"I was busy. The hospital?—"
"How. Many."
"Luca, I swear to God?—"
"I'm not judging." His voice is completely serious. His eyes are not. "I'm just recalibrating several assumptions."
"What assumptions?"
"About how much patience you had left." The not-quite-smile goes darker. "Makes a lot of things make sense."
Heat floods my face so fast it's humiliating. And it's not just my face. It's in several other places I refuse to inventory while standing at a window at 2 a.m. with the man responsible for all of them.
Surgeon's composure. Gone. Just like that.
"Luca."
"Yes?"
"Do not." I point at him, which does nothing because he looks deeply unbothered. "We are never speaking of this. Ever. It didn't happen."
"It happened."
"It didn't."
"We can call it something else."
"We're calling it nothing. It's getting a title and a locked door and we are never—" I stop.
Because he's almost smiling. Actually almost smiling, the real kind, and it does something catastrophic to his face. Makes him look younger. Less armored. Like the boy who grew up with brothers and a rotating nanny and no mother and learned early that the only safe thing was control.
I look away before I do something stupid. Like say something true.
"Go to sleep." Quiet. Not a command. Something closer to careful.
"Working on it." I push off the window. "Good night, Moretti."
"Good night, Virelli."
I should sleep.I know I should sleep.
Instead, I go upstairs, wash my face, change into a T-shirt, and stand in the middle of the guest room, turning the evening over in my hands like a piece of glass I'm checking for cracks.
The room is the same. Expensive and impersonal. The luxury of a cage that wants you to be comfortable.
I study the room, from the artwork on the walls to the vase of fresh flowers on the dresser, which has already been replaced twice since I arrived.
My eyes land on the smoke detector above the window.
Standard. White. Flush to the ceiling.
Except the ceiling is plaster and the mount is a half shade lighter. It was installed more recently than the original fixture.
My stomach drops.
I pull the desk chair over. Step up. Look at the smoke detector casing — and at the hair-thin lens embedded in the plastic at an angle that gives it a clear line of sight to the bed.
A camera.
