Chapter 26 #2
I put on jean and a linen shirt. The cardigan Sofia gave me for my last birthday, which I have not worn enough because it is too soft, and I have not let myself have soft things often. Today I want to be a woman who is wearing soft things. I don't interrogate the impulse.
I look at myself in the bathroom mirror.
The woman looking back has been told for a decade that she is a survivor of a tragic accident in a relationship she imagined. She has worn that story like a coat. She has worn it so long that the seams have become her.
Today I have to become someone else, I just don’t know who or how this will end.
I stare at her until I am sure.
She nods.
In the kitchen, I pour coffee into a chipped white cup and sit at the small table by the window like a woman who has every intention of behaving normally.
Florence has other plans.
Florence is never gentle in the morning.
She wakes up loud, shameless, overcaffeinated, and dressed better than anyone has a right to be before noon.
Church bells crash through the air. A scooter whines around the corner like it has a personal beef with the laws of physics.
Somewhere below, a man shouts at a delivery driver with such operatic betrayal that I briefly wonder if the van killed his firstborn or merely parked too close to the curb.
The basil plant on the sill has surrendered to the glass. I should water it. I should do many things. Stretch. Eat something with protein. Stop letting my life be run by fear, old men, beautiful liars, and whatever curse God put on women who fall for men with dangerous hands and tragic eyes.
Instead, I drink coffee that tastes like regret and burnt almonds.
The light comes in anyway.
It slides across the table. Finds the cracks in the wood. Find my fingers wrapped around the cup. Finds Bella resting beneath my skin, quiet for now, the tremor curled in my left wrist like a secret that learned to breathe with me.
The day is going to happen whether I am ready or not.
Rude, honestly.
I push away from the table before I can talk myself out of it, cross the room, and take the new phone from the nightstand.
It feels expensive. Sleek. Too clean for my life.
I hold it in both hands.
There is a ridiculous, humiliating part of me that expects it to ring the second I touch it. Like the phone knows. Like it understands that some names do not sit inside a device quietly. Some names take up space. Some names turn plastic and glass into a living thing.
I open the contacts.
There is only one.
Creed.
My thumb hovers above it.
My pulse does something dramatic and unnecessary, because apparently my body is still auditioning for a tragedy I didn't agree to star in.
But I refuse to call.
I am absolutely not going to call.
Calling would be pathetic. Calling would be desperate.
Calling would be exactly what a woman does when she has spent ten years pretending she buried a man only to find out the grave was empty, the dirt was decorative, and the idiot in question might still be breathing somewhere with all his terrible beauty intact.
So I do not call.
I type.
Which is different—barely.
I type, then delete, then type again, because self-respect is a flexible concept before noon.
I have your number again.
I stare at it.
Awful.
Too . . . bare. It’s a lot like standing in front of him with my ribs pried open and saying, Look. See what you left behind. See what I turned into while you were gone.
So, of course, I delete.
I try again.
Florence is dark already.
Which I’m aware makes no sense. It is morning. Sunlight is spills across the floor. A woman on a balcony across the street is watering geraniums in a silk robe, as if she was born for a perfume ad. A tourist is laughing below, too loud and too free.
I'm not, this morning, in the business of writing tragic little poems to a man who might have abandoned me ten years ago.
“Might have” is the key phrase.
Today, I delete it.
Then I sit there with my thumb hovering above the screen, and there it is again.
That tiny, poisonous mercy.
Might have means there is room for a story. For an explanation. For a door, I swore I sealed it with every scar he left behind. It means my anger has to share a room with hope, which feels unfair, frankly, since anger is at least honest enough to arrive with a knife and not flowers.
Bella twitches once in my left wrist.
Not panic.
Recognition.
I look down at my hand. My fingers are still mine.
The tremor is small today. Almost polite, which is suspicious.
Bella is never polite unless she is preparing to humiliate me later in public, preferably near glassware, hot coffee, or a man with excellent tailoring and catastrophic emotional availability.
