Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Livia
Now . . .
Bella is awake.
She has been awake since noon, which is unusual for her on a Saturday. Saturdays are usually slower. On Saturdays, my hand can sometimes pretend to be a hand without negotiation. Today, she came on at one and has not gone off.
The teaspoon in my coffee cup keeps catching the side.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
The small sound has become the soundtrack of my undoing. I have stopped trying to silence it because I am thirty-two years old, and apparently, today is the day my body has decided to testify against me in silverware.
Sofia called this morning to ask whether I was all right.
She has been pushing about the Saint Claire project, which is Sofia’s way of saying I know you are hiding something, Livia, and I am allowing you one final opportunity to disappoint me honestly.
Thankfully, someone called about the project, and I am a little off the hook.
Not fully. Sofia doesn't do fully off the hook.
She does probationary mercy with excellent eyeliner.
I told her I was fine.
I told her I had a deadline.
I told her I would see her Monday during our regular meeting.
Two of those three were lies.
That is what I do now. I play with lies the way other people play with house keys at the bottom of a purse—touching each one until I find the one that opens the version of the day I can survive.
I have been doing it since the accident.
Small lies. Necessary lies. Polite lies.
The lies I play so no one looks too closely at the woman I became when the woman I who didn’t come home.
I don't know yet whether I will see Sofia on Monday.
I don't know where I will be later today.
That alone should be enough to make me sit down and drink water like a sensible person. Instead, I am standing in my kitchen in Florence with a trembling hand, a cold coffee, and the very specific sensation that my life has been moved three inches to the left while I was not looking.
Fitz—Mr. Everhart, except he asked me to call him Fitz, which still feels like being invited to call a judge by his childhood nickname—said to let him handle everything. Avoid speaking about the Saint Claire matter. Get ready to leave on short notice.
Short notice.
The phrase has been living under my skin all morning.
Florence has taught me to measure time differently.
Not slowly, exactly. Italians are not slow.
Anyone who has watched a grandmother elbow three tourists aside for the last good tomatoes at the market knows that.
But Florence understands endurance. It lets light crawl across stone.
It lets espresso be three sips and still somehow an event.
It lets a person believe, for ten fragile years, that if she stands in one place long enough, the past might stop looking for her.
Now everything is urgent.
Now everything has a door.
Moises arrives on time, as usual.
The buzzer sounds, and I press the button before I am ready because if I wait for readiness, I will be found dead in this kitchen next to a fossilized bombolone.
As the lock releases downstairs, I realize something I don't want to realize.
I care for him.
I do.
But what we have is a routine.
A kind one. A tender one, in places. A Saturday routine with pastries, museum gossip, shared dinners, careful affection.
A routine that doesn't include the rush of wanting to open the door before he knocks.
A routine that doesn't make me imagine the next room, the next city, the next impossible adventure.
It makes me wonder if he feels the same.
It makes me hate myself a little for being in a relationship where neither of us has been fully giving or fully receiving, only placing small offerings on the table between us and pretending that was enough.
When he knocks, I call, “It’s open.”
My voice sounds too bright.
Of course it does.
Moises lets himself in and sets a paper bag on the counter.
“Pastries,” he says. “Marina was closing and gave me the last of the bombolone.”
“Thank you.”
“The strawberry one is for you.”
I look at him.
He looks back, expectant, kind, unaware that I am currently trying not to ruin his afternoon with the grace of a woman holding a loaded plate over a white rug.
I told him over the phone that I had something to talk about.
It’s important, I said.
I stretched that part. Important sounds organized. Important sounds like a document in a folder. This is not important. This is a fracture asking to become a sentence.
I have rehearsed this. I wrote three versions of the opening in a notebook and crossed all three out. I practiced in front of the mirror like a woman preparing to defend a thesis titled: How to Leave a Good Man Without Making Yourself the Villain, Though Regrettably You May Be One Anyway.
None of it works now.
Bella twitches.
I set the teaspoon down.
There is no time like the present, which is a horrible expression invented by people who have never had to detonate their own life before lunch.
“Something has come up,” I say.
