“I’m always serious.”
I go to the kitchen because I need to be in motion. Pace. Stand still. Pace some more. I stand at the window and look at the street in the quiet of the early morning. The streetlamps, the parked cars, the laundromat across the way that I have never once seen closed. A woman is folding something large and white inside it. Another person is asleep in a plastic chair. The ordinary surreal of the city at this hour.
I run the numbers.
I’ve been running them for months. What I owe Ed versus what I earn, mapped against his rate structure. What I’ll owe in six months if nothing changes. What I’ll owe in a year.
The numbers only get bigger.
The medical costs. The clinic visits, the prescriptions, the ER trip I still can’t think about directly. What happens if Opal keeps cycling, if the strep doesn’t resolve, if it becomes the thing the clinic doctor mentioned once in passing and I’ve been trying not to Google ever since.
What if she ends up with complications? Hearing loss? Brain damage from all the fevers? Or worse?
And then, there’s Ed.
Ed has been coming around more. The first several months, it was about the payment, businesslike. Then something shifted. He started showing up without a specific cause. Started finding reasons to stand a little longer in the hallway, to make the conversation drift toward things it has no reason to drift toward.
Three weeks ago, he used the wordarrangement, and the smile that accompanies it is the kind of smile men use when they wantyou to know that the no you’ve been saying is only a temporary condition they’re willing to wait out.
I’ve been saying no. I’ll keep saying no. But I’ve also been lying awake running calculations on how long I can keep saying it and what comes after that, and the answer I keep landing on isn’t one I want to live with.
Between Dario and Ed, that’s not even a question. That’s just math.
But math isn’t the whole story, and I know it. Dario is an unknown. He knows things he shouldn’t know and finds them without asking. He moves through the world with the quiet ease of someone who has done things he’s not advertising, and I’m not naive, and I’m not a kid anymore.
I know what a private-practice doctor who volunteers at free clinics and can pull my illegal loan notes means for the full picture of who he is. I know that picture has some dark corners. He’s somehow connected to Ed, and those connections aren’t good.
I’m also aware that I’m considering moving into that picture for three months, with my daughter, on his terms, because I don’t have any good options.
Three months under someone else’s roof is not nothing. Three months belonging to someone, even voluntarily, even with a clear negotiated end date, that’s real. That changes things. That’s a thing you can’t fully undo once you’ve agreed to it.
But 104.1 blinks at me in the dark.
“Okay.”
“I’ll come by in the morning. We’ll work out the logistics.”
We go through the practical things. When, what to bring, how to explain it to Opal in a way that feels like an adventure rather than a crisis. His voice stays even throughout, and I match it, because that’s easier than feeling what I’m feeling, which is some combination of relief and fear and something I don’t have a clean name for yet.
What the fuck am I agreeing to?
Full-time medical care for Opal.
That last thought clears away the cobwebs in my mind. I know very little about Dario. Dr. Dario Spinelli. Who has a private practice so successful that he has the time to volunteer for his community. Who has a penthouse large enough to house us and him.
Who has morals flexible enough to ask for me in exchange for my daughter’s health.
After we hang up, I stand in the kitchen for a while. Opal pads out of her room in her socks at some point. She does this, appears in doorways when she can’t sleep, doesn’t call out, just materializes. I open my arms, and she climbs into my arms and fists her hand in my shirt and closes her eyes.
She’s still warm. But she’s not shaking.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her. I believe it now more than I did an hour ago.
SIX
DARIO
I’m nota man who second-guesses himself. I decide, I execute, and I move forward. I’ve built two careers on the principle that hesitation is a liability.
