I am going to look at her the same way.
Stronzo — asshole, Nadia.
11
NADIA
He is gone when I wake up.
The bed beside me is cold. The covers are pulled up the way a man pulls them up when he has decided not to wake the woman he is leaving. The pillow has the dent of his head and the smell of him, and nothing else.
I do not move for a minute.
My throat does the thing it does when I am not going to cry, and my body has not yet received the message.
Then I move.
I get out of bed. I put on the t-shirt that was on the floor. I walk barefoot through my own apartment in the hard noon light of a Saturday and look at every place he was.
Kitchen island. Granite cleaned. The stool pushed back to the counter at the angle a man pushes a stool when he has decided to leave no trace.
Coffee cup. Washed. Drying upside down on a towel beside the sink.
His shirt. Gone.
I cross to the closet.
The panel is back in place. The hanging organizer is in the position I left it in. The closet floor has been swept of the small flakes of paint that panel housing leaves when it has been worked loose and put back.
He swept the floor.
Cazzo— fuck.
I open the panel. I open the safe. Empty except for the family tree, folded the way I folded it.
He folded it back the way he found it.
I take it out. I unfold it. I look at the page.
It is the page I drafted six weeks ago for the legal addendum on Maria's estate. The estate has been settled for a long time. I keep the chart anyway because it is the thing I look at when I need to remember what I am protecting and what I am not.
Vittorio Antonio Moretti. Maria Isabella Moretti.Three sons.Alessandro. Matteo. Luca.
Matteo Moretti. Born February 12, 1988.
Sean Donovan was born on February 12, 1988.
Sean Donovan saw this page sometime between 9:37 a.m. and whatever time he left. He read it. He folded it. He put it back. He swept the floor, locked the safe, and did not wake me up.
He saw it. He did not ask me about it. He left.
He left because he is a cop, and a cop does not ask the woman in the bed beside him a question whose answer he cannot afford to hear. He left because he now has a question, and he is going to find the answer himself. He left because asking me would have made me lie to his face, and we have already done enough of that in this apartment in the last however many hours.
He left to give us both the courtesy of not lying.
Stronzo— asshole.
Sean Donovan is the man who is going to ruin my career. He is also the man who, when he found the answer to the question we have not been asking each other, did me the courtesy of not asking.
