I close the notebooks and run my fingers over their leather covers—smooth, weighty, expensive. They smell faintly of ink and antiseptic. His handwriting hides inside them like pressed flowers—devotions disguised as documentation.
Six days of Giovanni Bavga sitting vigil beside my bed, tracking my heartbeat like a stock ticker, as if sheer observation could bully my body into staying alive.
Six days of the most dangerous man I’ve ever met trying to quantify faith.
Six days of a poet trapped in a mobster’s skin, bargaining with God through data.
And I wasn’t even awake for it.
Didn’t feel his pen move, didn’t hear his sighs, didn’t witness his attempts at control crumble into confession.
The one time someone loved me without requiring participation, I slept through it.
There’s irony in that. A poetic symmetry.
Giovanni writes to prove I’m still alive.
I read to confirm he once was.
The stainless case gleams beside me, too deliberate to ignore. Inside, another relic: a passport.
I almost laugh. How poetic. A ticket to somewhere else, just when I’ve finally arrived in my own body.
It’s not my old one—though it might as well be a ghost of it. The first vanished five years ago when they cleared out the house after the accident. I filed a police report, told Officer Whatshisname it wasn’t about the document itself. It was about the stamps—Paris, Rome, Zurich. That layover where my father insisted on sampling seven kinds of chocolate like it was a diplomatic mission.
That passport was proof that once, we were a family. That we existed outside of grief.
This one is newer. The leather stiffer. The paper clean.
My photo—recent. No bangs, no forced smile. Just me, stripped of pretense.
But the name...Emmaleen Collins.
Wrong birthday. Blank pages.
It’s beautiful, in a way. A resurrection forged in bureaucracy.
And tucked inside, a boarding pass. Cream stock, heavy enough to feel like a promise. Private jet. Destination: blank.
I hold it between my fingers, careful not to bend it.
He didn’t just make a way out.
He madethis: a mirror image of the thing I lost. A perfect echo.
Once, my parents gave me a passport so I could see the world.
Now, Giovanni gives me one so I can leave it.
And beneath it, in that precise, arrogant scrawl that somehow learned tenderness?—
Have a nice fresh start, Miss Take. You earned every reward.
No declarations. No apologies. Just... closure wrapped in possibility.
A goodbye shaped like belief.
I trace the letters with my thumb, half expecting the ink to smudge.