I drove home from the ball and sat in my car outside my building for twenty minutes doing nothing.
That was where I was at. Twenty minutes staring at a steering wheel because I couldn't stop seeing her face when she looked away from me across that room. The way she had gone quiet and stayed quiet and held her glass like something to hold herself to. She hadn't said a word about Camille. Hadn't asked, hadn't made anything of it directly.
She just went somewhere else and stayed there and let me stand beside her in that gap and feel every inch of it.
I knew what it meant. I had known what it meant the second I looked at her face.
The problem was that knowing what something meant and knowing what to do about it were two different problems, and I had been sitting with that gap for weeks without closing it. The ball had just made it impossible to keep pretending the gap wasn't there.
Watching her go quiet, watching her hold herself together across a room from me — that was not something I could file away and come back to later. That had followed me home and was still sitting in my chest the next morning.
I went inside eventually. Poured a drink I didn't finish. Got through the night.
The next afternoon I drove back to the Moretti house because Romeo had called about something that turned out to take less than an hour. Which meant I was standing in the front hall at three in the afternoon with nothing left to discuss and the full knowledge that she was somewhere in the house and I had been trying to stay out of rooms alone with her since the library and wasn't doing a great job of it.
I found her in the garden.
She was sitting on the stone steps at the far end with her phone in her lap and the particular stillness she got when she was thinking about something she didn't want to think about.
She wasn't looking at the phone. She wasn't looking at anything. She heard me coming across the grass and looked up and something moved through her expression before she settled it back into neutral.
We had gotten very good at that with each other.
I sat down without being invited. She moved over slightly to make room without being asked. That small easy adjustment,like it was already a habit, like we had already established certain things without discussing them. That was exactly the problem. We had been building something without naming it and now it had gotten too big to pretend wasn't there, and I was sitting on a garden step with the evidence of that beside me.
We sat without talking for a minute. Midafternoon light across the garden, the kind of quiet afternoon that had no business being this calm given everything.
"Last night," I started.
"You don't have to," she said.
"I know I don't have to. I'm choosing to."
She looked at her hands and waited
I had thought about how to say this the whole drive over and I still didn't have a clean version of it. There wasn't one. "What's been happening between us — I need you to understand that it's not nothing to me. That's not the issue."
"Then what's the issue?"
"My world," I said. "That's the whole thing. What I do and who I do it with, it's not a background detail, Andrea. It's everything I am. And the way it works is that if someone wants leverage over me and they find out I care about something, that something stops being safe. I've watched it happen.
A man I worked with lost his brother because someone noticed he cared too much about keeping him out of the business. That's the version of this that doesn't have a good ending. That's what I'm trying to keep you out of."
She was quiet for a second. "So you're saying I'd be a target."
"I'm saying you'd be a liability in the eyes of people who don't care what that costs."
She turned and looked at me directly, the way she did when she was done being careful. "You already care about me."
I didn't answer.
"Anthonio. You already do. Which means if that's the risk, it's already there whether we act on it or not."
That landed somewhere uncomfortable because she wasn't wrong. I had thought about it more than I wanted to admit. "Caring about someone quietly is different from making it visible," I said. "Right now nobody knows anything. That matters more than you might think."
She was quiet for a moment. I could see her turning it over the way she turned everything over, not rushing to the easiest conclusion, taking it apart and looking at all the pieces.
"What if we kept it that way?" she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Nobody knowing." She said it clearly, looking straight ahead at the garden. "We don't tell Romeo. We don't tell anyone. We're careful about it. Everything you're describing — the visibility, the target, all of it — it doesn't apply if nobody knows. It only becomes a risk if it becomes something people can see."
I looked at her.
"I'm not asking you to make it into something public," she said. "I'm not asking you to walk into a room holding my hand or change anything about how things look from the outside. I'm just saying that what's already happening between us doesn't have to be nothing simply because we can't be loud about it.
We could be quiet about it instead. We're already good at being quiet." She paused. "You've been protecting me in your head for weeks already, Anthonio. I'm just asking you to stop using that as a reason to keep your distance."
That one landed differently than the rest.
Because she was right about that too. I had been doing exactly that — using protection as a wall when the truth was messier and more personal than I wanted to say to her face.
"Secrets don't stay secrets," I said. "Not in this world. Not for long enough. And when this one came out, and it would definitely come out — the fallout wouldn't just land on me. It would land on you. On Romeo. On this whole family." I stopped. "I know this isn't what you want to hear."
"No," she said. "It's not."
"Andrea—"
"Don't"..... "Don't say my name like you feel sorry about it. Either you want this or you don't. If you don't, fine. But don't dress it up like you're doing me a favour."
"I am protecting you."
She looked at me. Held it for a second.
"You're protecting yourself."
That sat between us and I didn't argue with it. I looked at her face — that controlled, careful expression she wore when something was costing her and she had decided not to show how much — and felt it the way I always felt things where she was involved. Somewhere I didn't have a defence against.
She wasn't wrong. That was the part I couldn't say out loud. And the part quieter than that was that I didn't trust myself to be the one who kept this contained. I had been telling myself for weeks that I could manage it, stay close without crossing anything. The library had proven that was not as true as I needed it to be.
"We should stay away from each other for a while," I said. "Until this settles."
She looked back at the garden. Hands still in her lap. Making herself quiet around it the way she always did with difficult things.
"Okay," she said.
Just that. No argument, no pushing back. Which was worse than if she had fought me on it. If she had argued I could have held the line. This I just had to sit with.
I stood up. Looked at her one second longer than I should have.
"For what it's worth—"
"It's fine," she said. Still not looking at me. "Go."
I went.
I drove home with both hands on the wheel and told myself I had done the right thing. That I had been honest with her and made the only call that made sense given everything I knew about my life and the people in it. That she was safer this way and Romeo was safer this way and the decision I had just made was the correct one.
I told myself that the whole drive.
By the time I got there I almost believed it.
Almost wasn't nothing. But it wasn't enough. And somewhere on the drive I had stopped pretending it was going to get easier with distance. It hadn't gotten easier yet. I didn't have a good reason to think it would start now.
I went inside anyway. That was all I had.