CHAPTER 47 - WAITING FOR NOTHING

Elena noticed the pattern before she let herself name it, the particular, unwelcome rhythm of her own evenings rearranging themselves around a knock that had stopped coming.

It had been three weeks since Luca had last come to her room at night, not since the shooting, not since the long, careful weeks of recovery that had filled their hours instead with physical therapy sessions and quiet, businesslike visits that never once extended into anything resembling what their nights used to be.

Elena told herself, in the beginning, that this was simply practical, a wound healing, a body not yet ready for anything that might strain it.

She told herself that for the first two weeks, and mostly believed it.

By the third week, she found herself doing something she couldn't fully explain even to herself.

She'd catch herself, some evenings, washing longer than the day's grime actually required, applying the small vial of perfume Mrs. Bianchi had once given her for an occasion Elena could no longer remember, smoothing her hair with a care she hadn't bothered with in weeks.

She'd catch herself sitting up later than necessary, listening for footsteps in the hallway, and only realize, sometimes an hour into the waiting, exactly what she was doing.

The realization, each time, arrived with a fresh wave of humiliation.

What is wrong with me, she thought, one particular evening, staring at her own reflection in the small mirror above her dresser, the perfume already applied before she'd consciously decided to reach for it.

I used to dread that knock.

I used to lie awake afterward, hating every second of it.

And now I'm sitting here, waiting for it, like it's something I'm owed.

She scrubbed the perfume off with more force than necessary, furious at herself in a way she didn't fully understand, and told herself, climbing into bed with her hair still damp and unbrushed out of pure spite toward her own behavior, that tomorrow she would stop doing this.

Tomorrow, she did it again anyway.

She understood, lying awake in the dark on the fourth such night, exactly what this was.

She'd learned the name for it once, from her own careful, private reading, the particular way isolation and dependency could reshape a person's sense of what counted as attention, as care, as something worth wanting even when the thing itself had never once been kind. Knowing the name didn't help. It never seemed to help, with any of this.

It was nearly a month before she finally said something, the words arriving before she'd fully decided to let them.

She'd found Luca in his study, delivering some minor report Mrs. Bianchi had asked her to carry, and the words left her before she'd weighed the wisdom of asking them at all.

"You haven't come to my room in weeks," Elena said, and heard, even as she said it, how strange the sentence sounded aloud, stripped of whatever careful framing she might have applied to it with more warning.

Luca looked up from his desk, something briefly unreadable crossing his expression. "Yes, and?"

Elena kept her voice as level as she could manage, though something hot and humiliated was already climbing up her throat at having said it at all. "Is something wrong? Have I done something?"

"No." Luca set down his pen, studying her with the same unhurried, cataloguing attention he gave everything. "I haven't been thinking about it, Elena. There's been considerably more urgent business occupying my attention, an investigation that isn't resolving itself, a house still recovering from an attack that nearly cost me an asset I have no intention of losing again. Whatever appetite I might otherwise have for that particular arrangement has simply not been a priority."

"Oh." Elena felt the word land somewhere small and stinging in her chest, and hated, immediately, how much it stung.

"You're also still recovering," Luca added, his tone matter of fact, entirely without any awareness of how the previous sentence had already settled into her. "I wouldn't consider it responsible to resume anything physically demanding while your shoulder remains this fragile."

"That's not..." Elena stopped herself, some old, worn instinct toward pride fighting against the humiliating honesty rising in her chest. "I wasn't asking you to resume anything. I was only asking if something was wrong."

"Nothing is wrong." Luca's voice stayed flat, unbothered, and Elena understood, watching him return his attention to the papers on his desk, that he had absolutely no idea what this conversation had actually cost her to initiate. "If I found myself in need of that particular kind of attention, Elena, I have no shortage of options available to me outside this house. Women who aren't currently recovering from a bullet wound, who wouldn't require the same consideration your condition currently demands. I haven't sought any of them out because the need simply hasn't been pressing enough to bother with, not because there's some deficiency in the arrangement I have here."

The sentence landed in Elena's chest like something physical, and she stood very still for a moment, understanding, with a hot, humiliating clarity, exactly what she was feeling, and hating herself considerably more for feeling it than for anything Luca had actually said.

Jealousy.

Plain, ugly, entirely unwarranted jealousy, over a man who had just informed her, with complete indifference, that other women existed as an option he simply hadn't found worth pursuing yet.

"I see," she said, her voice considerably tighter than she wanted it to be.

Something in Luca's attention sharpened, finally registering the shift in her tone. "You're upset."

"I'm not upset." Elena answered.

"You are." He studied her for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that looked, for once, like genuine confusion rather than the flat certainty he usually carried. "I don't understand what about that statement would upset you. I was simply explaining that my absence from your room isn't a reflection of any problem with you specifically."

"I understand what you were explaining." Elena's voice had gone sharper than she intended, some old, tired frustration finally breaking through the careful composure she usually maintained around him. "You were explaining that I'm replaceable. That any woman would do, if the need arose, and that the only reason it hasn't is convenience, not preference."

"That's an accurate summary, yes." Luca said it without any apparent understanding of how the plain honesty of it might land, a man stating a fact he considered self evident rather than something that required careful handling. "I'm not certain why accuracy would upset you."

Elena stared at him for a long moment, something furious and humiliated and, underneath both, unmistakably hurt tangled together in her chest, and understood, with a bitter, exhausted clarity, that explaining the particular shape of that hurt to a man who genuinely didn't understand why it existed would accomplish nothing at all.

"It doesn't matter," she said finally, turning toward the door. "Forget I asked."

"Elena." His voice stopped her, and she turned back, some small, foolish part of her still hoping, despite everything, that he might say something that would soften the last several minutes into something she didn't have to carry away with her. "I don't understand what response you wanted from me. If you'd tell me plainly, I'd consider giving it."

Elena looked at him for a long moment, watching the genuine, unguarded confusion still sitting behind his expression, a man entirely incapable of understanding why his own honesty had wounded her, and understood, with a tired, resigned clarity, that there was no version of this conversation where she could explain it to him in language he currently had any framework for receiving.

"I wanted you to say you hadn't thought about anyone else," she said finally, quiet, more honest than she'd intended to be. "That's all. I don't need you to understand why that matters to me. I just needed to hear it."

Luca was quiet for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that Elena couldn't fully read.

"I haven't," he said finally, slowly, as though testing the truth of the sentence even as he said it. "Thought about anyone else. I hadn't considered that worth mentioning, because it hadn't occurred to me as significant information. I'm telling you now, since it apparently was."

It wasn't the warm, reassuring thing Elena had wanted to hear.

It was flat, factual, delivered with the same careful, methodical honesty he brought to everything.

But it was, she understood, standing there in the doorway with her chest still tight from everything the conversation had cost her, considerably more than he usually offered, and she found herself, despite every reason not to, holding onto it anyway, the same way she held onto every small, imperfect scrap of attention this house ever gave her.

"Thank you," she said quietly, and left before either of them had to sit any longer in the awkward, unfinished shape of what had just passed between them.