Chapter 5
“People who confuse loyalty with ownership.”
I looked down at the tabletop to prevent myself from laughing.
Lorenzo noticed.
For the 1st time in 3 months, I saw one corner of his mouth move by approximately 1 millimeter.
The meeting lasted 20 minutes.
When the captains left, Vanessa remained.
She collected her bag slowly, circled the table slowly, and paused near Lorenzo.
“You should investigate our new guest’s background before she learns too much, dear Lorenzo. Bennett is an extremely common surname in Chicago, isn’t it?”
Lorenzo gave no answer.
He raised his eyes with a calm more severe than any response.
Vanessa smiled, satisfied that she had planted the sentence, and departed with her perfume trailing behind her.
Matteo closed the door.
He rested both hands against the back of a chair.
“She does not touch you,” he said without looking at me. “Ever.”
“Did you just say that to her?”
“I said it to myself.”
Lorenzo rose.
Before leaving, he stopped beside my chair.
“Miss Bennett.”
“Mr. Ricci.”
He regarded me for longer than necessary.
I did not know what the look meant, but I made a mental note to find out.
Matteo left me inside his office while he dealt with a captain on the floor below.
“Five minutes,” he said. “Do not open a drawer.”
I waited 10 minutes.
Then I opened a drawer.
It was not entirely curiosity.
The bottom drawer had already been left partly open. A brown envelope protruded from the edge as though attempting to fall without assistance.
When I leaned down to push it inside, 3 documents slipped free.
They were receipts from children’s hospitals for pediatric surgeries involving large amounts of money.
Every bill had been paid through a shell company whose name I did not recognize.
Matteo DeLuca’s signature appeared at the bottom of each page.
The documents covered 3 hospitals and 11 surgeries.
No donor’s name appeared in any public record. I knew because I had memorized the holdings’ philanthropic reports.
I sat on the office floor with the pages in my lap and cried.
There were no sobs, only a thin line of tears that reached my chin before I noticed.
The carpet smelled of cedar and of something I had come to associate only with him.
When Matteo returned, I had placed the documents inside the envelope and moved the envelope onto the desk, but I had not wiped my face properly.
He stopped at the doorway, looked at me, examined the desk, and looked at me again.
“You opened a drawer.”
“I sat on the floor.”
“Why?”
I shrugged.
“Because the 1st time I truly saw you, you were bleeding through a white shirt inside a gallery. I wanted to know who the man was that no one else saw.”
He did not answer.
He crossed the room, sat on the floor beside me, and leaned his head against the wall.
His knee touched mine lightly, a warm weight that remained.
“It is not charity,” he said after a while. “It is interest.”
“Interest on what?”
“Everything I have ever done.”
I rested my forehead against his shoulder.
He did not move.
We remained there until someone knocked on the door.
We remained for 1 second afterward too.
I met Mari at the Brewline at 6:00.
She ordered 2 coffees the size of buckets and pushed me toward the rear table before I removed my coat.
The café smelled of burned beans and the thin rain beginning outside.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “Begin with her face.”
“Vanessa’s?”
“Vanessa’s. Obviously.”
I told her about the couch, the folder, the comment about Bennett being a common surname, the meeting, Lorenzo, and the hospital receipts.
I omitted the part in which I cried on the office floor.
That part still belonged to me.
Mari listened without interrupting, the rarest event in her world.
When I finished, she drank half her coffee at once.
“Tell me you are not in love with a monster.”
I choked.
“You are in love with a man who learned to pretend he was a monster,” she continued, “and he is beginning to abandon the disguise.”
“That belongs on the bumper of a truck.”
“It’s the truth. You have never cried over an employer. You cried over the man whose name was on those receipts.”
I looked at her.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
Mari smiled with the expression she used when she knew exactly what she would do in my position.
“Stay.”
Matteo arrived at my apartment at 11:00 that night without calling first.
He pressed the buzzer twice with the patience of a man who had already decided to wait as long as necessary.
Mari began pretending to sleep before I reached the door.
