Chapter 10 — The Night I Learned to Wait

The first time Rico Moretti asked me on a date, his son was watching us through a window.

The second time, he didn’t ask at all.

He simply waited until I was ready to answer.

That was what finally made me believe him.

For nearly three months after our conversation on the townhouse steps, he stopped trying to move my life forward for me. No envelopes appeared in drawers. No mysterious payments reached my landlord. Dante no longer knew things about my schedule that I hadn’t told him.

When Rico needed to change one of my afternoon visits, he asked.

When I said I couldn’t come, he accepted it.

The first time that happened, I stood in the restaurant’s service hallway staring at my phone.

Understood. We’ll see you Thursday.

No question about where I would be. No offer to send a car. No reminder that Leo would miss me.

Just understood.

Sarah glanced over my shoulder.

“You look like someone sent you a marriage proposal.”

“Worse,” I said. “A reasonable text.”

She considered that.

“From Moretti?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it. Might be worth something someday.”

I laughed, but I saved the message.

Not because it was romantic.

Because it was the first time a powerful man had disappointed himself without making that disappointment my responsibility.

At the townhouse, the changes were harder to miss.

The men with earpieces remained near the entrances. The cameras remained above the doors. Rico had no intention of pretending his past could be wished away.

But the living room belonged to Leo now.

There were blocks under the sofa, a fire truck parked beneath an antique console, and a crooked paper sun taped to one of the windows. Business conversations happened behind a closed study door. When voices rose, Rico lowered his first.

Once, I heard him arguing with someone over the phone.

“I’ve told you what I’m willing to do.”

A pause.

“No.”

Another pause, longer this time.

Then his voice sharpened.

“My son is not a negotiating point.”

I was helping Leo find the blue crayon when Rico came out.

He looked furious.

Leo looked up immediately.

“Daddy?”

Rico stopped in the doorway.

For a second, I could almost see the old instinct pulling at him: leave, make another call, put the anger somewhere useful.

Instead, he crouched.

“I’m upset about something at work.”

Leo held the crayon against his chest.

“Me?”

“No. Nothing you did.”

“Clara?”

“No.”

Leo thought about that.

“Dante?”

From the hallway, Dante said, “Why am I always the next suspect?”

Leo giggled.

Rico’s face changed at the sound.

He sat on the rug and stayed there until the anger had somewhere quieter to go.

That evening, while Leo slept upstairs, I found Rico in the kitchen looking at a photograph of Elena.

He didn’t hide it when I entered.

That mattered too.

“She would have liked you,” he said.

I put my bag on the counter.

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I know.”

In the photograph, Elena stood beside a beach umbrella, laughing at something outside the frame. Her hair was blowing across her face.

For months, every picture of her had seemed to belong to a locked room inside Rico.

Now he turned the photograph toward me.

“Leo was trying to eat sand,” he said. “I told him it wasn’t lunch. Elena said I was discouraging his interest in local cuisine.”

I smiled.

“She sounds funny.”

“She was.”

His thumb rested against the edge of the frame.

“She also thought I confused being necessary with being loved.”

I looked at him.

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

There was no argument waiting behind the answer.

No polished explanation.

Just yes.

I sat on the stool across from him.

“What changed?”

He glanced toward the staircase.

“Apparently, a person can need you desperately and still be afraid of you.”

I knew he meant Leo.

I also knew the sentence reached further than that.

For a while, we sat without speaking.

Then I said, “Saturday.”

Rico lifted his eyes.

“What happens Saturday?”

“You can take me to dinner.”

He went so still that I almost laughed.

Then he set down Elena’s photograph carefully.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve had three months to think about it.”

“I can arrange—”

“Nothing you own.”

His mouth closed.

“No restaurant you own, no private dining room, no driver waiting outside my apartment.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. You pick me up like a normal person.”

“What qualifies as normal?”

“You knock.”

“I know how doors work, Clara.”

“I’ve seen your security system. I wasn’t certain.”

He smiled.

It was still unfair, that smile.

“Saturday,” he said.

At seven the next evening, Rico Moretti knocked on my apartment door carrying a small bunch of flowers wrapped in brown paper.

No diamonds.

No extravagant arrangement requiring its own furniture.

Just flowers.

I opened the door in a dark green dress I had bought secondhand and altered myself.

