Chapter 4
He came home early that evening. That alone should have felt like something.
I was at the kitchen counter with my laptop open, working through a sleeve pattern I'd been refining all week. The door opened and Vincenzo walked in, loosening his tie, and for a second he just stood there watching me. I looked up.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey." He set his keys in the bowl. Didn't move toward me right away. Just stood there with that look on his face — the careful one, the one he'd been wearing for weeks now. Trying to locate something he couldn't quite name.
He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down.
"You've been different lately," he said. "Is everything okay?"
I closed the laptop halfway and smiled at him. Easy. Mild. "Everything's fine. I've just been keeping busy."
He studied my face. I knew what he was looking for. The tightness around my eyes. The way I used to go quiet and careful whenever he said her name. The small, readable signs that told him I was hurt but would come around. That I was waiting for him to fix it.
He didn't find any of it.
I watched the confusion move through him — just a flicker, quickly controlled. He leaned back in the chair and nodded slowly, like he'd concluded something.
"I feel like I've been dropping the ball," he said. "With us."
"You've been busy," I said. "It's fine."
"No, I mean it." He reached across the counter and put his hand over mine. His palm was warm. "This weekend. Just us. I'll book somewhere. Dinner, maybe a drive up the coast. Whatever you want."
I looked at his hand on mine.
"That sounds nice," I said.
He smiled. The relief in it was almost painful to see. He thought that was enough. He thought that was the thing that fixed it — the offer, the gesture, the plan that would probably dissolve by Thursday.
"Yeah?" he said.
"Yeah."
He squeezed my hand and stood up. "Good. I'll look into it tonight."
He moved toward the bedroom to change, and I opened my laptop again.
I stared at the sleeve pattern without seeing it.
The suitcase was under the bed. Packed for eleven days. Everything I was taking fit into one carry-on and a personal item, which had surprised me at first and then hadn't.
I'd been shedding this life for months. There wasn't much left to carry.
---
His phone rang at 9:14.
I know the time because I was looking at the clock on the microwave when I heard it. We were in the living room — him on the couch with a glass of wine, me in the armchair with a book I hadn't been reading. It was almost comfortable. Almost like something it hadn't been in a long time.
Then his phone lit up on the cushion beside him.
He glanced at the screen. Something shifted in his face. He picked it up.
"Delaney." Not a question. Just her name, said the way you say a word you already know the shape of.
He answered. I heard her voice through the speaker, high and fractured, crying. I caught the words *bleeding* and *scared* and *alone*, and then Vincenzo was already standing up.
"Okay," he said into the phone. "Okay, I'm coming. Just stay calm. I'm on my way."
He hung up and looked at me. One second. Maybe less.
"I have to go," he said. "She says something's wrong with the baby."
I nodded.
He grabbed his keys from the bowl by the door. Put his jacket on. His movements were quick and practiced, the muscle memory of a hundred other nights just like this one.
He opened the door.
He didn't look back.
The door clicked shut behind him.
---
I sat in the armchair for exactly one minute. I know because I counted.
Then I got up.
I moved through the apartment the way you move through a place you've already left in your mind. The bedroom first. I knelt beside the bed and pulled the suitcase out from underneath — it rolled smoothly on the hardwood, no resistance. I stood up and looked around the room. The water stain was still in the corner of the ceiling. We had never gotten it fixed.
I didn't linger.
Kitchen. Living room. One slow pass, not looking for things to take. Just looking. The couch where he'd been sitting. The wine glass he'd left on the coffee table, still half full. The bowl by the door where his keys had been.
I reached into my pocket and took out my apartment key. I set it on the kitchen counter, next to the fruit bowl, in a spot where he would see it immediately.
No note. There was nothing left to say that I hadn't already said in eleven days of silence.
I picked up my suitcase. I walked to the door. I opened it.
The hallway was empty and bright.
I stepped through, pulled the door shut behind me, and heard the latch catch.
I didn't look back.
The elevator came quickly. I rode it down to the lobby, walked through the glass doors, and stepped out into the Los Angeles night. The air was warm and dry and smelled faintly of exhaust and jasmine.
I flagged a cab.
"LAX," I said. "Terminal four."
The driver pulled out into traffic. I watched the city slide past the window — the lights, the palm trees, the wide dark streets. All of it exactly as I'd left it. All of it already somewhere I used to be.
I faced forward and didn't look back at that either.
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