29. Claire
CLAIRE
“At first,” Matteo says, “you were a challenge to my ego.”
There it is, then.
He leaves the sentence bare, without an explanation in front of it to make it easier to receive.
I sit across from him on the little terrace behind the cultural room with my camera bag against my ankle and an iron table between us that rocks slightly whenever either of us touches it.
Matteo has already noticed.
I know because his eyes dropped to the uneven leg twice.
He has not fixed it.
That may be the strangest thing about the afternoon so far.
I fold my hands in my lap.
“Okay.”
Something small changes in his face.
“I thought you were wrong,” he says. “About men losing interest after they believe the work is finished. About me specifically. You said I would turn the list into an optimization problem.”
“I remember.”
“You were right about that part.”
I look at him.
“That must hurt.”
“Yes.”
It slips out so dryly that I almost smile.
Almost.
Matteo looks down at the table.
“I wrote the note because I wanted to remember exactly what you said, and because I wanted to prove I could do the things you thought men stopped doing.”
“So I was a project.”
“At first, part of me treated you like one.”
I asked for the answer. It still lands hard.
I pick at the edge of the camera strap near my foot.
Matteo does not rush to fill the silence.
A scooter passes somewhere beyond the building. The sound rises, fades, and leaves us with a bird making an unreasonable amount of noise in the tree beside the terrace.
I say, “When did that change?”
He looks at me.
“I do not know.”
I was waiting for a date.
Of course I was. This is Matteo.
He sees that on my face.
“I know that is an irritating answer.”
“Deeply.”
“I can give you moments. I cannot give you the moment.”
“Try.”
Matteo leans back slightly.
“Ravello started because of the list. I wanted to prove I could plan something for you without needing credit.”
I look at the rocking table instead of him.
He continues.
“Then we got lost, you insulted my directions for forty minutes, and I stopped caring whether any part of the morning counted.”
“It was not forty minutes.”
“It was thirty-seven.”
I stare at him.
His mouth moves once.
I hate that I know the exact almost-smile.
“Continue.”
“The cooking was not the list. The dance was not planned. The boathouse was not planned. By the time you gave me the photograph of Luca, Nico, and me, I had stopped thinking about whether I was succeeding at anything.”
“But you kept the note.”
“Yes.”
“We are getting there.”
“I know.”
His fingers rest flat on his thighs. His phone is nowhere on the table, his watch stays untouched, and there is no pen within reach.
He has given himself nothing to do with his hands.
That feels deliberate, which annoys me, except I also know Matteo well enough to know he probably had to choose it deliberately.
I hate how complicated everything stays.
He says, “The gallery was when I noticed the difference most clearly.”
“Because you moved the dinner.”
“Yes. I wanted to be there. I knew it would cost me time the next day and I did not care. Then I opened the note afterward and wrote it there.”
“Which made it look like evidence.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know that?”
“No.”
The bird screams again.
I glance toward the tree.
“Useful timing.”
“I agree.”
I look back at Matteo.
“When did you start doing things for me when I would not know?”
He is quiet for a second.
“The first one I remember clearly was after the publicity argument.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing dramatic.”
“That phrase from you has become suspicious.”
He gives me that one.
“I told my communications team not to monitor your work for opportunities to correct stories unless you asked. There were articles you never saw. I did not send them to you.”
I let the camera strap fall from my fingers.
“You never told me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you had just spent an hour explaining that my help became another way of putting me in the middle.”
I slide the camera strap through my fingers.
“So you stopped.”
“I tried to.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“No. I still wanted to fix it. I started keeping my hands off it.”
My thumb stops moving over the camera strap.
I look away.
The terrace wall is low enough that I can see a slice of street through the opening, two women walking side by side with grocery bags, one of them talking with both hands.
I watch them until they disappear.
“Then there were smaller things,” Matteo says. “The battery. Food when you were too tired to answer questions. Moving a glass away from your memory cards and asking first.”
“The sandwich had no tomato.”
“You hate tomato in sandwiches when you are working.”
“I hate tomato escaping from sandwiches.”
“That is what I said.”
“No, you made it sound like a moral position.”
“It is an engineering failure.”
I look at him despite myself.
That sounds like him again.
For one second, the space between us feels familiar.
Then I remember why we are here.
The almost-smile disappears too.
“When you were not there, I thought about you anyway,” he says. “Whether you had eaten. Whether the Japan hotel had fixed the luggage problem. Whether you would hate the stone in Milan. Whether you would photograph the hands at the knife workshop before the knives.”
I look down at the table.
“When was the last time you opened it?”
“After the gallery.”
I know that answer. He gave it to me the morning after everything broke, somewhere inside all the chronology I could not stand hearing.
“So the battery?”
“No note.”
“The sandwich?”
“No note.”
“Japan?”
“You told me yourself. Japan mattered to you, so I remembered it.”
I look at him. Verifying any of that would mean rebuilding the same miserable case file I left Bellamare to escape.
“You understand I cannot prove when you stopped using it.”
“Yes.”
“And you cannot prove it to me.”
“No.”
He leaves the answer alone.
I look away first.
“That does not erase how it started.”
“No.”
He leaves the word there.
I wait.
The bird shrieks again before he offers another sentence.
“So what am I supposed to do with that?”
“I do not know.”
I laugh once.
“Very useful today.”
“I am trying not to answer for you.”
“That must also hurt.”
“Yes.”
This time I do smile.
It is tiny and gone quickly, but Matteo sees it.
Of course he sees it.
He looks like he wants to keep it.
He does not reach for it.
I put both hands around one knee.
“Why did you keep the note?”
His eyes drop to the table.
This is the question I have been waiting to hear him answer without a timeline.
“For several bad reasons.”
“Good start.”
