“Fine,” he grumbles. “She can have some time. We’ll deal with it another way.”
“There is no other way. You don’t have business with Lena. You don’t have business with her daughter. That’s permanent, not provisional.” I release him, largely because I refuse to go home smelling of cheap cologne.
He laughs once—flat, bitter, the laugh of a man swallowing something he didn’t choose to swallow. “We’ll see.”
“The fuck we will?—”
“Marco will have your ass if you keep this bullshit up, and you know it, Spinelli. I’ll let your little girlfriend have some peace.” He holds his hands up as he backs out of the alley. “For now.” Then, he disappears into the park before I can catch up to him.
From where I’ve parked, I can see the park path. Lena and Opal are already gone. I sit in the quiet and think through what just happened, which was straightforward.
Ed needed to understand the math had changed. He understands it now. That’s all that matters.
What I sit with longer is the surveillance log—the school, the park, the patterns. He’d already moved past debt collection into something else. What would another month have looked like, what might a Tuesday night on her old block have become, what would he have done to her?
I don’t finish that line of thinking because there’s no use in it. It didn’t happen. I’m here, and it didn’t happen. It never will.
What I don’t sit with at all, because there’s even less use in it, is the fact that I did this without Marco’s sanction. I went around him. I made a call about a situation using methods he’d consider organizational resources—my time, my read on the threat, my standing with the people whose goodwill makes a conversation like that one possible.
Marco didn’t authorize any of that. If he finds out—when he finds out, because Ed’s a goddamn rat when it comes to his fragile ego—there will be a conversation I won’t enjoy having.
Marco is going to be a problem. He’s been a problem I’ve been managing for years, and he’ll keep being one, and when the conversation comes, I’ll handle it the way I always handle Marco. Directly and without artifice.
We both know the score. We both know what I think of his so-called leadership. If this is what brings things to a head, so be it.
I put the car in drive and go home.
Lena is in the kitchen when I get there, making something with garlic and lemon that fills the apartment with the smell of a place someone actually lives in. Opal is at the counter with a worksheet, tongue out in concentration, her sneakers dangling over the floor. Lena smiles when she sees me. “Welcome home.”
Those two words strike something in my core. “Uh, thanks.”
I put my keys on the hook. I wash my hands. Nobody asks me to explain anything, and I don’t offer, and we eat dinner while Opal tells us about Alanda’s color game and how she explained what it means to be colorblind.
After dinner, Lena does the dishes, and Opal draws at the counter, and I review notes at the kitchen table. The three of us exist in the same space, doing separate things without it requiring any coordination at all. I’ve been noticing things about this apartment lately in a way I didn’t before—the way a room feels different when it’s occupied by people who are at ease in it, the way the evening feels more comfortable now than before they moved in.
It’s a normal evening. Or what I’m starting to understand normal can mean.
NINE
LENA
I’ve started lettingmyself look.
The first week, I kept my eyes in the middle distance—took in the broad strokes, didn’t push on the details. That felt like the right strategy for a woman who has walked into an arrangement with a man she doesn’t fully know, in a situation where knowing too much could be its own liability. But it has been enough time to form habits, and one of mine is paying attention, and I can only suppress that for so long before it reasserts itself.
So, I start looking.
The silences are the first thing I clock. They come on abruptly, almost always right after he’s come out of his office. He’ll be fully present—eating, listening to Opal explain something, making coffee—and then his phone buzzes, or he steps away to take a call, and when he comes back, the silence is there. Flat and hard, a wall that went up while I wasn’t watching.
It lifts eventually. Sometimes in minutes, sometimes not until the next morning. I start reading them like incoming weather,adjusting my trajectory accordingly. When he’s having a wall night, we don’t have sex.
I’m glad for it. I don’t know how to touch someone made of cold cement.
The visitors continue to come on some evenings. They arrive, stiff, injured. I’ve stopped offering any kind of hospitality. I’d rather they didn’t notice me at all. Thankfully, the path from the front door to Dario’s office gives them no reason to see me or Opal, most of the time.
I don’t ask Dario about them anymore either. His world is not my world, and it’s probably best for all of us that it stays that way.
That doesn’t stop me from wanting to ask questions. I’m just not sure how to strike up the conversation. Sometimes, it feels like Dario doesn’t want to talk about anything at all. Other times, he’s perfectly jovial and congenial, and it feels like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation. I never know which one I’ll get, so I keep my questions to myself.
