“You will,” he agrees, like he believes her, but also like he’s the kind of man who keeps a calendar. “That’s all this is. A reminder.”
“Tonight?” she asks. The break in that last syllable is small, and if I weren’t her kid I wouldn’t hear it.
“Because I respect your kitchen,” he says. “And your mother.”
I step closer before I think about it. Close enough to see the corner of the desk through the gap. The same battered wood, the jar of rubber bands, the stapler that bites your thumb if you aren’t careful.
I can see the edge of my mother’s sleeve. White. Pressed. Her wrist bone sharp against the desk when she rests her hand there. I can’t see him. Just the angle of a shoulder in the chair opposite. Dark fabric. Broad.
“Francesca,” he says, and hearing my mother’s name in that voice makes my stomach drop like I missed a step. “This isn’t a door I like knocking on. You know that.”
“I know,” she says.
There’s a small silence. Not empty. Waiting.
What are they talking about?
Their voices lower even more, and I can barely catch the words. Debt? Terms?
That’s all. Those two words make heat crawl up my neck. My pulse beats hard enough to feel in my mouth. I press my fingertips to the wall to anchor myself and think of the ledger’s columns and how neat Nonna kept her numbers. Always neat. Always honest. I think of my mother’s jaw grinding at 3:00 in the morning over payroll. I think of the new key heavy in my pocket.
What debt? Mr. Caruso said there was no debt. Just a line of credit and the rent.
“After service,” my mother says. “Please.”
“Tomorrow,” he says, making a small shift I hear in his chair legs on short carpet. “I’ll call at 9:00. We will be finished before you open.”
“8:00,” she says, fast, like she wants it earlier to get it over with, or to keep him from choosing the time. “I’ll be here.”
“8:00,” he agrees.
Chairs scrape. Panic sparks stupid and hot under my ribs—animal quick. I don’t want to be crouched at the door like a child. I don’t want anyone to see me listening and pin that on my mother. I back up fast, and my heel bites on the bad strip of carpet. I stumble into the closet door behind me, and the knob clicks in my palm. I shove it open and slip inside just as the office door moves.
The supply closet is small and packed. Shelves on both sides, a metal mop bucket low on the floor, the mop itself leaning against my shoulder with a damp head that smells like bleach and oregano because everything in this building smells like oregano. Aprons hang on hooks. My shoulder brushes a stack of paper towel sleeves. The air is too close. I pull the door almost shut, leave a slit to see through, and try to slow my heart down to a normal human rhythm.
Footsteps on the hall carpet. One set. Measured. No hurry. The light from the office swings, jumps, and then it’s just the dim hall bulb again.
He walks past.
I don’t know his name yet. But I know this: he doesn’t move like a customer looking for the bathroom. He doesn’t do the head swivel people do when they’re lost. He doesn’t make noise to be noticed or noise to pretend he wasn’t here. He isn’t hiding. He’s just… not performing.
Suit, dark. Definitely not off the rack. Shoulders under the suit that work for a living, not made in a gym. Hair dark too, with a few silver streaks shot through it, trimmed clean at the neck. No hat. No flashy watch he wants the world to see.
But the world can see it anyway in the way he holds himself. His hand brushes the edge of the frame when he passes, not touching, just close, and his knuckles are scraped in that way that says he doesn’t sit at a desk all day. He smells like something clean and expensive that doesn’t try too hard. Something far out of the budget of our regular clientele.
He pauses.
His head turns a fraction toward the closet door as if he heard my heart beating too hard in my chest. I hold still. I could be another mop. I could be a shadow. The sound from downstairs lifts, a swell of laughter right then. His eyes go that way—toward the sound—and I see them.
They aren’t soft. But they aren’t cold. They’re the kind of eyes that notice everything in a room. The kind that skim you once and have you memorized. I’m used to older men around here with soft bellies and too much cologne and eyes that stick. He’s not that. Definitely not soft. But careful and controlled.
He takes one more step, and the light hits his jaw. A small white scar catches it, a nick on the line that says he’s learned things the hard way and remembered those lessons. His mouth is a straight line that gives nothing away.
He looks down the stairs. His hand goes to the rail. The tendons in his wrist show when he grips it.
Attraction is stupid in moments like this. It doesn’t care that I’m in a supply closet with a mop kissing my shoulder and my mother walking behind him, panicked. It doesn’t care that I’m running hot and cold at once. It just rolls through me without asking. Awareness. That’s all. A small flare in the chest that says: notice me.
He starts down the stairs, not looking back. As I wait for them to go down, a small detail hits me in the throat. There’s only one set of creaks on the old floorboards, and they are my mom’s.
