There is exactly one person in my life who fits that description right now.
I put water on for pasta and listen for the sound of his key in the door.
SIXTEEN
DARIO
Something is very wrong.
It’s in the way she’s standing when I come in—at the kitchen counter, her back to the door, too still. Lena is never still like that when she’s cooking. She moves efficiently, continuously, the way people move when they’re comfortable in a space and know where everything is.
This is a different kind of still. This is a person holding themselves in place.
Opal is at the kitchen table with her pencils, drawing something elaborate and narrating it to herself at low volume. She looks up when I come in and gives me the quick, sunny smile that I’ve been receiving for nearly two months now, and I have not found a way to be indifferent to it.
“Hey,” I say to both of them.
Lena turns. There it is—the controlled surface of her face, everything managed, but her eyes are still doing the thing they do when she’s been scared and hasn’t fully come down from it yet. The pupils are slightly wide. The look she gives me is thekind that sayslater, not in front of Opal, and I receive it. So I wait.
I don’t like waiting. I like it less when I know Lena’s been hurt and she can’t say anything about it because her daughter is here. That means it’s big. Not just the day-to-day bullshit everyone handles.
Did someone die?
We eat dinner. Opal carries the conversation, which she is well-equipped to do. Tonight’s topic is the lifecycle of the mayfly, which she’s been reading about and which she describes with enormous sympathy for the mayfly’s position, given that it has approximately one day of adult life.
She feels this is unfair. She has plans to write a letter about it, though she hasn’t decided to whom.
“What would you say in the letter?”
She thinks about it for a full minute. “Dear Mayfly Doctor, the mayfly deserves more time.”
“That’s the whole letter?”
She nods once.
“That is a highly efficient letter.”
She grins with spinach in her teeth.
After dinner, I read to Opal—she specifically requests the one about the rabbit who doesn’t want to go to sleep, which I know well enough by now to read without looking at the pages. By the time I come back to the kitchen, Lena is at the table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she’s not drinking, and the look on her face is no longer managed at all.
I sit across from her, which is all it takes for her to unload on me.
She tells me everything, including the thing he said about identifying pieces of me to someone in an official context. She says this last part while looking straight at me, not softening it. Only then does her voice crack. “Pieces of you. Then he explained that it’d be a shame if I were framed for your murder, and he knows how to do that.”
What I want to do is get up, find Esposito, and expose each and every surface nerve end in his body. Then I’ll dig into the deeper ones, the ones the body evolved to keep away from harm near the surface. I’ll make him dance for me before I end it. A puppet on strings in agony.
I can make it last for weeks, if I want to.
But getting up would frighten her right now, and that would not be useful. So I stay seated, and I listen, and I let her finish.
“He isn’t scared of you, Dario. Who is he? Really, I mean. Why isn’t he scared of you?”
When she finishes, I get up and go to my office. I hear her inhale sharply behind me—she thinks I’m leaving, and she’s already drawing breath to call me back. I come back in forty-five seconds with a bank envelope and set it on the table in front of her.
“What is this?” Not a question. She can see what it is.
“Enough to clear the debt twice over.” I sit back down. “Cash. Nothing traceable. Small bills, and the ones that aren’t small are clean.”
