LENA
TWENTY-NINE
The weeks after Marco’s death are strange.
I feel it in the way Dario moves through the apartment. It’s the way he answers the phone, and the calls that come in at odd hours, and the ones he takes in his office with the door closed.
Strange outside it too, in the city—there’s something different in the texture of things for about a week. An absence where a presence used to be. Maybe it’s in my head, I don’t know. But then it resolves back into the ordinary.
There’s nothing that points to Dario. Nothing that points to anything. Just the city resuming. I don’t even see anything about Marco in the news.
It’s oddly peaceful inside the penthouse, like there’s less pressure in every direction.
I’ve been learning the contours of his world the way you learn a new landscape—not with a map, but with repeated exposure until the shapes become familiar.
I know which calls he’ll take standing at the window in his office, and which ones he closes the door for.
I know the difference between the two-word text responses that mean something routine and the ones that mean he’s going to be out.
Ed Esposito now shows up on Tuesday afternoons and sits in the kitchen with bad coffee he brings for himself and a legal pad, and afterward, Dario is always in a better mood, which I find genuinely baffling.
One day, I can’t take it anymore. I snap at Dario, “You do remember this asshole tried to kill me, right?”
Ed grimaces. “Never wanted to.”
“Do you think that makes me feel better about you being in my home?” It does. But I’m not telling him that.
“I could apologize again, Ms. Swan, but I doubt you’d hear that. All I can say is that it’ll never happen again. And since the moment I swore loyalty to Dario, you and yours fall under my protection too. For what that’s worth.”
Dario doesn’t smirk, but I get the sneaking suspicion he wants to, because he also knows that was a pretty good answer.
I glare at Ed. “Your protection? The man who couldn’t kill an office worker whose never been in a real fight in her life? I’m not sure I want that kind of protection.”
Dario snorts, and his shoulders shake while he tries to hold back his laughter.
Ed’s face goes red. “Well. You’ve got me there.”
Dammit. He’s gotta stop being likable, or I might end up liking that asshole too.
What I know most clearly is that Dario means what he said. Not on faith—I stopped taking important things on faith long before any of this.
I know it because I watch him work. The decisions he makes and the ones he declines to make tell me more than his words ever could.
He talks about the neighborhood the way I’ve only heard a handful of people talk about it—like it’s a place that deserves better than what it has, like the people in it are real people with real stakes, like the problem isn’t poverty itself but the particular machinery that keeps poverty in place and who benefits from running that machinery.
“You sound like a politician.”
Ed smiles. “Thanks.”
“Most people would think that was an insult.”
“Did you mean it as an insult?”
“Teasing mostly.”
That smile stays in place.
Dario has started going after that machinery. Quietly, methodically, the way he does everything. He doesn’t announce what he’s building. He just builds it, and you see the results.
Pritha mentions at the end of a Tuesday meeting that a landlord on Archer Street has suddenly reached an agreement with his tenants regarding the heating situation. She says it like it’s surprising. I nod and say that’s great and type it into my notes, and don’t mention that I know why.
Opal is thriving. She’s been thriving for months and keeps thriving, as though her setpoint for the world has been permanently upgraded and she’s simply operating at the new level.
She and Bea are still inseparable. She’s learning to whistle with two fingers, which she practices for exactly ten minutes every evening with great determination and spittle.
She has also developed opinions about wedding flowers, which she offers at breakfast, unprompted.
“White ones are boring,” she says one morning over cereal.
“What would you choose?”
She considers this seriously, her spoon paused mid-air. “Rainbow colors. All of them.”
Rainbow flowers it is, then.
Not long after the flower conversation, she slides a drawing across the kitchen counter toward me without ceremony. “My new family.”
It’s our apartment—she’s been drawing it from different angles for months, and she’s gotten much better at the scale of it. This version shows the living room with the bookshelves, the big window, and the city view that she’s been refining since the day we moved in.
Four figures. Not three.
Mama, labeled in her careful handwriting, standing at the kitchen doorway.
