“Take off that robe and lie down.”
She gets a mischievous look that could launch a thousand ships. Then she peels the robe away and joins me in the sheets. “Now what?”
I turn out the lights, roll her onto her side, and spoon her from behind. “Now, we sleep.”
“You serious?”
“It has been a long and strange day, pet. I require sleep.”
She sighs in my arms, and it’s less than a minute later that I hear her breathing shift from normal to long, low breaths.
There are tough men in this city who cross the street if they see me coming. They know I’m nuts. They know I’m dangerous.
But this single mom of a sickly little girl, the woman who has nothing but her daughter in this world, finds absolute peace in my arms.
Maybe she’s the crazy one.
FIFTEEN
LENA
The parkon Saturday afternoon is the specific gold of a late afternoon, the kind that makes everything look slightly more like itself than usual. The grass is greener, the sky is a more definitive blue, the laughter of the kids on the climbing structure rings cleaner and brighter than it has any right to be.
Opal is at the top of the climbing structure with Bea, the two of them sitting up there like they own the city below them, which at this moment they probably feel they do. Princesses in the castle tower, or ogres fighting the wizards below, I’ve heard them play both.
I’m on the bench with my coffee and a paperback I’ve been carrying around for two weeks and only opened twice, watching them and not really reading or paying too much attention to anything. I’m doing that particular park-bench thing where you let your mind go soft at the edges and just exist in the warmth for a little while.
I’ve been doing more of this lately. More existing, less calculating. I’m not sure if that’s growth or complacency, andI’ve decided not to decide right now. These days, I get to enjoy moments here and there, and I’m relishing it.
I accepted the job offer from the logistics firm. I did it at the kitchen counter with Dario’s coffee maker producing something excellent in the background, and Opal eating cereal, and the whole morning feeling almost aggressively normal. I said yes and hit send and sat there for a moment with my phone on the counter and felt something I can only describe as solid. A floor that bears weight. I’ve been surviving on surfaces that don’t entirely hold for long enough that the solidity is itself a sensation worth noting.
Dario said congratulations without looking up from whatever he was reading. Just congratulations, flat and certain, the way he says things he means. Opal made him say it louder so she could cheer. He said it louder. She cheered.
Like we were any clustered family who received good news, while enjoying the morning. Like I’m not happily living with the man who blackmailed me into living with him.
I have the urge to call it Stockholm syndrome, but that’s just an old sexist term for what happened to that woman. It was made up by a psychologist to explain why she was trying to keep the police from interfering with a hostage situation—the shrink said she must have fallen in love with her captor, because why else wouldn’t she want their help?
Turns out, when the police were making moves to come into the building, the assailant got squirrely. It was the only time he was actively violent. Before their involvement, the hostages were about to be released. But when cops came, he was agitated, so she told them to back off.
And now we have a whole sexist term for something that only women get labeled.
Funny the way my thoughts float these days. I guess being relaxed will do that to a girl.
I’m thinking about this—about the morning, the job, about the fact that in just a few weeks our arrangement ends, and I have no clear idea what that looks like from where I’m currently standing—when I smell his cologne.
Not Dario’s. Ed’s.
It’s not a bad cologne, which is somehow worse. Ed Esposito settles onto the bench beside me with the easy, unhurried movement of someone who has planned this and is not in a rush. He’s wearing a spring jacket and a relaxed expression, and he looks, from any distance, like a friendly acquaintance stopping to chat. “Lena, you look good. The new place agreeing with you?”
My stomach turns over. He knows about the new place. Knew we’d be here. Knew my routine enough to meet me here. Snuck up while I was lost in thought.
“Ed. Hi.” My voice comes out steady. I don’t know how.
He’s watching Opal on the climbing structure, smiling the mild, benevolent smile of a man at a park on a Saturday. “She looks good too,” he says. “Healthy. You finally got her sorted out, huh?”
“What do you want, Ed.”
“Same thing I always want,” he says, still in the warm register, still watching Opal. “The money you owe me, Lena. Nothing complicated about it. But I want it from you. Not from your new friend.”
