Chapter 8: What the Walls Don't
Say
Days folded into each other with the strange
elasticity of time that only exists outside of
ordinary life. No phones except one burner line
reserved for Enzo. No visitors, no schedule, no
reason to be anywhere except exactly where
they already were. Just the two of them, the
ocean, and far too much silence to
comfortably fill.
Isabella cooked, because she had always been
bad at sitting still and cooking gave her hands
something honest to do. She raided the
cottage's dusty pantry and turned half-expired
ingredients into something her grandmother would have recognized, humming under her
breath in a way Romeo suspected she didn't
realize she was doing.
Romeo fixed things — the sagging porch step,
a cabinet hinge that had rusted shut, a fence
post the salt air had eaten through — because
his hands needed a job or they remembered
other things. A trigger guard. A countdown. His
mother's hand slipping out of his seven-year-
old grip in a hallway thick with smoke, the heat
of it, the sound of his own voice screaming a
word he could no longer bring himself to say
out loud even now, seventeen years later.
"You do that thing," Isabella said one evening,
watching him over the rim of a chipped
ceramic mug while the last of the light drained
out of the sky.
"What thing?"
"Go somewhere else. Behind your eyes. You're
standing right here and then you're not —
you're somewhere I can't follow. Where do you
go, Romeo?" He almost lied. He had built an entire adult life
around lying, gracefully and efficiently, about
this exact thing. But there was something
about the cottage — its distance from Ferrari's
world, from every rule that had ever governed
his life — that made the truth feel less
dangerous than usual.
"I lost my parents when I was seven," he said,
watching her face carefully for the reaction
he'd learned to expect: pity, discomfort, the
reflexive need to fill the silence with something
reassuring. "House fire. At least, that's what I
was told happened."
"You don't believe it was an accident."
"I don't believe much of anything without proof
anymore." He looked at her, and for once he
didn't look away first. "Ask me again another
time. I'm not ready to give you all of it yet."
She studied him for a long moment, and then
— surprising them both — she simply nodded.
"Okay. Another time." She didn't push, didn't fill
the silence, didn't reach for him the way people
usually did when they wanted credit for their own compassion. She just let the silence sit
there between them, unhurried, and something
in Romeo's chest loosened slightly for the first
time in longer than he could remember.