One of the women near the kitchen entrance calls out a phrase in tentative English, something about bread, close but not quite, and Matt stands, brushing off his pants.
"Duty calls," he says, and squeezes my hand once before walking toward them.
I watch him go.
One of the women touches his arm as he approaches. Tentative. Grateful. Her fingers barely graze his sleeve, but the gesture holds everything she doesn't have the English for yet. Another tries the bread phrase again, and Matt corrects her gently, repeating it twice, his voice patient as a man who's spent twelve years teaching teenagers and never once lost the part of himself that believes people are worth the effort.
He belongs to all of them now. Not just to me.
The man from the cell. The man who held me through the worst nights of my life, who talked about stupid things until the dark got smaller and the concrete got warmer and the hours between guard rotations didn't feel like small deaths anymore.
He's everyone's now.
That should make me happy.
It does, but it also makes me feel like I'm losing a person I never had the right to keep. And if that's selfish, fine. Addit to the list. Right betweenfell for a monsterandcan't eat bread without crying.The list is getting long. I'll need a bigger notebook.
13
VIOLET
The bruise on my left hip has gone yellow-green at the edges as it's healing, which means it's been roughly ten days since Elio carried me out of that compound like something he'd salvaged from a fire. Give or take.
I'm trying not to count. Counting was a compound habit I am desperately trying to break. Trying being the operative word, because my body doesn't give a shit about my rehabilitation goals. It keeps its own record.
I tell myself I'm healing, but my nervous system tells me to go fuck myself. At least the nausea is almost gone, which means I'm eating again. Not a lot. Not with anything resembling pleasure or enthusiasm, but I'm keeping things down most of the time. Except when my stomach decides to stage a full revolt for absolutely no reason and saysactually, fuck that toast you just ateand I spend twenty minutes hunched over Italian porcelain looking at my own reflection, while Elio holds my hair, rubbing my back.
He's there for me whenever I need him. At night, when I wake up gasping, he's in his chair, ready to soothe.
Not thechair from my old room. This one is a leather one he dragged from his study to the side of his bed. Ten days in thatchair with his legs too long and his neck at an angle that would make a chiropractor weep. His back must be screaming, but he never mentions it.
He gives me space the way other men give flowers. Generously. With the clear expectation that it's what I need, wrapped in a bow of good intentions and restraint. And he's right. Hewasright. For the first three days, the idea of being touched made my skin crawl backward off my bones. Not just his touch. Anyone's. Matt's palm on my shoulder in the guest wing. Maria brushing against me in the hallway. Even the doctor's clinical fingers checking my ribs made my whole body lock up like a fist.
Elio read that on me without my having to say a single word. Pulled back. Gave me air. Gave me the entire room, the entire wing, the entire goddamn estate if I wanted it.
But it's been ten days and I'm not crawling anymore.
I'm restless.
The mornings are the worst. Or the best. Depends on which part of me you ask. He gets dressed with his back to me like he's giving me privacy I didn't ask for, and my gaze traces the line of his spine, the shift of muscle under skin as he pulls on a shirt, the way he buttons it from bottom to top with that mechanical precision he brings to everything. Long fingers. Steady. And the memory of what they feel like on my skin doesn't make me flinch.
It makes me ache.
The kind of ache that has nothing to do with bruises or starvation or any of the damage the compound left behind. This ache is older. Deeper. Mine.
Stop being so careful. Stop treating me like I'll break. I didn't survive that place to be handled like museum glass.
But I don't say it.
Not yet.
I let it build.
Two days ago, standing by the window with his back to me, he said I could go home if I wanted to. The Mediterranean stretched out behind him, blue and indifferent, and he told me he'd arrange a private jet to Boston. That I can go back to my family, to whatever life I want. He'd take care of everything. No strings. No conditions. No debts.
I could leave. Actually leave. Get on a plane and land at Logan and take the T to Southie and knock on Danny's door and he'd open it and say something terrible and perfect and I'd be home. Home where the buildings make sense and the accents are ugly-beautiful and nobody runs a criminal empire or sleeps in chairs or kills men with their bare hands.
I could go back.
