Page 74 of My Unexpected Surprise
Dante looks at me for a long moment. The smile doesn’t move but the warmth drains out of it, leaving just the scaffolding. “You’re very certain about things you’ve known about for a very short time.”
“Certainty is a professional qualification,” I say. “I’m quite good at it.”
He looks at Livia once, a glancing look that contains twenty years of history I wasn’t present for and intend to become an obstacle to, and then he nods, once, and steps away.
Livia doesn’t look at me until he’s gone. Then she turns her head and I can’t read everything in her expression, but I can read enough. Furious, I think. And something else underneath the fury, something she’d rather I hadn’t seen, sadness.
I look away.
In the cottage afterward, Nico is already asleep, the staff member already gone, the nightlight doing its work down the hall. Livia has changed out of the dinner dress into a grey t-shirt and she’s standing in the doorway of the main bedroom when I come in, shoes in hand, jacket over my arm.
We look at each other.
“You shouldn’t have said all of that,” she says. “Not to him.”
“Probably not.”
“He’s going to know it’s not—” She stops. “He’s going to ask questions.”
“Let him.”
She crosses her arms. Still in the doorway. Still close enough that the light from behind her catches the line of her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder. “Why?”
“Because he needs to believe it,” I say. “And so do you, for the next forty-eight hours.”
“That’s not” She exhales. “That’s not what you were doing in there.”
“No,” I agree. “It wasn’t.”
The silence between us has weight to it. I become aware that my hand has risen slightly, moving toward her face the way it did last night in the hallway, and I stop it.
She hasn’t moved. She isn’t flinching away. She’s watching me with those steady dark eyes and her arms still crossed and her mouth set in the expression she uses when she’s decided not to say what she’s actually thinking.
I lower my hand.
I step back.
I say, very quietly, “Goodnight, Livia,” and I walk past her, down the hall, past Nico’s amber-lit door, and out the cottage’s front door, and I sit down on the top step and look at the dark lawn and the lake beyond it, and I stay there.
Because this is what I do. This is where I always end up. Just outside the door.
The question I keep asking myself is whether that’s about discipline, or whether it’s about fear.
Chapter Nineteen
LIVIA
He’s still on the steps twenty minutes later.
I know because I can’t sleep because some restless, traitorous part of me keeps drifting to the window to check. The third time I do it, I see him exactly where I left him, elbows on his knees, head bowed slightly, the porch light throwing a long shadow down the steps and into the dark grass.
I should not care that he’s still out there. I tell myself that, lying in the dark of the bedroom with Nico’s monitor humming faintly on the nightstand, the small green light blinking its assurance that my son is asleep down the hall and the world, for the moment, has not ended. I have spent four years building a life that doesn’t depend on whether a man comes inside out of the cold. I am good at that life. I am proud of that life.
And yet I keep getting up to check the window.
The dinner replays behind my eyes every time I close them: his hand at my back, steady and certain, the way he said my father’s name like a fact rather than a threat, the way the whole room shifted around the two of us like we were something solid instead of something invented for an audience. I think about the doorway after, his hand rising toward my face and stopping, the careful retreat down the hall, the front door closing behind him with a deliberateness that felt less like discipline and more like a man fleeing something he didn’t have a name for.
I stand at the window with my arms wrapped around myself for a long moment, watching a man who organizes evacuation routes for a living refuse to come in out of the cold, and I think,not for the first time this week, that I am tired. Not of him. Of the distance.
