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If he is, he doesn’t say so.

“Boss,” Carmine says, standing in the doorway, car keys lost somewhere in one enormous hand, “we’re late.”

Enzo hands Matthew back to me almost too quickly, the way you set down something hot.

“Marta will get you settled in, give you the lay of the land,” he says, already turning. “We’ll go over your responsibilities this evening.”

And then he’s gone, out into the bright morning and into the low black car waiting at the bottom of the steps. When they’re gone, I let out the mother of all breaths.

“He likes you, too,” Marta says mildly, watching the door close.

I decide very firmly not to ask which of us she means.

The garden stretches for what seems like an impossible distance in the city. There’s real grass, actual trees, and a stone path winding between them and disappearing into the distance. After four years of playgrounds that are mostly rubberized concrete and a square of sky between buildings, where you have to constantly check the ground for broken glass or worse, my son looks at that green like he’s been shown the surface of the moon.

“Is that ours?” he breathes.

“For now.”

We head upstairs. On the second landing, Marta slows at the foot of the next staircase, the one going up to the floors above, and her voice changes, just slightly, lighter and firmer all at once.

“The fourth floor,” she says, “is Mr. Accardi’s. The elder Mr. Accardi, Enzo’s father.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize he lived here.”

“He lives here. He does not come down.” She gives a small final smile. “It’s best to think of the fourth floor as nonexistent. It does not concern us. You will most likely never see it.”

Matthew has stopped on the stairs. He’s looking up past us, past the landing, up the long well of the staircase toward the closed door at the top with the still, listening look he gets, the one that has never once in his life been about nothing.

“Matthew. Come on, bub.” He comes, but he looks back once.

“Yes,” Marta says. “Come along, your suites are just ahead.”

Marta opens a door, and my jaw drops.

The room is bigger than the entire apartment I left in Bushwick this morning, possibly bigger than my last two apartments stacked together. There’s a bed I could lose a person in; windows the height of the ceiling, allowing warm, golden light to pour in; a sitting area; and a closet that’s practically an apartment-within-an-apartment. My whole life used to fit into a space smaller than the room’s area rug.

“And through here,” Marta says, opening a door in the side wall, “is the bath, and beyond it, the second room, for Matthew.”

“I thought you both would like to have your own space but still be together in a sense. I hope I judged right.”

I have to look at the window for a second before I can answer her, because the truth is, she judged it exactly, devastatingly right, and I don’t know what to say about that. Nobody has arranged anything around what I might want in a very, very long time.

“You judged it exactly right,” I manage.

Eventually, it’s quiet. I sit down on the edge of the bed in this impossibly huge room that’s somehow mine for the time being. I let myself feel it, the space, the safety, the fact that Luca couldn’t get to me here, even if he wanted to.

I text Candy a picture of the room. Her reply comes in under a minute: eleven crying emojis and DO NOT COME BACK. Then, a second later: Kidding. Come Sunday. Bring my favorite man.

It could work. That’s the dangerous part. Sitting here in all this warm, golden light, with my son laughing in the next room, it honestly feels like it could work.

Then I think of Enzo’s face in the half second before he handed Matthew back to me, and the warmth cools by a few degrees. I remember exactly what I am in this beautiful house: a woman with a secret, hoping with everything I have that the man who hired me never learns the one thing that would bring the whole gorgeous place down on our heads.

“Just three months,” I tell myself.

In the next room, Matthew flings himself onto the bed for the twelfth time, shrieking with joy, already completely and totally at home.

That’s the part I’m afraid of.