Page 11 of Knight
Her address. Fourth floor. East side walk-up on Delancey.
I memorize it the way I memorize everything that is going to be a problem — quickly, completely, with the full understanding that I am making a mistake and the absolute inability to stop making it.
The smart move is to close this file. Go home. Call Santino in the morning. Face the war. Marry the Marchese girl if that is what it takes. Be the King's son. Play the piece Giovanni carved me into.
The smart move has never once been the move I make.
I stare at her file until the screen dims. Her face in that photograph. No smile. No fear. No want. Just a woman looking straight ahead with the kind of stillness that comes from carrying so much weight for so long that she has forgotten what it feels like to set it down.
A war is coming.
And I cannot stop staring at her file.
2
nova
Survival Mode
The Weight She Carries Home
Four flights. The elevator has been broken since March and the super swears the part is on order and I stopped believing him around July.
I count the tips by touch as I climb. Fives are soft. Tens are creased. Twenties I fold lengthwise so my fingers findthem blind. Two hundred and fourteen dollars. Plus the three hundred that the owner — Romeo Rivas, with his unbuttoned collar and his green eyes and his voice that went quiet when I told him to fix my money — transferred back into my account forty minutes ago.
Five hundred and fourteen dollars. Nine days until rent.
I hip-check the apartment door because it swells in the humidity and the landlord does not return calls. Inside, the kitchen light is off but the stove light is on and there is a pot of chicken soup sitting on the burner, cold, untouched. A single bowl beside it with a spoon laid across the rim.
Marisol. Thirteen years old and stubborn enough to outlast a siege. She will not eat dinner without me. I have told her a hundred times — eat when the food is warm, don't wait, I will be late every night because that is how this works. She waits anyway. Every single night.
She is on the couch now. School hoodie, textbook facedown on her chest, asleep with her mouth slightly open. I pull the throw blanket over her legs and lift the textbook — algebra, chapter nine — and set it on the coffee table. She does not stir.
Tomás's door is cracked. I push it open with two fingers.
He is curled around his pillow, the dollar-store rocket nightlight casting blue shadows across the wall. His sneakers are on the floor beside the bed and I can see the left sole from here — split open along the ball of the foot, a folded napkin stuffed inside to cover the gap. He did that himself. He did that so I would not see it and worry.
He is ten.
Last Tuesday he was on the bathroom floor at school, chest locked, hands tingling, convinced his heart was stopping. The nurse called me at the club. I drove there in my stage makeup with my jacket zipped to my chin and held him on the tile until his breathing came back. The ER doctor said panic attack.Handed me a pamphlet and a referral to a pediatric therapist. A hundred and eighty dollars a session.
I close his door and sit on the hallway floor between their rooms. Back against the wall. The apartment is quiet except for the radiator ticking and a dog barking somewhere below us.
Phone out. Calculator open.
Rent: twelve hundred. Nine days.
Electric: eighty-seven. Past due. The shutoff notice is in the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus because I cannot look at it every time I open the drawer.
Tomás's shoes: forty dollars if I find them on sale.
Marisol's graphing calculator for algebra: sixty. She has been borrowing one from a girl named Dakota and I can see what it costs her every morning — the tiny swallow before she asks, the way she holds the borrowed calculator like it might shatter.
Five hundred and fourteen dollars in my name. Eight hundred and twelve in the coffee can above the refrigerator.
I run the numbers. I subtract. I move things around. I give Tomás the shoes and push the electric bill another week and tell myself Marisol can keep borrowing Dakota's calculator until next pay cycle.
The math never works. I run it again anyway.
