“Bagel.” I hold his face in both hands. His tongue finds my wrist. “I am sorry I did not come. I will try to be more reliable.”
“He forgives you,” Claire says. “He forgave you the second he saw your shoes.”
I stand. Bagel’s weight lifts off my foot and the lightness where the weight was is its own kind of absence. The joggers pass. The Beltline curves ahead through trees that are doing what they’ve been doing since June.
I skip the coffee shop. Jordan will ask me something kind and I will have to assemble an answer in English and today I do not have the pieces.
My apartment is quiet. Quiet used to be mine. Now it’s just empty.
My phone has a message from Tomáš sent days ago. I haven’t opened it. The preview says Call me when you’re ready and the timing tells me enough. Damián’s message and Tomáš‘s message arrived the same day. That isn’t a coincidence.
The bookshelf across the room filled with books. All those stories about people who carry the truth alone until they can’t.
There’s a knock on the door and I open it. Marchetti. He is holding a paper bag and a coffee.
“You missed skate,” he says.
“I told you I was not feeling well.”
“You told me that yesterday. And the day before.” He holds up the bag. “Soup. The place on Peachtree. You said it was kind seven months ago and I wrote it down.”
“Marchetti, you did not need to bring me soup.”
“I did, though. Because you missed skate twice, which has never happened, and you haven’t posted anything on your not-so-secret Instagram account in four days, which Thompson noticed because Thompson notices everything.” He steps past me into the apartment without waiting. “Thompson wanted to come too but I told him I’d do recon first.”
He puts the bag on the counter. He sees the sunflower lying beside it and looks at me.
“You have a flower.”
“The woman at the stand gave it to me.”
“The woman at the stand always gives you flowers. You always take a photo. You didn’t take a photo.”
“Not everything requires documentation.”
He opens the cupboard and finds a tall glass and fills it with water. He puts the sunflower in the water and sets the glass on the counter near the window where the morning light is coming in.
I watch him do it. My chest does something I don’t try to name.
“Eat,” he says. “When you’re ready. It holds for an hour. I asked.”
He sits on the stool at the counter. The stool Damián sat on when I made him coffee. Marchetti does not know this.
“I’m not going to ask what’s wrong.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not going to ask because you’ll tell me when you’re ready and if you’re never ready that’s okay too. Thompson and I have a theory but theories aren’t facts and we aren’t detectives.”
“The soup is very kind, Marchetti.”
“The soup is just soup. I’m the kind one.” The Marchetti smile, the one that fills a room without asking whether the room wanted to be filled. “Eat the soup. Come to skate tomorrow. Text Thompson back because he’s about to send a search party and Davis will be involved and you do not want Davis involved.”
“I will text Thompson.”
“Good.”
We sit for a moment. The morning light is on the sunflower and the sunflower is in the glass and the soup is on the counter. Marchetti is not filling the silence. He is sitting in it, which is the rarest thing Marchetti does and the most generous.
