He held my gaze, as if deciding whether there was anything left to say that would actually help. Apparently deciding there wasn’t, he only gave one short nod in return and headed for the door.
The apartment went quiet and I opened my laptop.
“Are you okay?”
I looked up to find Olivero standing in the doorway, his face uncharacteristically grave. On anyone else it might have looked natural. On him it was unsettling.
“Mono no aware,” I said before I could stop myself.
He frowned. “Mono…what?”
I looked back down at the coffee cooling in my hands. “It’s a Japanese expression. My uncle once told me there are some things you cannot understand properly until life gives them to you.”
Olivero said nothing, which I appreciated more than whatever joke he was clearly strangling for my benefit.
“Did you know,” I went on, “that cherry blossoms only last a matter of days? The whole world stops to look at them because everyone knows it won’t last.”
Olivero crossed the room and sat opposite me, his expression went from confusion into something sadder and more patient.
“I know you haven’t slept in nearly three days,” he said carefully, “but you are going to have to help me a little here.”
I let out a breath that might once have been a laugh.
“There is a kind of sadness built into beautiful things. There are moments with certain people where you feel both at once,” I said more quietly. “Joy sharp because it already carries loss inside it. Nothing has broken yet, but some part of you understands how much there is to lose.”
“Pietro…”
I shook my head. “Emily and I were never supposed to last. Not like this. Not in any way that could stay untouched by what I am. It was too beautiful, and maybe that was the first sign it could never remain.”
Olivero leaned forward slightly, forearms braced on his knees. “It doesn’t have to stop. You don’t have to make it stop.”
I looked at him then. “Don’t I?”
My own voice sounded strange to me, flatter than I felt.
“I knew the Albanians were dangerous. I knew taunting Adam was reckless. I knew better, and she got hurt anyway.” I swallowed, the words growing sharper as I said them aloud. “Not in some abstract future I could pretend I would handle when it arrived. Not someday. Now. Here. Because of me.”
At least the Albanian operation Besnik had dragged into this for the sake of one man's wounded pride was already being dismantled. My father had made clear that whatever personal arrangements existed between Adam Calloway and the Bashkim family ended the second we walked into that warehouse. Valon Bashkim was not a man who tolerated expensive mistakes, andBesnik had made one of the most egregious in recent memory. That problem, at least, would resolve itself. Men like Valon did not need our help punishing their own. And Emily would face nothing further from them.
Olivero watched me for a long second, the argument clearly still sitting on the edge of his mouth.
“I just think?—”
“No offense,” I cut in, “but my decision is made.” I pushed to my feet before he could try again. “I’m emailing the office now, and we’ll go home for Christmas as planned.”
“I hate when you sound like your father,” he muttered, standing too.
“That makes one of us.”
For once, he didn’t rise to it. He just nodded and headed for the guest room, giving me privacy that felt too much like pity.
The apartment went quiet, and I stayed where I was, both hands around the cold coffee, looking at nothing in particular.
I knew what I was about to do to her. Not to us, not to myself, not to some abstract future I could mourn cleanly from a distance. To Emily. To the woman who stood in my apartment three weeks ago and told me exactly what she needed, who laid out her terms with the precision of someone who learned the hard way what happened when she didn’t, who looked me in the eye and said if she asked me a question, I should answer honestly, and she would decide, and if at any point she said stop, I had to stop.
I said yes to all of it. Meant it when I said it. Still meant it now, in the specific, useless way a man meant something he was choosing not to honor.
She gave me the terms of how not to become Adam Calloway, and I was about to break every one of them.