“I see you,” I murmur.
For ten years, I have spoken to this tremor like it is a puppy I adopted the moment we met. As if it is not my body betraying me, but my body telling the truth before I have the nerve to say it out loud.
“Yes,” I add under my breath. “I know. We are going to have a day.”
Bella settles.
At least one of us can chill sometimes. Lucky her.
I look back at the message field.
My thumb moves before I decide anything.
I’m here.
Two words.
Small enough to survive.
Large enough to ruin me.
I stare at them until the screen dims, until the black glass throws my face back at me.
I look tired. Older than I feel, younger than I should after everything.
My hair is knotted at my nape. There is a crease from the pillow on one cheek.
My mouth looks like it forgot how to be kissed and is deeply offended by the neglect.
I don't send the message.
Not yet.
Still, I wrote it.
That has to count for something.
I lock the phone and press it against my sternum for one foolish second, as if I can absorb courage through technology. Spoiler: I can't. If someone ever invents that feature, women like me will bankrupt themselves and then organize the payment plan alphabetically.
The buzzer rings at five to eleven.
Moises.
Always early enough not to be late, late enough not to look eager. One of the many things I know about him. One of the many things that should make me feel warm, grateful, maybe even safe in the uncomplicated way women are supposed to feel when a good man keeps showing up.
Women are supposed to do many things.
I have failed at most of them with enthusiasm and annotated footnotes.
I let him up and open the door.
Moises stands at the threshold with a paper bag from the little bakery on Via dei Servi, his dark hair damp at the temples, his coat open, his expression already searching mine before he says a word.
I step back.
He comes in and kisses my cheek.
“You look tired,” he says.
Fortunately, he doesn’t say I also look haunted, underfed, emotionally compromised, and one terrible decision away from texting a man who could probably destroy my life with a single sentence.
Maybe he’s thinking it.
Let’s be honest. Tired is polite. Tired is what decent people say when the truth would require a chair, legal counsel, and perhaps a pastry.
“I’m going for mysterious,” I tell him. “Tired is my affordable version.”
His mouth curves, but his eyes stay on me. “Did you eat last night?”
“Half a sandwich at the institute.” I close the door behind him. “I don't recommend it as a wellness practice. The bread had the texture of a legal document.”
“Livia.”
“What? I’m serious. Very binding. Impossible to digest. Probably notarized.”
He doesn't laugh as much as I want him to.
That is the first cruel thing my heart notices.
Not that he fails me. Never that.
Only that I am standing in my kitchen with a man who buys me breakfast, remembers my favorites, kisses my cheek without taking more than I offer, and I am still thinking of Creed.
Of Creed’s controlled mouth. Creed’s perfect posture.
Creed sending a phone, security, and solutions instead of the one thing I have spent ten years starving for.
I looked for you.
I should have found you.
I never stopped.
And Hal—God, Hal—whose silence has always felt less like absence and more like a locked door with a man bleeding behind it. Hal, who watches everything. Hal, who trusts no one. Hal, who made danger look personal the moment anyone came too close to what he considered his.
Creed would hire a company.
Hal would learn the threat’s name.
I hate that I know the difference and how they complement each other.
I hate it more than my body does too.
Moises sets the bakery bag on the counter.
He moves around my kitchen with the ease of a man who knows where everything is, which should comfort me.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it terrifies me how quietly a person can become part of the furniture of your life while another man remains burned into the walls.
He takes a plate from the cupboard.
The blue one.
Because he knows I like it.
He opens the bag, and the scent rises first—warm pastry, butter, sugar, orange zest, custard still rich from the oven.
He places a sfoglia on the plate. Golden, fragile at the edges, dusted with powdered sugar that clings to the fluted layers like the pastry has wandered through snow and survived beautifully.
Then he puts the plate in front of the chair he knows I will choose.
He does all of this without speaking.
That is Moises’s gift. He doesn't fill the silence because he is afraid of it. He lets it exist.
I sit.