“You’ll catch it next time,” I tell her, and without fully understanding what comes over me, I lean down and kiss her.
Her eyes are still on the screen when I pull back, and I can tell she’s locked somewhere inside her own head right now. I used to do the same thing.
“Amalia. Talk to me.”
I feel her tense in her chair, and she doesn’t answer. I already know what’s going on, I just want her to say it out loud so she can hear for herself how wrong every word of it sounds.
“What if I’m not cut out for this?” she whispers, and a quiet, understanding smile spreads across my face.
Impostor syndrome. I’ve seen it in her over these past weeks. In the way she constantly second-guesses her own work, in the way anything less than perfect feels like failure.
“This,” I tap her temple three times, “is perfectly capable of doing everything it sets out to do. You’ve put nine hours a day into this project, baby.Your brain needs to breathe too, Amalia.”
I watch her search my eyes for the catch, the lie, the trick. She won’t find one. She’s the most intelligent woman I know, and she needs to understand that it’s all right not to always be at your peak, it’s all right not to have the answer to every problem the moment it appears.
“Has it ever happened to you? Hearing that voice in your head too loudly, the one that tells you you’re doing nothing right?” she asks with so much vulnerability, so much genuine doubt in her voice, that before I can stop myself I’m pulling her into my arms and carrying her to the couch.
Once I sit down, I position her in my lap facing me. She’s wearing fluffy lavender socks and a sweater that readsLittle Sweetheart,and my heart doubles its pace.
I can’t fight her demons for her, but fuck, I want to tear every last one of those doubts out by the root with my bare hands.
“Before, yes. Before, I let what everyone said get to me.”
“What changed?”
It takes me a moment to find the words, but with my eyes down, I answer.
“My brother.”
It’s the first time I’ve mentioned him. But I don’t want to lie to her. I’m not ready to tell her about Karina and Sebastianyet, or about the monster who fractured our family, because it would frighten her. And the thought that she might stop sitting like this, in my arms, that relaxed, it puts a hollow feeling in my chest.
She waits patiently for me to continue, because Amalia is empathetic. She’s good. I know that if she found out everything I actually do with my time, the image she has of me would fall apart entirely, and that’s not something I can avoid forever.
“When I took over the accounting for a company, I made an error. A calculation I could run in ten seconds with my eyes closed now, but at the time my mind wasn’t as sharp. I didn’t want to eat for two days, didn’t want to leave my room, because I felt like I’d let my brother down. He was the one who got me the job, and I’d failed at something I was supposedly a genius at. He was the one who came, after those forty-eight hours, and put this watch in my hand, the watch he’d had from our mother. He told me to look at it and tell him how many seconds are in a day. Eighty-six thousand four hundred, I told him. And all he said was:you can’t give a hundred percent in every single one of those eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds, Si. But you can try, and I know how hard you try.After that, I understood I needed to take breaks. That’s how I got into sports. How I got into reading. To let my mind breathe.”
She nods slowly, because she understands. Rationally, she already knows she can’t be at full capacity every moment of every day, but it’s the emotional side, which is far more developed in her than in me, that keeps overriding it.
“Your brother sounds wonderful,” she whispers, and the knot in my throat comes back.
“He was,” is all I can manage.
She goes still for a moment, and then her lips come to rest first on my forehead, then on my cheek.
“I’m so sorry, Silas. Do you wa?—”
“Let me put some more hot chocolate on,” I tell her, moving past the subject, and I watch her quietly accept that she won’t get more than that for now.
I’m in the kitchen when I hear the knock at the door, and then the soft pad of Amalia’s footsteps crossing the apartment to answer it.
I hear his voice before I see him, and my body locks up immediately.
I leave the hot chocolate forgotten on the stove and cross the apartment in a few quick strides, stepping into the doorway.
“Silvio.” His name comes out in a register that should leave no room for misunderstanding.
Because he knows he has no business being at my home, and I don’t know how he found out where I live.
His eyes move to Amalia, so I step in front of her, cutting off his line of sight entirely.
