Page 24 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"It is acceptable," Rosa said, which from her was closer to a medal ceremony than modesty.

"No, genuinely. What is this?"

"Food. You eat it, you don't interrogate it." Rosa set a second plate down before Cora had finished the first, watching her with the narrow, satisfied attention of a woman conducting an experiment she already suspected would go well. "You ask a lot of questions for someone at a dinner table."

"Occupational hazard. I ask people about their flowers, their linens, their second cousin's opinion on chair covers. Food's more interesting."

"Finally," Rosa announced to the room at large, to nobody in particular, the way she announced anything she considered a matter of public record, "a woman who eats."

"High praise," I said.

"It is the only praise that matters." Rosa pointed a wooden spoon at Cora like she was awarding her something official. "The last one he brought here, if you could call it bringing, picked at a salad for twenty minutes and asked if I had anything with fewer opinions in it. I told her the kitchen doesn't do opinions, it does food, and she left early."

"There was no last one, Rosa."

"There was a photographer once. For a magazine. I am counting her because she counts." Rosa waved this away like it settled the matter permanently, which, as far as Rosa was concerned, it did.

After the second plate, I gave Cora the tour I had promised, walking her through rooms I had not actually looked at in years, not as someone looks at a place they live but the way a man checks that nothing has shifted since he last forgot to look. She moved through them slowly, asking good questions, running her hand along surfaces just as she had once run it along the gold molding at the Ambrose, cataloguing a space professionally even when she was not working.

"You have a library and no books in it," she said, standing in the doorway of a room I had furnished and never used.

"I read on a tablet."

"That's not the point of a library, Dmitri."

"Enlighten me."

"Evidence. That you've read things. That you're the kind of person who sits in a chair with a book and gets so absorbed you forget to turn a light on until it's too dark to see the page." She wandered further in, touched the spine of nothing, since there was nothing to touch. "This room is a rumor of a person who doesn't exist."

"That's a very specific accusation for a bookshelf."

"I plan events for a living. I notice when a room is performing something instead of living it."

She stopped in the hallway outside my office next, studying the bare wall with the same focus she had once given sightlines and seating charts, and I watched her arrive, without quite saying it out loud, at the thing I had spent fifteen years not naming to myself.

"You don't have any photographs," she said. It was not a question. It was an observation, delivered with the same care she gave anything that mattered to her, weighed silently before she let herself say it out loud.

"No."

"None. Anywhere. Not your parents, not you as a kid, not a school picture, not one bad vacation photo where everybody's squinting." She turned to look at me directly. "Most people have at least one bad vacation photo."

"I don't take vacations."

"That's not actually an answer to what I said."

She was right, and I let the silence sit there instead of filling it with something that would have sounded like an excuse, because it would have been one.

"I don't keep things that can be used to find what I care about," I said finally. "A photograph tells anyone who sees it exactly who matters to me, and exactly what to threaten if they want something from me. I stopped keeping them a long time ago. It became a habit before it became a rule, and now I don't remember which came first."

Cora did not say anything for a moment, and when she did, her voice had lost the light, cataloguing tone from a minute earlier.

"That's a very lonely way to keep yourself safe."

"It's worked for fifteen years."

"I didn't ask if it worked. I asked what it costs." She looked around the hallway once more, at the bare walls, at the marble, at a house that had never once been asked to hold a memory. "This is a beautiful house, Dmitri. It doesn't feel like anybody's home. It feels like a very expensive hotel where the guest never checked out."

I thought about telling her she was wrong. I did not, because she was not, and I had never found much use in lying to a woman who could already see straight through the walls I'd paid a great deal of money to make look solid. Instead I reached for her hand, and she let me take it, and we went in to dinner before either of us had to find out what I would have said next.