Page 57
“She’s been kicking since four a.m.,” Nova says. “Your daughter has your sleep habits.”
“My daughter has my everything.”
“God help us all.”
Nova’s hand covers his. The Patek Philippe ticks between their palms and beneath their fingers, a heartbeat answers.
I stand at the edge of the kitchen. The margin. The place I have occupied in this household for seven months — present but peripheral, essential but invisible, the boy who reads the room because reading the room is easier than standing in the center of it.
Thirty-two weeks.
Eight from the due date. Seven if the baby is impatient.
And in the center of this kitchen, two clocks are running. One on Romeo’s wrist, counting down to a dead man’s rhythm. And the one under his palm, counting down to a living girl who will arrive on her own schedule.
Neither one is waiting for permission.
Three Inches of Space
Marisol left early. With the boy.
I clocked the departure the way I clock everything in this household — not through the perimeter system Fabio maintains, not through the security grid Romeo rebuilt after the breach. Through frequency. The channel I keep tuned to the people who live inside these walls the way other people keep tuned to weather or traffic or the news crawl at the bottom of a screen.
Marisol’s movements have their own signature. She has had one since the first week — the careful, radar-forward gait of a girl who learned to read rooms before she learned to read books. I mapped the signature in the first seventy-two hours. The speed. The weight distribution. The way her shoulders carry tension like a second skin she cannot shed.
The exit was different today.
Backpack on one shoulder. The new normal. The boy’s gravitational pull dragging her out of the two-strap brace that has defined her since the day her mother walked out and left a thirteen-year-old girl standing in a doorway with her arms at her sides and her radar screaming and nobody on the other end of the frequency.
Two straps meant armored. Braced. Ready to move.
One shoulder means something else entirely.
She did not announce the departure. Did not ask permission. Walked through the kitchen with the boy three steps behind her — ironed shirt, too much cologne, the careful posture of a fourteen-year-old kid who has been inside this penthouse four times now and still looks at the ceilings like they might fall on him — and said “Later” to no one in particular.
The door closed.
I tracked her through the lobby camera feed for exactly twelve seconds. Long enough to confirm the boy was beside her. Not touching her.
Three inches of space between their hands.
The precise distance of a fourteen-year-old boy who wants desperately to reach for a girl’s hand and is too fucking terrified to close the gap. I know that distance. Have been measuring a version of it my entire life — the space between the margin and the center, between invisibility and presence, between knowing a woman through intelligence and knowing her through the sound she makes when her body arches against yours and her defenses dissolve, and the frequency you have been reading from across a room becomes the frequency you are holding against your skin.
Three inches.
That gap kept me alive for twenty-six years. Kept me invisible. Kept me useful. The illegitimate son who never stepped forward, never demanded, never occupied space that was not offered. Three inches between my hand and every door I could have opened, every conversation I could have entered, every moment I could have said I am here instead of letting the absence speak for me.
Liana closed that gap. Not me. She closed it with her mouth on mine and her hands in my hair and the word Rivas still burning in her throat like a bullet she swallowed instead of spitting out.
“You’re brooding.”
Nova. From the couch. Her feet up on the ottoman Romeo positioned at the exact angle recommended by the pregnancy book with the blue cover — page forty-seven, ankle elevation protocol, third trimester.
“I don’t brood.”
“You absolutely brood. You just do it quieter than the rest of them so people think you’re being mysterious.”
“I’m watching the lobby feed.”
