She cuts me a look. Months ago, my maybes meant probably not—she figured that out early, the way she figures out everything. Opal has been my partner in life since before she was born, and I relied on her too much. I know that. But it made her smarter than most kids her age, and I can’t bring myself to regret it. She developed a sense of my tone, a love for books and documentaries, street smarts, and the uncanny ability to discern what adults mean with little effort on her part.
I’d like to think those things will keep her safer as she moves through the world. But now, she gets to be a kid. I have a new partner, and to my surprise, she’s welcomed him into our lives with open arms. No jealousy.
Maybe she’s relieved that she doesn’t need to be another adult in the room.
The school is exactly what I hoped it would be. Our tour guide is a twelve-year-old named Sofia with the easy confidence of someone who knows she’s received a good education and a lifetime of money not being a worry. I hope that by the time Opal is her age, she’ll have that same ease.
Sofia takes us through the art room, where three students are working on a canvas the size of a door. In the science lab, something is apparently growing in a series of petri dishes. The library has current books and windows and a librarian who looks up and waves at Sofia like she knows her by name, which she probably does.
Opal asks seven questions during the tour. Sofia answers six correctly and admits she doesn’t know the answer to theseventh. This earns her Opal’s highest honor, which is a slow, solemn nod.
“She said she didn’t know,” Opal whispers to me, as we follow Sofia into the courtyard.
“People who admit they don’t know things are usually worth listening to.”
Opal considers this. “Dario does that.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Okay,” she says, catching up to Sofia.
In the courtyard, a group of students is gathered around a papier-mâché solar system—planets on wire hangers at roughly accurate relative distances.
Opal stops walking entirely. “That’s wrong.”
“Opal—”
“They’re the wrong sizes, and they forgot the asteroid belt.” She says it without heat, just as a statement of fact. “But the colors are good. Especially the last one.”
Sofia, to her credit, doesn’t look offended. “Do you want to see the science projects?”
Opal looks at her. “Can I?”
“Let’s go.”
She takes in the bulletin boards covered in student work, the science fair display case, the mural the graduating class painted across the far wall. She catalogs all of it.
Then she looks up at me. “I like it here.”
I drive us home with the quiet satisfaction of something resolved. For years, the question of school was a constant low-grade ache—the gap between what I could afford and what Opal needed, the way I had to explain to her teachers why certain things were off the table. I was a good enough manager of it. I never let her see the math. But I always knew.
I think she did too.
Now the math is different. And I keep waiting for the catch, because I grew up knowing nothing good comes free. But I think maybe the price got paid already in the years of struggle.
That evening, after Opal’s in bed, I go to Dario’s office and take the chair across from his desk—the one that used to be for whoever was having a difficult conversation. Now it’s just where I sit. “I need to understand the full shape of what I’m inside. Not just the parts I can see.”
He leans back. “What do you already know?”
“Enough to know I don’t have the whole picture.”
He nods, and then he tells me. Not the operational details—those aren’t mine to carry, and I’m not asking for them. The legitimate operations, the ones that aren’t there yet, the revenue breakdown, the direction it’s moving. The line he draws and how he decides where to put it.
“Five years before the legitimate side is the majority. Seven before it’s almost everything.” He says it like a forecast, not a promise. “That’s what I’m building. Not just because it’s safer—though it is. Because it’s what this should have been before Marco spent twenty years turning a wheel that didn’t need to keep turning.”
“And if something goes sideways in the meantime?”
“I handle it,” he says. “You and Opal are insulated.”
