15. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
The first solo visit was a disaster.
Giovanni showed up with printed research, actual printed pages, stacked and highlighted, with Post-it notes marking relevant sections and citations in the margins.
He was wearing reading glasses. Reading glasses, perched on his nose like a professor, which was absurd because Giovanni Ferraro had perfect vision and had definitely never needed glasses for anything in the five years I’d known him.
“What’s that?” I asked from the doorway.
“Research.” He shuffled the papers. Adjusted the glasses. “Infant development, zero to six months. I found some discrepancies in the literature, but the consensus seems to be-”
“Giovanni.”
“-that this age is primarily about attachment formation and sensory development, with particular emphasis on-”
“Giovanni.”
He stopped. Looked up at me. The reading glasses made him look different, softer somehow, more human. Like an extremely dangerous man who had wandered into a library and forgotten to leave.
“You’re overthinking this,” I said.
“I’m being thorough.”
“You’re being insane.” I stepped aside, let him in. “He’s a baby. You hold him, you feed him, you change him when he needs it. You don’t need a bibliography.”
But watching him with Nico was like watching a hostile takeover in miniature.
He studied the swaddle technique from a video on his phone, brow furrowed, replaying the same thirty-second tutorial four times before attempting it himself.
His sleeves were rolled up, his forearms exposed, covered in ink I didn’t recognize, new tattoos he hadn’t had a year ago, intricate patterns I couldn’t read from across the room, and his movements were careful.
Precise. The movements of a man who was used to handling delicate things, but not things that wiggled.
I shouldn’t have been cataloguing him at all.
I was aware, in a distant clinical way, that it was beneath me, that a grown woman with a mortgage of grievances against this man didn’t get to lose the thread of a sentence because he’d bent his head over our son with that unfamiliar new ink running up his arm.
But I couldn’t read the ink from across the room, and I wanted to.
It was everything wrong with us, in miniature.
I wanted to cross the room and read my ex-husband’s skin with my fingers, I hated myself for it, and I stayed exactly where I was so I wouldn’t.
“The second fold goes under,” I said from the doorway.
“I know the second fold goes under. That’s what the video-” He looked down at the swaddled bundle, which had somehow become a burrito shape that bore no resemblance to the video’s demonstration. “This is wrong.”
“Yes.”
“Where did I-” He started unwrapping. Nico made a sound of complaint. Giovanni froze like he’d triggered an alarm. “What was that? Is he hurt? Did I-”
“He’s fine. He just doesn’t like being unwrapped.” I walked over. Took Nico from his arms. “Here. Watch.”
I demonstrated the swaddle, quick, practiced, the muscle memory of four months making my hands move without thought. Nico settled immediately, cocooned and calm, blinking up at his father with those impossible blue eyes.
Giovanni stared at the swaddle like it contained the secrets of the universe.
“Do that again.”
I did it again. And again. And a fourth time, until Giovanni could replicate it with only minor corrections, his hands finally learning the pattern that had taken me weeks to master.
“There,” I said. “See? Not that hard.”
He looked at me. Looked at Nico. Looked back at me.
“You make it look effortless.”
“It’s not. I just practiced until it felt that way.” I settled Nico back into his arms. “That’s what parenting is. Practice and repetition and being okay with getting it wrong sometimes.”
His face changed. A softening, maybe. A crack in the careful composure he’d been maintaining since he’d walked through my door.
“I want to be good at this,” he said. Quietly. Almost to himself. “I want to - I need to get it right.”
I had to leave the room.
Not because of the words, though those were bad enough. But because of the image of him standing in my living room with reading glasses and rolled sleeves and a baby in his arms, looking at his son like he was the most important thing in the world.
It did something to me.
Something I wasn’t ready to name.
***
The visits became routine, and the routine became the problem.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, three to five.
He came exactly on time, which I’d expected.
What I hadn’t expected was that he’d be good at it.
Not the baby part, though he was learning that too, fast. The other part.
The part where a man who used to fill a room by dominating it now filled mine by paying attention to it, and to me, with a focus that should have been illegal.
He noticed things. That I’d started taking my coffee without sugar.
That the third stair creaked and I always skipped it.
That I’d rehung the kitchen art twice and still wasn’t happy with it.
He never made a show of noticing. He just let me catch him at it, one quiet observation at a time, until being watched that closely by Giovanni Ferraro had somehow become the best part of my Tuesdays, which was its own kind of disaster.
And he was funny. That was the truly unfair part.
Three years of marriage and I’d forgotten he was funny, the dry, quiet way he could land a line dark enough to level a room with a completely straight face while he burped our son.
He didn’t perform it. He aimed it at me, watched me lose the fight not to laugh, and looked quietly, insufferably pleased with himself every single time I lost.
