The charcoal feels good between my fingers. Gritty and real, leaving evidence on everything it touches, which is more than I can say for the last month of my life.
I sit on the low stone wall by the fountain and draw the arched windows of the east wing because my hands remember what my brain hasn't caught up to yet.
I'm a restorer. I build things back. It's what I do. It's what I've always done, even before I had a word for it, even when I was eight years old gluing Danny's broken model airplane back together on the kitchen floor while Ma yelled at Sean about something I've blocked out. My hands know how to make broken things whole. They're just waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
The charcoal drags across the paper in long, sure strokes. Arches first. Always arches first, they carry the load, distribute the weight, tell you how the whole structure thinks about gravity. Then the mullions, the tracery, the shadow patterns where the afternoon light cuts through limestone at exactly the angle that would've made a Renaissance architect weep.
A smudge on my wrist. Another on my thumb. Black dust under my nails that'll take a few washes to get out.
Good. Evidence of living. Evidence of making.
Matt finds me. Sits beside me on the wall, close enough that our shoulders brush, and looks at the sketch. His whole face opens up. Genuine delight, bright and warm and so uncomplicated it almost hurts to look at.
"You're really talented." He tilts his head, studying the drawing with the kind of earnest attention he probably gives his students' essays. "My kids would flip. They think art is just TikTok filters and whatever AI spits out."
"To be fair, some of those filters are doing god's work."
He snorts. "Don't tell my AP students that. They already think effort is optional."
There's a specific warmth in being seen by someone who knew you at your worst and is now watching you rebuild. Like having a witness to your own resurrection.
Except less dramatic. And with more charcoal smudges.
"Do you feel safe here?" Matt asks after a while. His voice is easy, conversational. The voice of a man who needs to know where the walls are, even when the walls are made of lemon trees and bougainvillea instead of concrete. "Like, do people know about this place? How far is the nearest town?"
And the thing is, these are exactly the questions I would have asked if I was stuck somewhere after everything we went through. So I answer him. Tell him the estate is about forty minutes outside Palermo. That the security is layers deep—cameras, armed guards, a perimeter wall that would make a medieval fortress blush. That the nearest village is a cluster of stone houses down the hill, close enough to see from the west terrace but far enough to feel like another planet.
He nods as I reassure him. Asking more questions and exhaling a relieved sigh when I give him the answers.
"He's good to you?" The change of topic doesn't startle me. Maybe it's because I want to talk about Elio, and all the thingsI got wrong about him. I want to tell the world about him, but instead I tell my audience of one.
Matt is the only person I can tell, because he already knows what Elio is, what he does, what he's done, and what he means to me, I tell him that Elio is more than what people see. That under the empire and the violence and the name that makes grown men flinch, there's a man who slept in a chair beside my bed for ten nights because he was afraid of crowding me. That he fed me with his hands when mine shook too hard to hold food. That he offered to send me home, no conditions, no strings, just a plane ticket and an open door, and meant it.
"He doesn't let go," I say, watching a hawk circle above the tree line. "At all. Ever. And I used to think that was the problem. That being held that tight meant being helddown. But now I think it might be the point."
Matt listens. Really listens. The way he listened in the cell, turned toward me, eyes steady, body still. Not waiting for his turn to speak. Just... receiving. Taking it in.
"You love him," he says quietly.
I don't deny it.
What would be the point? Matt saw it written across my face, plain and clear. Or maybe he drew it out of me, the way good listeners do, asking the right questions in the right order until you've handed them the whole blueprint without realizing you opened the drawer. And Matt is the best listener I've ever met.
I should probably find that more unsettling than I do.
Above us, the hawk is still hunting.
I'mon my way to find Elio, when I pass Valente near the east staircase. He's on his phone, half-turned toward the window, speaking low, rapid Italian that I only catch fragments of.
One fragment is enough.
Rossi.
My feet keep moving. My brain stops.
Rossi. Gabriella Rossi. Elio's ex-fiancée. The woman who arranged my kidnapping like she was ordering a hit, because that's essentially what it was, except instead of killing me she sold me to men who traffic women by the pound and let them do whatever they wanted with the leftovers.
I haven't thought much of her once since I got back, which is shocking really. I should tell Elio but I haven't yet.
