And look, I grew up with two brothers. I know what male jealousy looks like when it has a shape. Danny slamming doors. Sean going quiet for three days straight and pretending nothing's wrong until it leaks out sideways over something stupid, like who left the milk out. Those are shapes I can work with. Shapes I can name.
This isn't that.
This is subtler. Like a crack running behind drywall where you can't see it. The kind you only catch because the paint's buckled a quarter inch and the door frame doesn't sit right anymore. The structure looks fine. The structure is not fine.
It's worse at dinner when we all sit at the long table in the formal dining room. It's not the same room I've had dinners with Elio in, that seems like a lifetime ago. This room is lit up by candles because two of the women still flinch at overhead fluorescents. Elio noticed it without being told, and had every overhead fixture in the dining room switched off within the hour. That's the man I'm falling hard for. The one who notices fluorescent lights make trafficking survivors flinch and fixes it without a word.
That man sits at the head of the table. Matt sits across from me, four seats down.
Matt tries. He always tries. It's one of the things that makes him Matt. He asks Elio about the investigation into the trafficking network, whether there's been progress tracing the supply chain. Good questions. Informed questions, the kind a smart man asks when he's genuinely trying to understand the world he's landed in.
"We've identified several intermediary contacts," Elio says. "Valente is coordinating with our people in Catania to trace the financial thread."
It's a complete answer, offered without hesitation. And absolutely nothing behind it. Like talking to a beautifully designed building with no one inside. Every window lit, every surface polished, every structural element in place. No one home.
Matt absorbs this. His fork pauses for maybe half a second, before he pivots to lighter ground. He tells a story about the time his JV basketball team lost to a school whose gym was so small the baseline was literally the wall, and a kid knocked himself out on a fast break. The women at the table don't all understand the words, but they understand his voice, the rhythm of it, the way his hands move when he talks. Maria laughs, and then Lucia,and then the young girl whose name is Ella makes a sound that might be the first laugh she's produced in months.
The table warms. Matt does that. He's a space heater for damaged people. Throws off warmth without trying.
Elio's mouth curves. The appropriate response at the appropriate moment. A social smile with the structural integrity of wet cardboard.
I push a piece of bread around my plate. My stomach's been off all day and the bread tastes like nothing.
That's all this is. Jealousy. The man who controls everything can't stand that he can't control this.
I tell myself that with the confidence of a woman who's almost entirely sure.
And it keeps happening. The next morning I find Matt at the kitchen counter making coffee, his back to me as he measures freshly ground beans, and Elio stiffens beside me. I feel it before I see it. His whole body going taut, his eyes locking onto Matt with the specific attention of a man committing something to record. The way I've seen him study architectural plans, or financial documents, or the faces of men who were caught doing something he didn't like. Detailed. Thorough. Already past information-gathering and deep into something else.
I step sideways. Make sure he can see that I see him watching.
He doesn't look away. Doesn't flinch. Just holds my gaze for a beat, his face perfectly neutral, and then moves past me down the hallway without a word.
That afternoon I'm on the terrace with a glass of water, watching Matt in the garden below, helping two of the women carry supplies from the kitchen outbuilding. Easy laughter drifts up. Matt's, and then one of the women's, lighter, uncertain, like she's remembering how the sound works.
Elio appears beside me. Stands at the railing, his eyes on Matt. That same look on his face. His knuckles whiten around the railing before he turns around without a word and goes back inside.
I stand on the terrace alone and look down at Matt laughing in the garden with a bag of flour tucked under one arm, trying to figure out what it is that Elio sees. I fail.
A dead bougainvillea bloom clings to the railing. I snap it off, crush it between my fingers.
It's just jealousy. There's nothing else that fits.
The next day Matt sits across from me at lunch, talking through the logistics of eventually going home. The flights, the bureaucratic nightmare of replacing a passport, what his building super will have done with a month of mail piling up outside his apartment.
"She's definitely adopted my fern by now," he says. "She already killed my basil plant, Gerald, while I was at work one summer. Just took him. and repotted him. He was dead in a week."
"She murdered Gerald?"
"In cold blood. Didn't even apologize. Said he was 'struggling' and she was 'intervening.'" He shakes his head. "Gerald was doing fine. Gerald was thriving."
I laugh so hard my belly aches, my right hand moving across the table to cover his while I wipe off the laughter tears with my left.This is the first time I laughed since I found about Elena, and I will be eternally grateful to Matt for giving me this moment.
Matt's eyes flicker behind me and I don't have to turn around to know that Elio must be watching. I leave my hand where it is.
That eveningI'm on the terrace watching stars when I spot Matt acting all weird. He's walking toward me but his approach is all wrong, close to the wall, checking the doorway behind him.
"Hey." His voice is light, too light. The Matt equivalent of Elio's social smile. Correct shape, wrong material.