He never overstayed, either. Five o’clock came and he got up, unhurried, and left.
Not because I’d trained him to. Because somewhere in that year I hadn’t watched, he’d decided he didn’t need to grab at me to keep me.
A man that sure of his own long game doesn’t cling.
And that was worse than clinging, because clinging I knew how to resist.
Once, handing Nico across the threshold, his hand closed over mine on the baby’s back and stayed a beat past the handoff, warm and deliberate.
He held my eyes while he did it, no apology in them anywhere, and I felt it travel up my arm and land behind my sternum before I could stop it.
I stepped back so fast I nearly dropped the diaper bag.
“Tuesday,” he said, as if nothing had happened. But he was smiling when he said it, and he knew exactly what he’d done.
The security detail was everywhere and nowhere. I’d catch glimpses sometimes, a car parked down the block, a man walking past who moved with too much purpose, but he’d kept his word. They stayed invisible unless I needed them, and I hadn’t needed them.
Not since the photographer.
***
The books started appearing two weeks in.
Not flowers. Not jewelry. Not any of the expensive, impersonal gifts I’d have expected from the Giovanni I’d married. Just paperbacks, left on my porch one at a time, one per week, each one with a single note in the margin of a specific page.
The first was a novel I’d read him in the garden, the summer I’d painted the shutters. His note, in that cramped handwriting I’d learned to recognize over three years, was on page 212: You did the voices. I never told you I loved the voices.
The second was a collection of essays I’d mentioned wanting but never bought. His note, page 89: You underlined this passage in your copy at the brownstone. I went back before the sale and photographed every page you’d marked.
The third was a poetry anthology. Page 47: You read this one at dinner once, when it was just us. I kept the restaurant open an hour late so you could finish the wine. You never knew.
I announced to the empty kitchen that I was donating all of them.
I shelved them in my bedroom instead.
***
The pattern started so quietly I almost missed it.
My porch light had been broken for a month. A short in the wiring, the landlord said, he’d get to it eventually, but eventually kept getting pushed back, and I’d gotten used to navigating the dark steps at night.
Then one morning, the light worked.
I didn’t think anything of it. Assumed the landlord had finally come through, made a mental note to thank him, forgot about it entirely.
A week later, the cabinet hinge, the one in the kitchen that had been loose since I’d moved in, the one that made the door hang slightly crooked, was suddenly smooth. Silent. As if it had never been broken at all.
Then the gate latch. The truck door that had been sticking. The loose board on the back porch, the one I’d been meaning to fix for months.
I stood in my kitchen, holding the suddenly-smooth cabinet door, and six years of the hall table reorganized themselves in my chest.
The drawer that always stuck. The leg that wobbled. The small accumulation of damage that I’d complained about and then forgotten, because there were always more important things to worry about.
Three years of marriage. Of that drawer opening smoothly in the morning, that leg standing steady, those small repairs that appeared like magic.
I’d thought it was the maintenance service. Staff, doing their jobs efficiently, keeping the house running without my input.
It was him.
It was always him.
Six years of 3 a.m. repairs. Of love spoken in a language I couldn’t hear. Of Giovanni fixing things in the dark because that was the only way he knew to say what he couldn’t put into words.
I found him on my porch that evening, fixing the mailbox I hadn’t even realized was broken.
“Stop.”
He looked up. Wrench in hand, sleeves rolled, the same new ink visible on his forearms. Something crossed his face, guilt, maybe. Or just the resignation of a man who had been caught doing exactly what he’d always done.
“The hinge was loose,” he said. “It was going to fall off in a month.”
“Stop. Fixing. Things.”
“Kylie-”
“The hall table.” My voice had an edge I hadn’t planned on.
Sharper. But this had been building for hours, ever since I’d stood in my kitchen and felt six years of understanding rearrange itself in my chest. “Say it. Say what you were doing. All those years, in the brownstone - the drawer, the leg, all of it. Say it.”
He went still.
Caught across six years. Caught across every silent repair, every midnight adjustment, every act of love he’d performed in secret because he didn’t know how to perform it any other way.
“Everything you left there,” he said. Quietly. Carefully. Like the words might break if he said them too loud. “Yes.”
I stared at him.
This impossible man. This infuriating, damaged, desperately trying man.
Who had spent six years loving me in a language I couldn’t understand, who had let our marriage die because he didn’t know how to love me any other way, who was standing on my porch with a wrench in his hand because fixing things was still the only dialect of love he was fluent in.
I had to walk away.
Had to turn around and go back inside and close the door before I did something unforgivable.
Like cross the room, put my mouth on the new ink over his pulse, and refuse to stop there.
I leaned my back against the closed door with my heart going too hard and my skin too warm for the room, and I thought, with real despair: this is going to be a problem.