He entered wearing a dark jacket without a tie. The Chicago wind had disturbed his hair slightly.
He brought the cold of the street and the smell of rain into the hallway.
He examined my kitchen for the 1st time: dishes inside the sink, a crooked magnet on the refrigerator, a coffee-stained towel I had promised to wash for 3 weeks, and a yellow bulb that made everything resemble an old film.
“It’s small,” I said defensively.
“It’s yours.”
He walked to the counter and placed his palm against the granite behind me without touching my body.
He stayed there for 1 second longer than necessary.
Three steps became half a step.
I could smell his coat, his skin, and the night that had not yet begun.
The granite was cold beneath my hand. The heat of him behind my shoulder seemed to stop the air.
“I bought a house,” he said.
I looked up.
“In Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Approximately 90 minutes from here.”
“Why?”
He took time to answer.
He looked toward the cabinet above my head as though the explanation might be written there.
“I have spent my entire life living in places that did not belong to me. Guest apartments, family homes, hotels. I never purchased anything while believing I would remain.”
He lowered his eyes to me.
“I bought this one while thinking about a life I never believed I deserved.”
I could not speak for a while.
He waited with his hand still on the granite, his chin lowered and his breathing measured.
“Do you want to see it?” he asked.
“When?”
“Sunday.”
I thought about debt, rent, and the fact that he had been my employer from the day I joined DeLuca Holdings.
I thought about Vanessa’s folder, the meeting on the 4th floor, and the cut above his eyebrow.
I thought about the man who had sat on his own office floor and described the hospital payments as interest on everything he had ever done.
“Sunday,” I said.
He nodded.
He pressed his lips to my forehead.
The contact was too quick to be a kiss and too slow to be merely a farewell.
He left without turning around.
I remained in the small kitchen with my hand resting on the section of granite where his palm had been.
It was still warm.
Mari opened her bedroom door wearing crooked pajamas.
“Are you going?”
“Yes.”
“Take the good coat.”
I laughed.
For the 1st time that week, the laugh was complete.
On Sunday morning, a small bag rested in the trunk of Matteo’s black car as we traveled along Interstate 94.
Wisconsin appeared on the horizon, low and blue-gray beneath mist rising from the lake.
Matteo drove with 1 hand on the wheel.
The other rested near mine without touching it.
I understood from his profile against the morning light that he was afraid of arriving.
For the 1st time since meeting him, I knew the house was not what frightened him.
He was afraid I would not remain.
The Lake Geneva property stood at the end of a narrow dirt road surrounded by trees holding the final red leaves of autumn.
The house was built of light wood and broad glass, with a wide porch facing water as smooth as a newly cleaned mirror.
Matteo turned off the engine and remained silent for 1 second too long.
Both hands stayed on the steering wheel as though he needed my reaction before allowing himself to breathe.
“You bought this,” I said.
It was not truly a question.
“I bought it while thinking about a life I did not believe I had the right to possess.”
He said it quietly, almost apologizing for his own desire.
Something inside my chest tightened and gave way at the same time.
I left the car barefoot because I had removed my shoes during the drive and forgotten to replace them.
The ground retained some warmth from the weak afternoon sun.
Matteo followed with the keys hanging from his index finger.
He watched me as he watched everything, the way he had from the moment he crossed the conference room—as though measuring a distance he had not yet decided he was permitted to travel.
I opened the front door and entered.
I laughed at the wrong things: the 2 broad windows, the empty drawers, the smell of new wood, and the good silence filling the rooms without requesting permission.
In the kitchen, I touched the pale stone counter and opened the cabinet above the sink.
It contained nothing.
I laughed again.
“You purchased a house without 1 glass.”
“I purchased it without anything because I wanted to choose what entered it with someone else.”
He remained in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his coat pockets, as though crossing that threshold alone were still impossible.
I held my breath.
The sentence had landed with a weight he probably had not calculated.
I crossed the kitchen, took his hand, drew him inside, and closed the door.
