Ed Esposito now shows up on Tuesday afternoons and sits in the kitchen with bad coffee he brings for himself and a legal pad, and afterward, Dario is always in a better mood, which I find genuinely baffling.
One day, I can’t take it anymore. I snap at Dario, “You do remember this asshole tried to kill me, right?”
Ed grimaces. “Never wanted to.”
“Do you think that makes me feel better about you being in my home?” It does. But I’m not telling him that.
“I could apologize again, Ms. Swan, but I doubt you’d hear that. All I can say is that it’ll never happen again. And since the moment I swore loyalty to Dario, you and yours fall under my protection too. For what that’s worth.”
Dario doesn’t smirk, but I get the sneaking suspicion he wants to, because he also knows that was a pretty good answer.
I glare at Ed. “Yourprotection? The man who couldn’t kill an office worker whose never been in a real fight in her life? I’m not sure I want that kind of protection.”
Dario snorts, and his shoulders shake while he tries to hold back his laughter.
Ed’s face goes red. “Well. You’ve got me there.”
Dammit. He’s gotta stop being likable, or I might end up liking that asshole too.
What I know most clearly is that Dario means what he said. Not on faith—I stopped taking important things on faith long before any of this.
I know it because I watch him work. The decisions he makes and the ones he declines to make tell me more than his words ever could. He talks about the neighborhood the way I’ve only heard a handful of people talk about it—like it’s a place that deserves better than what it has, like the people in it are real people with real stakes, like the problem isn’t poverty itself but the particular machinery that keeps poverty in place and who benefits from running that machinery.
“You sound like a politician.”
Ed smiles. “Thanks.”
“Most people would think that was an insult.”
“Did you mean it as an insult?”
“Teasing mostly.”
That smile stays in place.
Dario has started going after that machinery. Quietly, methodically, the way he does everything. He doesn’t announce what he’s building. He just builds it, and you see the results.
Pritha mentions at the end of a Tuesday meeting that a landlord on Archer Street has suddenly reached an agreement with his tenants regarding the heating situation. She says it like it’s surprising. I nod and say that’s great and type it into my notes, and don’t mention that I know why.
Opal is thriving. She’s been thriving for months and keeps thriving, as though her setpoint for the world has beenpermanently upgraded and she’s simply operating at the new level. She and Bea are still inseparable. She’s learning to whistle with two fingers, which she practices for exactly ten minutes every evening with great determination and spittle. She has also developed opinions about wedding flowers, which she offers at breakfast, unprompted.
“White ones are boring,” she says one morning over cereal.
“What would you choose?”
She considers this seriously, her spoon paused mid-air. “Rainbow colors. All of them.”
Rainbow flowers it is, then.
Not long after the flower conversation, she slides a drawing across the kitchen counter toward me without ceremony. “My new family.”
It’s our apartment—she’s been drawing it from different angles for months, and she’s gotten much better at the scale of it. This version shows the living room with the bookshelves, the big window, and the city view that she’s been refining since the day we moved in.
Four figures. Not three.
Mama, labeled in her careful handwriting, standing at the kitchen doorway. Herself, labeled with a small pencil icon. Dario in the armchair, the book in his hands. And in the corner near the window, rendered in careful black crayon with a small diamond collar—she used glitter glue she’s not allowed to use without supervision for that.
“We don’t have a cat, Opal.”
