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“Well, mi sei mancata, too.”
He laughed. “I’m a guy, so you say, mancato. You know, with an o and not an a.”
“Mi sei mancato,” she repeated.
“There you go! Watch out, look at my girl getting bilingual.”
* * *
Haven sat back on her knees, humming to herself as she surveyed the sparkling kitchen floor. She’d been scrubbing it for more than an hour, removing the black scuff marks from the marble tile. Dr. DeMarco never spoke to her about cleaning. The rare occasions she forgot to do something, he overlooked it. Sometimes she felt like she was living in another universe with how drastically her life had changed. She never imagined living an existence where she could throw down the broom and put the laundry on hold to catch a television program in the middle of the afternoon.
A lot of it happened without her realizing it. Before she had come to the DeMarco house, she was constantly focused on tasks to stay out of trouble, but now she thought about herself more.
And that was something she had never been allowed to do before.
She stood, catching a glimpse of something when she turned around. Dr. DeMarco stood in the doorway, watching her silently. It was noon, and she hadn’t realized someone was home. “Are you hungry, sir?”
He nodded. “You can make some lunch, dolcezza. We’ll watch TV while we eat.”
She blinked a few times after he walked out. We?
After making some chicken salad sandwiches and distractedly throwing together two cherry Cokes, Haven headed into the family room. Dr. DeMarco lounged in a chair with his legs stretched out in front of him, his smile falling when he took his lunch.
She sat down on the couch and picked at her sandwich as he took a sip of his drink. “Can I ask you something, child?”
“Yes, sir.”
He pulled a cherry out of his soda. “Did you make these on your own, or did my son ask you to?”
“I made it on my own. I wanted to be nice.”
“Interesting.”
“Is something wrong with that?” she asked.
“No, I was just curious,” he said. “I’m curious about a lot, actually.”
“Like?”
“Like, how did you know to use the special cleaner on my windows?”
Her brow furrowed. “It was written on the bottle.”
“So you’re admitting you could read back then?”
Her blatant mistake stunned her. She nodded, afraid to speak.
“I already knew it at the time, but I was surprised you’d slip up on your first day. You aren’t as slick as you think you are.”
Queasiness overtook her. She set her sandwich down. “How did you know I could read?”
“I discovered it years ago on a trip to Blackburn. You had a book. Had I not known, though, you would’ve given yourself away anyway. The moment your illiteracy was mentioned, you looked left. That’s your tell. When you’re hiding something, you look to the left.”
Haven said nothing, forcing herself to look straight ahead.
29
Carmine paced the foyer, the sound of his feet against the wooden floor echoing through the downstairs. The sun hadn’t risen and he already couldn’t stand still.