Moises stills.
I press my lips together, gather what little courage I can find, and try again.
“From before I moved here. From—from the part of my life I prefer not to discuss.”
He doesn't move. His face changes in the careful way a man prepares to receive a hit and does the receiving before impact.
“Okay,” he says.
“I have to go back to the States.”
“When?”
I lift one shoulder. “Soon.”
Moises nods a couple of times.
He doesn't ask why.
For ten seconds, I am grateful with such force that it almost makes me cruel. Because he is generous. Because he knows where not to step. Because I have given him a map of closed doors for three years, and he has honored every single one.
Then he says, “Liv, is someone hurt?”
The kitchen goes very quiet around that question.
I stare at him and try to decide what I can give him. Enough, but not everything. Truth, but not the whole knife.
For ten years, I have lied to myself and to other people. I play with lies that make everyone around me feel better. I play with lies that let me sleep. I play with lies that make the morning manageable.
This should be easy.
After three years, he deserves more than easy.
“Yes,” I say.
The word scrapes on the way out.
“Someone has been hurt for a long time. He is going to be all right. I think. I hope. But it is not something I can stay here and handle from across an ocean. I have to be there. I have to be there for a while, and I don't know how long.”
“He?” The word is barely a question.
He hears the truth before I give it a shape.
I don't look away.
“Is he someone from your past?” he asks.
The second question lands closer to the skin.
I nod. My voice drops. “Yes.”
“Are you safe?”
I think about that for too long.
His eyes change.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m safe. I have help.”
“You need help from him or because of him?”
“We got help from people who care about him,” I say automatically.
I don't say Creed.
Not here.
Not yet.
“About me,” I add, because that is also true, and I don't know what to do with the fact that it is true.
Moises nods once.
His jaw works.
“Livia,” he says, “I won’t ask you to tell me more than what you believe is necessary, but this feels so unlike you.”
I almost laugh.
Not because it is funny.
Because I don't know what like me means anymore.
I reinvented myself because everyone praised reinvention when the alternative was grief.
I became a conservator. A provenance researcher.
A woman who restores damaged things with tiny tools and great patience, who can look at a cracked panel painting and know the difference between what time did, what neglect did, and what someone tried to hide.
I became useful.
I still don't know what happened to the old Livia.
The one who loved without apology. The one who wore a ring and believed paperwork could protect a vow from violence.
The one who let two men touch her left wrist in an East Village tattoo parlor and thought forever was a thing people could choose hard enough.
Bella is going at full speed now.
My hand on the edge of the counter has gone from a small, irregular shake to the rhythm she takes when something I have not allowed myself to feel finally clears the wall of my mouth and finds my body. I close my hand into a fist to make her less visible.
Moises looks at the fist.
Then at my face.
He crosses the room.
He doesn't touch me.
He stops at the corner of the counter, close enough that I can smell his cologne, the one he started wearing six months ago after I said I liked it once. He sets his palm flat on the marble next to my closed fist.
That is Moises.
Wanting to comfort me, then asking whether comfort has permission.
“Can I?” he asks.
I nod.
He covers my fist with his hand.
Bella keeps shaking inside it.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit because if I keep standing, I am going to become either too honest or not honest enough.
He pulls out the chair across from mine.
Not beside me.
Across.
That small distance tells me he already knows what this conversation is.
He sits and folds his hands on the table. He looks at me with an expression that is not pity, not anger, not the polished mildness of a man preparing a polite exit.
“I want to tell you something,” he says. “Then you can tell me whatever you feel comfortable with.”
“Okay.”
“I knew.” He pauses. His gaze drops to his hands, then returns to me.
“I knew there was something from the beginning. The first time we had dinner. The way you held your wrist when I asked about the tattoo. The way you have never said yes to coming to my parents’ house in Madrid.
I knew there was a room in you I wasn’t going to be allowed into. ”
I open my mouth.
He shakes his head, gentle but firm. “Let me say it.”
I close my mouth.
“I know because I’ve never told you about my wife,” he says.
Everything in me stops reaching for the next defense.
“She died with our child during childbirth.”