Page 89 of Knight
Because if Nova reads this dossier — twelve pages of Vescari intelligence logs with my name on every entry — she will not hear a seventeen-year-old boy trying to save his brothers. She will hear a traitor. She will see INTERIOR ASSET stamped across the man who sleeps beside her and holds her hand against his chest and promised her a life that would be different from the one she had.
I push away from the desk. Stand. The office is dark except for the desk lamp throwing a cone of yellow light across the pages I cannot bring myself to look at again.
The hallway is six feet away. Beyond it, the kitchen. Beyond that, the bedrooms where Tomás sleeps with his rocket nightlight and Marisol sleeps with her lock checked three timesand Nova sleeps with her hand on the pillow where my head belongs.
I have two doors.
Behind one is Giovanni's method. The version. Smooth, partial, delivered with enough sincerity to satisfy the question while keeping the worst of it locked in a vault she will never find. It will work. It has always worked. Every relationship I have ever had ran on versions — curated, controlled, the charming performance of a man who understood early that the full truth empties rooms.
Behind the other door is the thing Giovanni never did in his life.
The whole truth. Ugly. Unmanaged. Every detail laid out on the kitchen counter the way Isadora laid it on my desk — without cushion, without context designed to soften the impact, without the scaffolding of a man who needs the listener to forgive him before he finishes speaking.
Nova asked me once — in this hallway, in this dark, with her hand against my chest — to look at her and mean something.
I pull the dossier off the desk. Fold it once. Slide it into my back pocket.
She does not want my version.
She wants me.
And if the man underneath the versions is someone she cannot live with, I would rather know tonight than spend the rest of this war performing for a woman who deserved the truth from the moment she signed her name next to mine in a courthouse that smelled like floor wax and the end of pretending.
The Walk to Her
She is teaching Tomás fractions.
I stop in the doorway and I watch because in thirty seconds I am going to walk into that kitchen and say something that might ruin the way she looks at me, and I need to memorize this version of her face before it changes. The version where she trusts me. The version where the man she married is someone worth building a life beside.
Nova is sitting at the counter with a worksheet spread between them, her finger tracing a number line while Tomás squints at it like it owes him money. She explains the same concept three different ways — once with words, once by cutting an apple into quarters with the paring knife from the block, once by sliding four sugar packets across the counter and asking him to divide them between two imaginary friends.
She does not lose patience. Her voice stays level. Her hands stay steady. She treats his confusion as intelligence looking for the right doorway rather than a failure to understand — and something in my chest fractures watching it because this is the woman I married. This is who she is when no one is threatening her siblings or breaching her walls or asking her to carry the weight of a war she never wanted.
She is good. She is good in a way I have spent twenty-two years pretending does not exist because acknowledging goodness means acknowledging what you are not, and I have known what I am not since I was seventeen years old standing in a gas station parking lot with a burner phone and my father's security schedule written on the back of a receipt.
The dossier is in my back pocket. Twelve pages. The folded edge pressing against my spine like a blade I am carrying into my own home.
Tomás gets the answer right. Nova's face splits into a grin — wide, proud, the full-wattage version she reserves for moments when her brother does something that proves the world has not crushed the brilliant out of him. She ruffles his hair. He squirms away, laughing.
"Go brush your teeth, baby. And actually use toothpaste this time."
"I always use toothpaste."
"The dry toothbrush in the holder this morning says otherwise."
He grins — the shameless, busted grin of a ten-year-old caught in a lie he is not even slightly sorry about — and slides off the stool. His bare feet slap against the hardwood as he runs toward the bathroom. The sound fades down the hallway. A door closes. The faucet turns on.
The kitchen empties.
Nova is collecting the sugar packets. Sliding them into a neat pile. Her hair is down — natural, wild, the curls she pins for the stage freed for the evening. The overhead light catches the brown of her skin and the thin scar on her left wrist and the small hands that are always doing something because stillness is a luxury she never learned to afford.
The refrigerator hums. Tomás's drawings rustle on the fridge from a draft I have never fixed because fixing it was never important until everything on that fridge became the most important thing in my life.
She looks up. Sees me in the doorway. Her eyes do the sweep — the automatic diagnostic she runs on every person who enters her line of sight, reading posture and expression and the distance between the performance and the person underneath.
Whatever she reads on my face makes her hands go still on the sugar packets.
"I need to tell you something." My voice comes out stripped. Low. The charming register is gone and I did not even have to kill it — it simply refused to load. "And I need you to let me finish before you decide anything."
