The avoiding was going fine until it wasn't.
Four days. Four days of timing my exits right, choosing the far chair, staying in rooms that didn't require me to perform nonchalant across a five-foot distance.
It wasn't comfortable but it was working. I had a system and the system was holding.
The system was: get up before everyone else. Eat. Be somewhere useful before the house filled up. When Anthonio was around, find a reason to be in a different part of it.
When he wasn't, stop listening for the sound of a car in the driveway. Stop clocking which chair was going to put me closest to the door if I needed to leave a room quickly. Stop thinking about it like a problem to be managed and just live like a normal person.
That last part was the one I hadn't figured out yet.
But the rest of it was working. Four days, no incidents, we didn't cross paths, I was fine.
Then Matteo knocked on my door Wednesday afternoon and said "Anthonio's here, Romeo wants everyone downstairs" and the whole system fell apart.
I took my time going down. Not enough to be noticed, just enough to get myself together before I had to walk into a room and act like a person who had nothing going on. I was good at that. A few extra seconds on the stairs, one breath at the door. I had been doing small things like that my whole life.
The sitting room had everyone in it. Luca and Romeo on one side of the conversation, Anthonio on the other, something about a contact in the city that needed handling.
Matteo on the sofa pretending to be fully paying attention. Elio near the window with a book he wasn't reading.
Anthonio looked up when I came in.
I found a chair and sat down in it.
"Hey," Romeo said, then I nodded. I gave the conversation my attention. I did not look at the other side of the room.
Anthonio didn't look at me either.
Here is the thing about agreeing to distance that nobody tells you. The hard part isn't the feeling underneath it. The hard part is the performance. Sitting in the same room as someone and making sure your face and your body and the way you hold your glass all say the same thing. That, by the way, is not the same as being completely unbothered.
That takes concentration. Real concentration, the kind that doesn't leave room for anything else.
I had been holding on to that for four days, and it left me exhausted in a way I couldn't explain without explaining everything.
Anthonio was doing it too. That was the part that made it worse. I could tell because he was being too normal. That specific, slightly awkward version of normal that people produce when they're working at it. He said the right things to Luca, responded to Romeo at the right moments, kept his eyes exactly where they were supposed to be.
He was running the same system I was running and doing it just as carefully.
Knowing that didn't make it easier. It meant we were both sitting in the same room doing the same exhausting thing for the same reason and neither of us was going to acknowledge it and the whole situation had a particular kind of awful to it that I hadn't anticipated when I said okay on that garden step.
I had pictured distance being cleaner than this. More like absence and less like presence with a wall through the middle of it.
I concentrated.
Business. Logistics. The careful low language this family used for things that didn't get put in writing. I answered when someone asked me something. I laughed when Matteo said something. I was completely present and completely normal and completely fine.
At one point Anthonio gestured toward the window and his hand moved through the air about two feet from where I was sitting.
I looked at the wall and thought about nothing.
In forty minutes. Then the room started to break up the way rooms do when a meeting ends and people remember they have other things to do. I stood up, said something to Matteo about dinner, and moved toward the door before anyone could pull me back into it.
I was almost through when I clocked that Anthonio was heading out at the same time and our paths were going to cross in the doorway.
I stepped back and checked my phone.
He went through first without slowing down.
I stood in the corridor for a moment after he'd gone. The house was quiet in that particular way it got when a conversation had just finished and everyone went their seperate ways. I took one breath and told myself this was fine. That I had managed forty minutes in the same room without giving a single thing away and that was the whole point and it had worked and I was okay.
It had worked. That part was true.
It just didn't feel like anything good.
I counted to five and walked the other way.
Elio found me in the kitchen about twenty minutes later.
He didn't make anything of it. Just came in, poured two glasses of water, set one in front of me and sat down at the table across from where I was leaning against the counter. I looked at the glass abd picked it up.
"You want to tell me something," I said.
"I want to ask you something," he said.
"You and Anthonio." He said it the way he said most things.... quietly, without making it bigger than it needed to be.
"What about it?"
"Something's different."
"Nothing's different." I kept my voice even. "We're fine."
He looked at me. Not the interrogating kind of look. Just the Elio kind — steady and patient, the one that didn't push but didn't let you off the hook either.
"I'm not pushing," he said.
"I know."
"I just notice things."
"I know that too." I looked at my glass. "There's nothing to notice, Elio. Genuinely."
He nodded. The slow one that meant he was letting it go for now, not that he believed me.
The kitchen was quiet. The house outside was settling into itself the way it did early evenings, the day winding down slowly, everyone finding their corners. I had always liked that hour. Tonight it just felt bit different.
I set my water glass down.
"You know you can tell me things, right?" I said.
He looked up.
"I mean it. If something is bothering you, if there's something you've been dealing with that you don't know what to do with — you don't have to keep it to yourself." I held his eyes. "I'm not going to push you. That's not what I'm doing. I'm just saying I'm here. Whatever it is."
Something shifted in his face. Quiet and careful the way everything with Elio was quiet and careful. He sat with it for a moment and I watched him decide something quietly and I didn't rush him.
He didn't say anything.
He stood up slowly and came around the table and put his arms around me and I held on right back and we just stood there in the kitchen for a while. No words between us. No explanation needed. Just that.
I pressed my face into his shoulder and let myself stop holding everything in place for one minute. The four days of being careful exits and managed expressions and the particular concentrated effort of being in the same room as Anthonio and showing nothing. The tiredness underneath all of it that I hadn't let myself feel properly because feeling it would mean admitting how much this whole thing was costing me. It sat there now, quiet and real, and I let it, just for that minute, while Elio held on and didn't ask me to explain.
He held a little tighter.
He probably understood more than he let on. That was Elio. That had always been Elio.
We stayed like that until Matteo's voice came from down the hall and the house pulled us back into itself. We separated. I looked at the window. He looked at his glass. Neither of us said anything about what that had been.
We didn't need to.
I was good at being okay. I had been good at that for a long time and I knew how to make it hold together. But standing there alone after, I could feel the weight of it more clearly than I had in a while.
And I wasn't sure how much longer I could carry it without something giving way.