid-flap, mid-rant, mid-collapse—it hits me. The cold, creeping realization that I sound exactly like the people I swore I’d never become.
My ex. My academic advisor who blamed the “system” when he forgot to file my scholarship renewal. Everyone who ever mistook their own failure for fate.
And worst of all—Giovanni’s right. He said 8 a.m. Monday morning. Not “meet me at the restaurant.” I assumed. I didn’t ask. I didn’t think. I saw the salary—$52,000 a year, $4,333 a month, almost $1,100 a week—and let every rational thought get steamrolled by desperation math.
I didn’t want a job. I wanted a rescue. I wanted a way out of the shelter, out of debt, out of the tote-bag life with the dead “Save the Bees” patch that used to mean something.
And now it’s gone. Not because he tricked me. But because I let hope fill in the blanks.
I stand there, deflating like a tragic dollar-store balloon. The quiet in the room is so thick you could serve it as a dessert special.
Giovanni tilts his head slightly—the kind of micro-movement that somehow transforms the air between us into something sharp and dangerous. It’s the head tilt of a predator who’s already decided how this ends, but is curious about how you’ll squirm on the way out.
“Did you,” he asks with terrifying precision, “even try to find out when Bavga’s opens on Mondays?”
My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. The goldfish defense strategy.
“Do you know anything about my restaurant at all?”
Each question lands like a professional boxer working a speed bag. No wasted motion. No unnecessary force. Just clean, devastating accuracy.
“Did it ever occur to you to ask?”
And there it is. The triple combo that leaves me intellectually KO’d on the canvas.
Because no, I didn’t. I just assumed the restaurant would be open because.
.. because why? Because I needed it to be?
Because the universe owed me a functional entrance and clear instructions after the cake-destruction incident?
He sets his coffee down with the kind of precision that makes me think he could probably perform neurosurgery with his eyes closed. Then he leans back on his heels—not relaxed, just... finished. Like he’s reached the end of a particularly disappointing book.
“My grandfather,” he says, voice low and even, “ran numbers out of a butcher shop in Cleveland. If you wanted in, you showed up early. No address. No instructions. You found the real door on your own.”
Oh. This isn’t a random anecdote about Family Business Ancestry dot com.
This is him telling me exactly how his world operates.
A world where nobody gets their hand held.
Where second chances are mythological creatures.
Where people who fail the first test simply cease to exist in institutional memory.
“You saw dollar signs,” he says, the words cutting clean through my self-justifications. “A way to pay off your debts. To everyone but me, apparently.”
And there it is—the truth bomb that obliterates my last defensive position. I did see dollar signs. I saw rent money and food that wasn’t shelter donations and maybe even a future where I wasn’t one bad day away from sleeping on a park bench.
I never saw him at all.
I take a breath, and suddenly I’m that girl who once wrote twelve pages on Taco Bell’s socioeconomic marketing strategy at 3:00 a.m. while hopped up on gas station energy drinks. Words spill out like I’m being waterboarded with my own anxiety.
“You’re right. I should have researched.
I mean, I once tracked the correlation between Mercury retrograde and Starbucks’ seasonal menu releases across three fiscal quarters.
I made a PowerPoint. With animations. Transitions that swooped and sparkled.
I color-coded the data points to match their seasonal cup designs and created custom graphs showing how pumpkin spice sales spike during certain astrological alignments.
I presented it to my roommate’s astrology club at 2:00 a.m. and they gave me a standing ovation. ”
He blinks.
I wait for a response, but silence is spilling out of him like a broken faucet that only drips awkwardness.
Say something. Put me out of my misery.
He doesn’t. Giovanni Bavga isn’t a prince. Men like him don’t save women. They claim them. Consume them. Devour, undo, and ruin them.
So what else can I do but keep spamming him with my irrelevant thoughts?
“But your restaurant? Something actually relevant to my life right now? Basic operating hours that would have prevented me from showing up like some desperate, unprepared mess? Nope. Total fail. Catastrophic oversight. I apparently saved all my investigative skills for completely useless trivia instead of, you know, the one thing that might have made me look competent in front of you.”
We stare at each other. His indifference crashing into my desperation.
Come on, bro. Throw me a fucking bone!
“I’m usually so detail-oriented. I can tell you why birds started getting the worm early – did you know that proverb dates back to 1636?
Something about medieval plowmen? I once spent three days tracing the etymology of that phrase through seventeen different historical texts just to win an argument with my roommate about whether it was originally about actual birds or just a farming metaphor.
I created a timeline with primary sources and everything.
The library staff knew me by name because I kept requesting obscure linguistic journals from their special collections.
I even contacted a professor at Oxford who specializes in seventeenth-century English colloquialisms. All this research energy, all these obsessive tendencies that could have been channeled into something useful like, oh I don’t know, checking your restaurant’s hours or preparing for this interview properly.
But no, I chose to become an expert on avian-based idioms instead of securing my financial future. ”
Nothing? Nothing? How in the hell does he not react to an utter meltdown about ancient vernacular? I can’t take it. My filter completely dissolves. My internal monologue bursts forth into being like a ghost from another dimension being made manifest upon the striking of the witching hour.
The carefully constructed dam between my thoughts and my mouth crumbles entirely, words rushing out in a torrent that I’m powerless to stop.
It’s as if the pressure of this moment—the weight of Giovanni’s silent judgment, the desperate need for this job, and my own mounting anxiety—has corroded whatever thin membrane usually separates what I think from what I say.
Each syllable spills out unchecked, unfiltered, unrestrained, flowing directly from the chaotic whirlpool of my mind straight past my lips without so much as a courtesy pause for editing or social appropriateness.
Finally—I get to the point.
“Look.” I blow out a breath, creating a wind so forceful, my hair flutters up into the air. “I don’t unravel,OK? I’m not a girl who unravels!” I gesture at myself with both hands, full theater-kid energy now, “I ravel the fuck out of things. I get shit done. I—”
I… kind of give up.
Because the silence is stretching between us like some kind of psychological taffy, and I’m running out of oxygen and sanity in equal measure.
I rewind back to the beginning. Square my shoulders. Tilt my chin up. And wait for my judgment while Giovanni Bavga watches me with all the emotion of a security camera.