Herself, labeled with a small pencil icon.
Dario in the armchair, the book in his hands.
And in the corner near the window, rendered in careful black crayon with a small diamond collar—she used glitter glue she’s not allowed to use without supervision for that.
“We don’t have a cat, Opal.”
“We don’t have a cat yet. He’s black. His name will be Rainbow.”
I don’t even know if Dario likes cats. Or if he’s allergic. But I have a feeling he’d figure out a way around either issue. I stand at the counter and look at this drawing for a long time. Opal knew he was our person from the start. I really should start listening to her better.
I take the drawing to Dario’s office.
He’s on a call. He holds up one finger, and I wait in the doorway, watching him. He’s in the chair he uses when he’s working rather than the one he uses when he’s thinking. When he’s working, he sits forward. When he’s thinking he leans back. Each chair has its use.
Right now, he’s forward, taking notes on a legal pad, listening to something he finds interesting. He hangs up, and I walk in and set the drawing on the desk in front of him without saying anything.
“You drew me a picture? You shouldn’t have.”
I snort. “Look what she drew.”
He looks at it for a while, reading each label, focusing on the cat. “We don’t have a cat.”
“We don’t have a cat yet. Apparently, she’s named our cat Rainbow.”
“He’s black.”
“I am aware.”
He picks up the drawing and looks more closely. He reads the text underneath the cat. He sits with it for a moment longer. “Where do you get a good cat?”
“Couldn’t tell you. Any animal I ever had came from a shelter.”
“I’m going to find out where to get a good one. There has to be a store with designer cats.”
I snicker. “I’m not sure if you can find designer cats—”
“There’s designer everything.”
Two days later, I find a small folder on the kitchen counter with three pages of printed research on Maine Coon cats, their temperament, their appropriate diet, and the top-rated veterinary practices within four miles. The cat hasn’t been acquired yet.
I can’t believe he’s taking it this seriously. But it also warms my heart that he’s so determined to get this right for Opal.
She finds the folder on the third day. She sits at the counter and reads it with great seriousness, annotating in the margins in crayon. She adds a question mark next to Maine Coon and writes in her big block letters “OR JUST A REGULAR CAT, HE DOESN’T HAVE TO BE FANCY.”
Over after-dinner wine, post-Opal’s bedtime, Dario asks, “Is she mad that I wanted to get a nice cat for her? I can’t tell.”
“No. I’m pretty sure she just wants a cat and sees all of this hullabaloo as time between now and when she has her cat.”
He considers this. “So some things require the best version, and other things, less so?”
I nod. “A regular black cat named Rainbow would make her happy.”
“I’ll have to adjust my expectations. Can you help me with that?”
“Whenever I get the chance.”
He takes the drawing and tapes it to the wall behind his desk, above the stack of other drawings Opal has been producing and leaving around the apartment since the first week she moved in.
A small accumulating archive—crayon and colored pencil and the occasional marker, the proportions improving steadily with every iteration, the stories they tell getting more complex.
Our family, as interpreted by a five-year-old who has been right about all of it from the beginning and has the artistic documentation to prove it.
I start looking at wedding venues that weekend.
Not obsessively—I have a job, a degree program, and a child who has decided she needs to know everything about flower girl traditions across different cultures before the day arrives.
I open a tab on my laptop at the kitchen counter on a Saturday morning while Opal is at Bea’s house.
Dario reads over my shoulder at some point. He studies the list for a moment, his coffee in one hand. “Pick anywhere on earth.”
I laugh. But he frowns. “Wait, you were serious?”
“I want you to be happy. Wherever that is.”
I take a breath, already having an idea. “I want somewhere real. Not somewhere impressive. Somewhere that means something.”
He nods and goes back to his coffee, and I sit with the list and think about what that means—what place means something, what place is ours—and I realize I already know.
It’s not a venue you book from a website.
It’s not somewhere impressive. It’s somewhere you keep coming back to because it’s where things have happened, where things have been decided, where the story actually is.
I close the tab.
I know where I want to get married.