“You’re in now. You can’t go back outside.”
Matteo released a small laugh, one known only to me, the kind no one at the company would have believed his face capable of producing.
He tightened his hand around mine, raised my fingers to his mouth, and kissed them without speaking.
We walked through the house together.
He indicated where he wanted to place a turntable.
I selected the corner where the ridiculous armchair I had always wanted would fit.
He showed me the glass wall of the bedroom facing the lake.
I chose a chandelier he would never have selected himself.
“You have no taste,” I told him.
“I possess taste in only 1 thing.”
He did not turn toward me.
“She is barefoot in the middle of my hallway.”
The pier made quiet sounds beneath my feet.
The sun descended slowly over the opposite side of the lake, leaving orange paths across the water.
I sat at the end with my legs hanging over the edge.
Matteo sat beside me, close enough for his shoulder to rest against mine without planning.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
There was only water against wood and the persistent call of a bird from the opposite shore.
“I cannot leave all of it at once,” he said without looking at me. “It will take 1 year, perhaps 2. People depend on me. Operations must be dismantled carefully so no one dies during the process. I will not lie and tell you I can wake tomorrow as a clean man.”
I studied his profile, the line of his jaw, the fading cut above his eyebrow, and the exhaustion he carried like a 2nd skin.
In that light, the burden appeared slightly less severe.
“I never requested a saint,” I said. “I requested truth.”
He turned toward me.
His eyes appeared clearer than I had ever seen them, perhaps because the lake reflected in them or because he had released something carried inside his chest for years.
“I have survived a great deal, Chloe. But I have never lived in peace. I don’t know how it is done.”
“Neither do I.”
I paused.
“We’ll learn together.”
He laughed quietly.
The sound became something softer when he raised a hand to my face and brushed my chin with his thumb.
The last sunlight struck the glass behind us and returned through the water.
“May I?” he asked.
The question made me want to cry from anger and tenderness at the same time.
The most dangerous man in Chicago was asking permission to kiss me at the end of a wooden pier in Wisconsin.
“You always could.”
He kissed me slowly, like a man testing whether the ground still existed beneath his feet.
His hand steadied the back of my neck.
It felt different from the other times he had touched me there.
It did not tremble.
For the 1st time, it held only certainty.
When we separated, the light had almost disappeared.
He rested his forehead against mine and remained breathing close.
“Come,” he said eventually.
He helped me stand.
We walked back to the house holding hands.
A thin rain began before we reached the entrance, more like mist than a storm.
I illuminated a kitchen lamp.
Matteo removed his coat.
The living room still smelled like new timber and something I could not identify—perhaps the beginning of something.
He stopped at the entrance to the corridor leading toward the bedroom.
He looked at me in a way I already recognized, but this time he did not conceal half the question.
He extended his hand.
I accepted it.
He led me down the corridor without haste.
Rain touched the skylight.
The bedroom door closed quietly, as though the house itself had agreed to respect the silence.
I woke with sunlight against my face and the smell of coffee in the air.
I rose carefully, adjusted the shirt I had worn to sleep, and descended the new wooden stairs barefoot.
Matteo stood in the kitchen with his back toward me.
He wore dark pajama trousers, his broad shoulders outlined by morning light passing through the glass wall.
Jazz played quietly from somewhere in the house.
Obviously.
He collected records as though they were small religions.
“Good morning,” I said from the doorway.
He turned and looked at me like someone still learning to believe in what he saw.
He pushed a mug toward me without asking how I preferred my coffee.
He already knew.
The fact that he knew affected me in a way no statement could have done.
“Good morning,” he answered, his voice rough from sleep.
I sat on the counter.
He remained opposite me with his own mug, watching.
Beneath the marble, his bare foot found mine and remained against it, as though reserving a place for the rest of my life.
“We need to buy a glass,” I said, restraining a smile.
“We need to buy everything. I don’t even know where the sugar is.”
May you like
I rose and opened the wrong cabinet.
Then I opened a 2nd incorrect cabinet.
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