Chapter 12: The Distance
At the second safehouse — a larger property
further inland, better defended, colder
somehow despite the improved amenities —
Romeo went quiet in a way Isabella had never seen from him before. Not the careful,
watchful quiet of a professional bodyguard
doing his job. Something colder. Something
that had walls in it.
He stopped reaching for her hand on the path
down to the small lake behind the property. He
started sleeping in the front room instead of
outside her door, as if the door itself had
become something he could no longer bring
himself to look at directly. He answered her
questions in single words, if he answered them
at all, and twice she caught him staring at
nothing for so long she had to say his name
three times before he surfaced.
"Did I do something?" she finally asked, on the
third day, standing in the kitchen doorway with
her arms crossed against more than just the
evening chill coming through the drafty
windows.
"No." He wouldn't meet her eyes.
"That's not an answer, Romeo."
"It's the only one I have right now." His voice
came out rougher than he meant it to, scraped raw at the edges. "Isabella. Please. Just give
me some room."
She studied him for a long, silent moment —
long enough that he almost broke and told her
everything right there in the kitchen, folder and
all. "You're allowed to have things you're not
ready to say," she said finally, quieter now,
some of the hurt draining out of her voice and
leaving something gentler in its place. "I asked
that of you once too, remember? On the beach,
before any of this. I know how to wait, Romeo.
I've had practice my whole life. I just need you
to tell me if waiting is actually going to help, or
if I'm just standing here watching you drown."
He didn't answer that either. He couldn't. He
didn't know how to tell the woman he had
somehow, impossibly, fallen in love with that
her father had murdered his parents — that
some nights now he lay awake in the front
room trying to decide whether loving her made
him a traitor to a seven-year-old boy who had
never once been allowed to properly grieve.