His gaze traveled over me once, then returned to my face.

“You look beautiful.”

For once, I didn’t make a joke.

“Thank you.”

He held out the flowers.

“I asked the florist what was appropriate.”

“What did she say?”

“That I looked like a man who needed instructions.”

“She sounds good at her job.”

“She was expensive.”

I laughed and let him see my apartment.

It was small. One window stuck in humid weather. The kitchen table doubled as a desk. A stack of overdue library books sat beneath a lamp.

Rico looked around without making me feel examined.

When his gaze reached the repaired hinge on a cupboard, he said nothing.

When I apologized for the space, he frowned.

“Why?”

I stopped.

Then I put the flowers in a water pitcher because I didn’t own a vase.

“Habit.”

He waited while I found my keys.

We ate at a diner in Queens.

Rico studied the laminated menu with the concentration of a man reviewing an unfavorable contract.

“You can order a burger,” I told him.

“I can see that.”

“You’ve been looking at the same page for five minutes.”

“There are photographs.”

“They’re there to help.”

“The burger in the photograph appears to be structural.”

I laughed so hard the waitress looked over.

Rico ordered it anyway.

Halfway through dinner, his phone vibrated.

He checked the screen.

“Dante,” he said. “He’s with Leo.”

“Answer.”

He did.

His expression softened almost immediately.

“Hello, buddy.”

I could hear Leo faintly through the speaker.

“Clara there?”

“Yes.”

“Milk?”

Rico looked at my coffee.

“No milk tonight.”

A pause.

“Why?”

“She’s having dinner.”

Another pause.

“Daddy come home?”

“Yes. Before you wake up.”

Rico listened carefully.

Then he said, “I’ll ask.”

He covered the phone.

“He wants to know whether you’re coming Thursday.”

“Yes.”

Rico repeated the answer.

Leo apparently considered that sufficient. The call ended with a discussion about whether Dante knew how to make dinosaur noises.

“He doesn’t,” Rico told me.

“Does that affect his salary?”

“It should.”

After dinner, we walked along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

The river reflected broken strips of light. A couple leaned against the railing farther down. Someone’s dog objected loudly to a passing bicycle.

For the first time, I was beside Rico without waiting for Leo to call from another room.

It felt strange.

It also felt like something I wanted.

He stopped near the railing.

“There’s something you should understand before this goes any further.”

My stomach tightened.

“All right.”

“Changing my businesses doesn’t make everything I’ve done disappear.”

“I know.”

“Some people will always have reasons to hate me.”

I watched his face.

“Are you telling me to leave?”

“No.”

“Then tell me what you’re actually asking.”

He took a breath.

“I’m asking you to keep making your own decisions. Including about me.”

The answer settled somewhere deep inside my chest.

“I intend to.”

“I know you do.”

His hand rested on the railing near mine.

Close enough to reach.

He didn’t.

So I moved first.

I put my hand over his.

Rico looked down, then back at me.

“Clara.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to kiss you.”

The question was so careful that it almost hurt.

“Yes,” I said.

He leaned in slowly enough that I could change my mind.

I didn’t.

The kiss was warm and restrained, nothing like the man’s reputation and everything like the man I had begun to know.

When we separated, he rested his forehead briefly against mine.

I smiled.

“You really do know how to ask.”

“I’ve had excellent, unpleasant instruction.”

Our third date never happened.

Leo developed a fever that afternoon.

Rico called before I had finished getting ready.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The pediatrician thinks it’s a virus, but he’s miserable, and he keeps asking for me.”

“Then stay with him.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“I wanted to see you too.”

A pause.

“You’re not angry?”

I sat on the edge of my bed.

“Rico, you’re choosing to be there for your sick child. That makes me trust you more.”

He was quiet long enough that I thought the call had dropped.

Then he said, “I’m still learning that disappointing someone doesn’t always mean losing them.”

“I know.”

I brought soup the next morning.

Leo was sleeping against his father’s chest on the sofa. Rico looked exhausted, his shirt wrinkled, his hair pushed back badly.

It was the most attractive I had ever found him.

He lifted his eyes when I entered.

“You came.”

“I said I would.”

His smile was small.

Familiar.

I set the soup down and sat beside them.

No one asked me to stay forever.

For that morning, staying was enough.