Chapter 10 #3
“Careful,” I warn. “He’s emotionally fragile today.”
Moises looks at the scooter. “Today?”
“Don’t start. He can smell judgment.”
“I would never judge Bruno.”
“Liar.”
“Yes,” he says, handing me coffee. “But with affection.”
I take the cup with my right hand. My left is tucked under the strap of my bag, fingers curled against the leather where he can't see them.
He sees anyway.
Moises doesn't look at my hand.
He looks at my face.
Worse.
“You didn’t sleep,” he says.
“I slept adjacent.”
“Livia.”
I shrug. “It’s my normal. Don’t worry about it.”
He knows about the accident. The public version. The clean version. The version that starts with a crash and ends with rehabilitation, because people prefer stories that behave like medical brochures. Injury. Treatment. Recovery. Progress.
He doesn't know that before the accident, there were two men.
He doesn't know I belonged to them in two different ways and somehow completely.
He doesn't know one of them was my husband, and the other was the man I should not have wanted and loved with the same desperate honesty.
He doesn't know that I am still legally tied to a man who has had years to release me and has chosen silence instead.
And I don't plan to tell him.
Ever.
That is what therapists are for, right? They listen to your past wounds in a controlled environment, write notes, offer breathing exercises, and don't propose over risotto—or worse, gelato.
I take a sip of coffee, burn my tongue, and welcome the distraction because physical pain is sometimes emotional pain with better documentation.
The morning shifts around us. People pass by with bags and dogs. A cyclist rings a bell as if bells have ever solved anything. From the café, the smell of warm cornetti drifts out, butter and sugar and ordinary life.
Moises’s thumb brushes the side of his cup.
“It’s a bad day for Bella?” he asks.
I should lie.
Lying is easy when everyone rewards you for it.
A bright smile, a small joke, a tidy little assurance placed in someone’s hand so they can walk away relieved.
It is performance, really. My motivation is simple: convince everyone I am fine so they can be comfortable.
So I can be useful. So no one looks too closely at the parts of my life held together by routine and nerve.
Still, I hear myself say, “Yes.”
Moises’s face changes only a little. That is one of his mercies. He never makes my pain perform for him.
“Then we go slow today.”
I laugh once. “That is adorable.”
“It was not a suggestion.”
“Careful. Bossy before eight makes you sound like a man with long-term intentions.”
His eyes stay on mine.
The joke slips between us and refuses to stay a joke.
Moises and long-term intentions are not theoretical.
They have been arriving quietly for months.
A drawer at his place. A toothbrush at mine.
Invitations phrased casually but placed with care.
His mother asked over dinner whether I preferred the church near the river or the one near the institute.
There are some lovely ones in Mexico City—and San Miguel de Ayende too.
And of course, Moises coughing so hard he nearly died in a plate of ravioli.
He has a ring.
I know he has a ring because I restored the little lacquered box for his aunt when she came to visit last spring.
She wasn’t subtle. I held the box in my hands for three days, touching up the hinge, polishing the worn corners, pretending I didn’t understand why Moises watched me with that cautious, tender look men get when they are trying not to scare the woman they love.
He has a future in his pocket.
I have a graveyard in mine.
What would I tell him if he asked?
Sorry, before you get on one knee, there’s a small administrative complication.
I am married. It will be eleven years next February.
Also, my husband and the man who used to look at me like he wanted to ruin anyone who hurt me both disappeared from my life after I was broken.
So yes, I would love more coffee, but marriage might be legally and emotionally crowded.
How pathetic is that?
No, worse than pathetic.
Cruel.
Moises deserves a woman whose past is not sitting between them with its elbows on the table. He deserves someone who can hear the word “forever” and not immediately wonder whose name she would be betraying by answering.
The truth hurts so much that I choose my lies instead. They don’t make me happy, not exactly, but they keep me moving through this life I have built. They keep the roof above me, the floor beneath me, the mornings arranged in manageable pieces.
A complacent future is still a future.
Some days, that has to be enough.
Moises smiles, but it doesn't reach the part of his face that knows me best. “Come. Before you insult me further.”
“Impossible. I haven’t warmed up.”
See, this is simple. This lie is easy to live, easy to manage with Bella and all the baggage I carry behind me.
Why complicate it with dreams and a past that forgot about me long ago? It’ll never come back—ever.