Then, she snores.
If she sleeps on this floor, even with the plush rug beneath us, she will ache for days. Can’t let that happen. I gentle her off my chest, then attempt to scoop her up from the floor. The term deadlift was made for times like these. “Baby, you gotta sit up for me.”
“Hmm.”
“Come on,” I say, helping her. “Just a little more.”
She does what little she can without fully waking up, and then I have her in my arms. I carry her down the hall to our bedroom, and there I tuck her into our bed. I scoot in and spoon her, and in seconds, I’m out too.
Later, the apartment fills with the sounds of a morning that I’m not awake for yet. Lena must have left the door cracked. Opal’s feet in the hallway, the espresso machine, the sound of crayons being arranged in chromatic order on the counter.
“There’s bagels?” I hear Lena say.
“Yeah. I found the bag by the door,” Opal explains.
“Oh, he got the good ones.”
“Good ones don’t have fish.” Opal goes on about how it’s not fair that we eat fish, and I lie there for a moment before I get up. I listen to her monologue about eating fish, and to be fair, she makes some good points.
Then Lena says, “But fish eat other fish. So are we wrong for eating them, or are the other fish wrong for being cannibals?”
“Cannibals?”
“Animals who eat their own.”
I can almost hear the face Opal must be making. Then she says, “Fish really eat other fish?”
“Have you learned about sharks yet?”
“Yeah, but… oh.”
“That’s how they get so big.”
“Not all sharks are big, Mom. Have you seen epithet sharks?”
Lena laughs. “I don’t think that’s what they’re called. Let’s look them up.”
Turns out, she meant epaulette sharks, and by the time they’re looking at what are apparently the cutest sharks—threshers—I’m clothed and hunting for my own bagel.
This is what I was protecting when I killed Marco. Not the organization.
This. The sounds of a morning that make the world a better place.
TWENTY-NINE
LENA
The weeksafter Marco’s death are strange.
I feel it in the way Dario moves through the apartment. It’s the way he answers the phone, and the calls that come in at odd hours, and the ones he takes in his office with the door closed.
Strange outside it too, in the city—there’s something different in the texture of things for about a week. An absence where a presence used to be. Maybe it’s in my head, I don’t know. But then it resolves back into the ordinary.
There’s nothing that points to Dario. Nothing that points to anything. Just the city resuming. I don’t even see anything about Marco in the news.
It’s oddly peaceful inside the penthouse, like there’s less pressure in every direction.
I’ve been learning the contours of his world the way you learn a new landscape—not with a map, but with repeated exposure until the shapes become familiar. I know which calls he’ll take standing at the window in his office, and which ones he closes the door for. I know the difference between the two-word textresponses that mean something routine and the ones that mean he’s going to be out.
