"Keep working, bambina. I'll be right back."
The hallway gives me ten feet of privacy and a wall to lean against. I keep my voice low.
"I heard about the flowers."
No preamble. Sal has never in his life opened with a greeting. Small talk is for people who don't already know everything worth knowing.
"I'm handling it."
"Your bodyguard handling it, or you handling it?"
Through the kitchen doorway, Cole's silhouette fills the window frame. He hasn't turned around, but I know he's aware of exactly where I am, where Chesca is, where Xanderis finishing his perimeter check, where every entrance and exit leads. I used to find that suffocating.
I don't know what it is now.
"Both."
"Castellano women." The warmth in his voice never quite softens the authority underneath. "Always fighting what's good for them." A pause — Sal's pauses are never empty; they're the part of the sentence he wants you to fill in yourself. "This man. He's good?"
"Yes."
The word falls out whole and unqualified, no caveat, no hedge. The kind of answer I would never allow in my courtroom because it hasn't been subjected to cross-examination. Three letters that I meant completely, and I don't know when that happened.
"Then stop fighting it."
The line goes dead. Sal gives advice the way he gives orders. Without waiting for a response, without leaving room for argument.
Does he know more about Cole than he's letting on?
I stand in the hallway with the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to nothing.
Stop fighting it.
Fighting what, exactly? The surveillance? The obsession? The fact that I let him inside me twelve hours after finding out he's been watching me for seven years?
Or the fact that I want to do it again?
Cole is in the doorway when I turn around. The hallway is narrow enough that I would have to press past him to get back to the kitchen, close enough that I feel his body heat, see changes the day wrought in his eyes.The flower. His hands cradling my face in chambers. The almost-kiss I've spent twelve hoursprosecuting and defending in alternating arguments, neither side winning.
"Uncle Sal?" he asks.
I nod. My voice has apparently filed a motion to remain silent.
His gaze holds mine for a beat too long, and I watch him decide not to push.
"Mom! I got it! 7 times 17 is 119!"
He steps aside to let me pass, and I do, and our shoulders don't touch, and I'm aware of that absence the whole way back to the kitchen.
Back to the kitchen. Back to the pasta going cold on the table. Back to the daughter who needs me to be the mother and not the woman and I can do that, I have always been able to do that, this is what I do.
Chesca's bedtime takes forty-seven minutes tonight.
Three stories instead of two. Extra time brushing teeth. A glass of water, then another glass of water, then a trip to the bathroom that was definitely necessary and not at all a stalling tactic. I recognize the anxiety underneath the delay. She feels the tension in the house even if she can't name it, picks up on frequencies I'm trying so hard to keep quiet.
"Mamma?" Her voice is small in the purple glow of her nightlight. "Is the man going to stay?"
"Cole?"