“Habit, first.”
I wait.
“I keep information. Work details. Repairs. Staff preferences. Things people tell me once that I do not want to lose. I put your list in the same system because at the beginning I thought remembering it was useful.”
“And later?”
“I stopped seeing what it was.”
I frown.
“That sounds convenient.”
“It is not meant to.”
“Then explain it better.”
He exhales through his nose.
“I kept opening the same place I had been using. I added things because they mattered to me. By then I was not thinking, Claire is a project. I was thinking, I do not want to forget this.”
“Which is still the problem.”
“Yes.”
This yes sounds rougher.
Matteo looks toward the doorway, then back at me.
“I thought remembering everything was a virtue.”
I do not say anything.
“I still think remembering matters,” he says. “I should have remembered what you told me without turning it into a file.”
I let the answer sit there.
“Did you know it would hurt me if I saw it?”
“No.”
“Should you have?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I kept looking at what I meant to do. I did not look hard enough at what you would see if you found it.”
A laugh nearly gets out.
“That is the most Matteo answer you could possibly give.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
The table shifts when I put my elbow on it.
One leg clicks against the stone.
Matteo’s eyes drop.
His hand moves an inch.
Stops.
The whole argument with himself happens in two seconds.
“Go ahead,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Fix the table.”
“Are you sure?”
“It is driving both of us insane.”
He crouches, folds a small piece of paper from the corner of a discarded gallery flyer on the ledge, and wedges it under the short leg.
The table stops rocking.
He sits again.
I test it with one finger.
“Annoyingly effective.”
“Yes.”
I test the table again, then catch myself leaning back in the chair.
Annoying.
I look at him.
“What happens if I can’t forgive you yet?”
Matteo does not move.
The question sits between us without any furniture left to fix.
“Then you cannot.”
“That’s it?”
“No.”
His voice drops.
“It will be awful.”
I blink.
He looks down once, then back at me.
“I want you back. I want your things in my house. I want you at coffee before you are willing to speak. I want to know what you shoot in Japan and what hotel makes you angry and whether you still think the second basil photograph is better.”
“I want you to come back to Bellamare because you choose to, not because I made leaving difficult.”
“Matteo.”
“I love you.”
He says it before I can brace for a safer sentence.
I stop breathing for one stupid second.
He keeps looking at me.
“I love you,” he says again, quieter. “I have for longer than I admitted to myself. I do not know whether that helps. It should not cancel what I did. You do not have to say it back.”
I look down at my hands.
There is still ink along the side of my hand from this morning.
A man tells me he loves me and apparently my brain chooses the ink.
Very on brand.
“What are you asking for?”
“A chance, if you want to give me one.”
“And if I don’t?”
His jaw tightens.
For the first time all afternoon, he looks exactly as unhappy as I feel.
“Then I go home.”
“And then?”
“I keep living.”
“That sounds grim.”
“It will probably be grim for a while.”
I almost laugh.
He continues before I can.
“If you decide you do not want this, I go home. I leave my friends, your work, and Bellamare out of it. I hate it, and I leave you alone.”
I blink hard once.
I look toward the street again.
The two women with grocery bags are gone. Somebody has left a bicycle against the opposite wall. A man in a white shirt walks past carrying a crate of bottled water.
The world is being aggressively normal.
I press my lips together.
“You deleted the note?”
Matteo’s expression changes.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Four days after you left.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You asked me not to contact you.”
The simplicity of it hurts.
“And it is gone?”
“Yes. I checked Recently Deleted.”
“Of course you did.”
For the first time, his mouth almost moves.
“Claire.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
I face him.
He looks tired now. Not polished, not controlled enough to hide it.
“I did not delete it so I could tell you I deleted it,” he says. “I deleted it because I did not want to use it anymore.”
“I know.”
This time I mean it.
Neither of us speaks.
The bird in the tree has finally shut up.
I wish it had not.
Matteo’s hand rests open on his thigh.
I almost reach across the table.
I keep my hands where they are.
Instead I remember the first morning on his terrace, ten minutes of silence before the world wanted something from him.
Then the double espresso and water, the wrong road, flour on his shirt, his wrist across a crowded room, the sandwich with no tomato.
And the phone note I never agreed to become.
None of those memories cancels the next one.
I stand.
Matteo stands immediately.
My camera bag catches against the chair leg when I lift it. I tug once, harder than necessary.
Matteo’s hand moves.
He stops himself.
I free the strap.
“Do you want help?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
I put the bag over my shoulder.
He waits.
I can guess what he wants to ask.
He does not.
“Matteo.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to go.”
His face empties, not cold so much as hit.
Then he nods.
“All right.”
For one stupid second, I almost ask him not to.
He reaches for his phone, slides it into his pocket, and looks at me once more.
“I meant what I said.”
“I believe you.”
“I am not taking it back because you asked me to leave.”
“I know.”
His hand closes around the back of the chair.
Then lets go.
“Goodbye, Claire.”
He does not dress it up with forever or see you soon.
Just my name and the door I asked him to use.
“Goodbye, Matteo.”
He walks through the corridor. I listen until his footsteps disappear.
He does not pause outside, send a message, or turn back as if my request is secretly a test.
I sit again because my knees have become unreliable.
The little table stays perfectly still.
Of course it does.
I put both hands over my face.
For a minute, I am angry at him for leaving.
Which is ridiculous enough that a laugh gets out.
It sounds awful in the quiet.
I lower my hands and look at the empty chair.
I hear myself on the path beside Bellamare weeks ago.
Stay when I give him every reason to leave.
And then the part I made sure he understood.
If I actually ask someone to leave, he should leave. That’s not a test.
I stare at the chair.
“Oh, hell.”
Because he honored that part too.