Chapter Six Renata Cole, No Relation #3
“You look tired in a different way than usual,” Dante said, finding me at the table that second evening, papers spread in the specific chaos of a mind that had been living inside someone else’s for too many hours.
“I am,” I admitted. “It’s strange, building a person instead of just a case.
I keep catching myself thinking like her, and then having to remind myself which side of this I’m actually on.
” I rubbed my eyes, feeling the specific fatigue of a day spent in someone else’s architecture.
“I think I understand her a little too well for comfort. That’s useful.
It’s also not a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. ”
“Then stop for tonight,” Dante said, gentle, closing the folder in front of me before I could protest. “She’ll still be there tomorrow. So will you, hopefully rested enough to keep seeing her clearly instead of just exhausted enough to start seeing yourself in her.”
“Sit with me a while first,” I said, “before you make me go up. I don’t want to be alone with her yet, even in my own head.”
He pulled his chair around the table’s corner, close, and didn’t reach for the folder again, just sat, present, the specific undemanding company I’d come to trust from him on the nights that needed it least dressed up as anything more complicated than exactly what it was.
“Tell me something that isn’t about her,” he said. “Anything. I don’t care how small.”
I considered it, letting my mind drift away from shell companies and academic papers toward something that belonged only to me.
“I used to have a plant,” I said, finally, surprising myself with how far back the memory reached.
“In my old apartment. A pothos, the kind that’s nearly impossible to kill, which was exactly why I bought it — I wanted something alive in that apartment that didn’t require more attention than I had to give it most weeks.
I named it nothing, watered it on Sundays, and somehow, in six years, managed to keep it alive through three moves and one particularly bad month I don’t like remembering.
I think about it sometimes. Whether whoever’s living there now kept it, or let it die, or never noticed it was worth keeping in the first place. ”
“Do you want a new one?” Dante asked, something quietly serious underneath the simplicity of the question. “For whichever house is next. I could have one here by tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” I said, and felt something unclench, slightly, at the specific ordinariness of the offer — no tactical weight to it, no threat assessment attached, just a man offering to replace a small, forgotten piece of a life I’d left behind because I’d mentioned missing it.
“Not because I need proof I can keep something alive. I think I just want something in this house that’s mine for no reason except that I chose it. ”
“Then you’ll have it,” he said, and that, more than anything else that long, strange day had produced, was what finally let me go up to sleep without her voice still running underneath everything.
He made good on it the next afternoon, arriving back from wherever the day’s errands had taken him with a small pothos in a plain terracotta pot, setting it on the kitchen windowsill without any particular ceremony, like it was the most natural thing in the world for a man running a shipping conglomerate and a war simultaneously to also remember, unprompted, a stray detail about a plant his — whatever we were now — had mentioned missing.
“It’s not the same one,” he said, unnecessary, watching me cross the kitchen to look at it properly.
“I know that. I just wanted there to be something green in this house that didn’t have anything to do with money or blood or any of the rest of it.
Something simple you could water on Sundays and not have to think about the other six days. ”
“You remembered the day,” I said, something catching in my throat that had nothing to do with the plant itself and everything to do with being heard that precisely by a man who ran his whole life on precision. “I only mentioned that once.”
“I remember most things you say,” he admitted, something almost sheepish under the usual composure.
“I used to think that was just diligence, the same instinct that makes me good at running a business. Lately I think it might just be that I’m paying attention to you the way I used to only pay attention to threats.
It’s a strange thing, noticing the difference. ”
I touched one of the leaves, gentle, feeling something settle that had nothing to do with Renata Cole or any of the danger still circling this house.
“Thank you,” I said, simple, and meant every unglamorous, ordinary inch of it.
“I didn’t know how much I needed something in this house that was just mine, for no reason at all. ”
“Then I’m glad I got it right,” he said, and left me there, watering a plant on a Tuesday instead of a Sunday because the day itself had suddenly stopped mattering as much as the fact that someone had actually listened.
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