I find I don’t give a fuck about that.
Let me be visible. Let others eye me with suspicion that I’m getting soft. I’ll slit their throats without a blink, and they all know it. If they’ve forgotten, I’ll remind them.
The only trouble is, I don’t want that visibility to fall onto Lena and Opal. They are innocent and pure, and they don’t deserve this kind of bullshit in their lives.
Well, Lena’s not innocent or pure, but she still doesn’t deserve this kind of bullshit in her life. I’d feel guilty for putting a target on her back were it not for the fact that Esposito did it first.
The man is a problem. I like making problems disappear. He should have thought about that before he ran squealing to Marco.
THIRTEEN
LENA
I dropOpal off at school on a Tuesday morning and watch her run across the blacktop toward who I assume is Bea without a single backward glance. Not even a wave. Just the blue flash of her backpack and the sound of her voice cutting through all the other voices, already mid-sentence before she reaches her friend, already deep in whatever urgent thing she’s been saving up since yesterday.
Something about their hopscotch victory by the way they hop on one leg as they talk.
I stand at the gate for a moment longer than I need to. She doesn’t look back. She never looks back anymore—she used to, before she was sick, before the bad stretch, when she’d turn and find me with her eyes one last time before going in, as though checking that I was still there.
She doesn’t need to do that now. She knows I’m there. She’s stopped needing the confirmation.
That should feel like a good thing. It does feel like a good thing, at least a little bit.
But it also feels like watching a door close that you didn’t realize was open until the click.
I take the bus back, trying not to cry. The penthouse is quiet when I let myself in—the particular quiet of a weekday morning. No Opal, and Dario’s office door is open. Then water runs in the kitchen, and there’s the low sound of something on the stove. He’s cooking.
It’s funny. Before living here, if I came home and heard sounds in my apartment when I came in, I would have backed out and called the cops. Not that they would have shown up in my neighborhood, but I still would call out of a sense ofthat’s what you’re supposed to do.
But walking into this apartment, my first thought is not,Get out!
It’s,Oh, I wonder what Dario’s up to now.
Strange that I feel safer with the man blackmailing me into sex than I ever felt on my own.
I drop my bag, go to the kitchen doorway, and lean against it. He’s at the stove with his back to me, shirt sleeves pushed to the elbow, doing something with a pan that smells like butter and garlic and something herbal I can’t identify from here. He’s not aware I’m watching him, or if he is, he doesn’t show it. There’s something about the unselfconsciousness of the way he moves in this kitchen that I find I have to observe for a moment before I trust my voice to come out normally.
I should speak so I don’t startle him when he’s doing something dangerous with a knife. “You’re making lunch.”
He doesn’t turn. “You’re observant.”
“It’s ten thirty.”
“It’ll be lunch by the time it’s ready.”
I sit at the kitchen counter. He’s making something with pasta and what turns out to be a quick sauce that involves more technique than it looks like. I watch him deglaze a pan, and my understanding of what’s happening in that skillet is entirely surface-level. I can cook, but he’s a cook.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I look at it and then look at it again. Are they serious? “I got a job offer.”
He turns at that. “Tell me.”
I tell him as I scan the email. “Peters Logistics. Downtown office. Junior supervisor. The salary is… holy shit. It’s forty percent higher than the call center supervisor job would have been. I can set my hours. An actual title on a business card.” I can’t read the rest because my hand is shaking.
“That’s one hell of an upgrade.”
I nod. The HR manager who called said they’d had three rounds of interviews before they found my application, and it was the strongest in the pool, which she said like it was obvious, like of course it was the strongest, and I had to work not to make a sound when she said that.
Dario goes to the wine rack—it’s eleven in the morning, and he goes to the wine rack—and comes back with a bottle that I can tell from the label is not the kind of wine you drink at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.
