I take out my phone and call Armando.
He answers on the first ring. “Sì?”
“Food,” I say.
“What would you like?”
I look toward the kitchen. “Pasta if it can come quickly. Soup. Bread. Something sweet.”
“From Regio?”
“No. Too far.”
“There is a place nearby. Good Italian. Not yours,” he adds carefully.
Not preferred, but… “I will survive.”
“Capito.”
I end the call.
The shower is still running.
I look up toward the ceiling.
She is undressed above me.
Water sliding over skin I have not yet touched.
Skin I nearly did touch. Skin I imagined under my hands from the moment I saw her standing across my conference table, chin lifted. Professional persona in place.
My jaw tightens.
I take off my coat and lay it over the back of a chair. Then I remove my suit jacket because keeping it on feels absurdly formal in this room.
I roll my sleeves to my forearms and force myself to look around again, but not upstairs. Not toward the sound of water and wet flesh.
The living room is neat, but lived in. Not decorated to impress anyone or staged, but for comfort. A soft rug beneath the coffee table. A narrow bookshelf full enough that some of the books lie sideways across the top of the others. Legal texts on the lower shelf. Novels mixed in with them. A vase on the windowsill with flowers past their best but not yet thrown away.
Even her disorder has order.
I step into the kitchen.
Small but clean with wooden cabinets and light counters. A dish towel is folded over the oven handle and a bowl on the counter has three apples and one lemon. The coffee machine that looks overused.
I open the refrigerator.
Not to intrude, of course.
Simply to confirm what I already know.
A container of Greek yogurt, eggs, half a bottle of white wine, salad greens that are not so fresh anymore, cheese, and sparkling water. There are a couple of takeout containers, but nothing that suggests she had anything to feed herself tonight.
I close the refrigerator with a little more force than I mean to.
This woman.
This brilliant, stubborn, exhausted woman.
