He meets my gaze.
A cut above his eyebrow is closed with medical tape. His forearm is bandaged where his sleeve is rolled back. He’s standing, and he’s here, and he’s unhurt in any real way, and I feel the thing I always feel now when I look at him after something has happened. The thing that took hold in a park when Ed said the wordpiecesand hasn’t let go since. The specific, undeniable weight of it. Of us. The way it’s been living in my chest like a tenant who stopped pretending months ago.
But I’ve been rehearsing this. Hours on the couch, running it in my head until the words came out the way I needed them to.
“I can’t do this.” My voice comes out even. I’m grateful. “Whatever happened tonight—I can’t have Opal inside it. I can’t have her growing up in a life where the power cuts and men come through the hallway in the dark. I can’t have her throwingher books at armed strangers because she needs to save me. I won’t do that to her. Can’t.”
I brace for the argument. I’ve been preparing for it since he left this morning—the case he’ll make about his own capabilities and the level of protection he offers, and how things are different now, how he has it handled, and how leaving would mean giving up everything we’ve built.
I’ve got answers for all of it. I’m ready for whatever comes out of his mouth.
“I know.”
I blink at him. “You know…?”
“You can’t do that to her. I know.”
Just that.
I wait for the rest. There isn’t any.
“Neither could I,” he says as a reasonable fact.
Something in my chest does something complicated.
But it doesn’t matter. Whatever he’s saying, none of it changes things. “I don’t want to leave you.” The words come out before I’ve decided to say them, and once they’re out I don’t take them back, because they’re true and he should know they’re true. “I want to be here. I want—this. You.” I stop. Start again. “But she’s five. She screamed your name in the dark and she didn’t even hesitate, like you’re her person to call, like that’s just—settled. And I love that. I love that she feels that way. But I won’t have her building that certainty inside a life where she has to keep proving it.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment. “I know. I won’t either.”
Okay, I didn’t plan for him to agree with me. Thought about everything else. Not that.
He moves away from the desk and comes to stand in the middle of the room. He looks at me, and he starts talking. “You know who my parents were.”
I go still. “Yes. But what does that have to do with Opal and me?”
“My mother was the organization. My father ran it technically. His name was on everything—he sat at the head of the table, his face was the one in the newspaper when the newspaper covered things it shouldn’t have covered. But Angela was the engine. Silent, invisible, without mercy when mercy wasn’t useful, and brilliant enough that nobody ever thought to look at her. She let them not look. She preferred it.”
I don’t know where he’s going with this. I know most of it already. “Go on.”
“My father loved her the way you love something that exceeds you. His whole life, he knew she was more than him. Better than him at everything. Smarter, faster, colder. He told me once that the trick was to be grateful for it rather than be destroyed by it. It took him years to figure that out.”
“The photograph,” I say, nodding to the one on the bookshelf across the room. “The woman. That’s her, isn’t it?”
She’s beautiful, raven-haired and curves, tossing her head back as she laughs. A white dress and a matching hat. Behind her, a small cobblestone street. The woman could have been a movie star with looks like that.
“That’s her.”
“She’s beyond pretty.”
He smiles a little pridefully. “Marco took over when my father died. He came to me first—offered me a seat at the table. A seat atmyparents’table. I turned it down because they had asked me to finish my residency and I honored that. I’ve thought about that decision a great deal over the years.” He pauses. “Whether honoring what they wanted was the same thing as doing what I should have. Whether I let something sit empty that I should have claimed.”
“You did what they wanted. It’s honorable.”
His jaw shifts. “Marco spent years in a role that was never his. Running it the way a man runs something he knows he has no real claim to—aggressively, loudly, constantly proving a point that no one who mattered was asking him to prove.”
That makes sense with how Ed was with me. “The single moms.”
He looks at me.
