CHAPTER 60 - THE SPACE BETWEEN

Elena kept to the far side of the house for three days, timing her chores and her meals around the hours she knew Luca usually occupied, and understood, doing it, exactly how deliberate the avoidance had become, though she found she didn't much care.

She saw him once, in the hallway outside the kitchen, and turned down a different corridor before he'd fully registered she was there.

Behind her, she heard him speak her name, low and uncertain, and she kept walking anyway.

The hurt was still too raw to risk another conversation that would end the way the last one had.

Mrs. Bianchi noticed by the end of the first day.

"You've taken to eating in the kitchen," Mrs. Bianchi remarked, not looking up from the linens she was folding.

"It's easier," Elena replied.

"Easier than the dining room, with all that empty table." Mrs. Bianchi smoothed a pillowcase flat. "I don't ask what goes on upstairs, and I don't intend to start. But a house this size gets a good deal smaller when two people are working this hard not to share a room."

"I'm not avoiding anyone," Elena said.

"Of course not," Mrs. Bianchi answered dryly. "Take the bread out before it scorches, would you? I've my hands full."

Elena did as she was asked and said nothing more, and Mrs. Bianchi let the matter go, though the look she gave Elena's back suggested she'd understood exactly as much as she'd pretended not to.

Elias found her on the second afternoon, on the bench at the far end of the garden, the one place in the house that still felt entirely hers.

"You've stopped coming to the main hall for dinner," Elias observed, settling at a careful distance.

"News travels." Elena said.

"Not much of it does in this house. That one did." He waited a moment. "You don't have to tell me why."

"I know," Elena said. "I think I want to, actually. I haven't had anyone to say it to."

Elias didn't press, only waited, and Elena found the patience of it easier to lean on than she'd expected.

"I asked to see my mother," she said finally. "He said no. And when I fell apart over it, he wasn't upset that he'd hurt me. He was upset that you were the one who comforted me instead of him."

"That sounds like him," Elias said quietly.

"Does it?" Elena asked.

"Luca's never shared anything easily. Territory, money, people." Elias turned his hands over on his knees. "I don't think it ever occurred to him that comfort was something he couldn't simply claim."

"That's what I told him." Elena's laugh had no humor in it. "He said he didn't know what to call it either."

"And what do you think it is?" Elias asked.

"I don't know," Elena admitted. "Half the time I think something real is happening between us, and the other half I think I'm imagining warmth into a man who's only ever going to understand me as something he owns. I can't tell which of those is true. I'm not sure he can either."

"I wish I had an answer for you," Elias said.

"I'm not asking you for one," Elena replied. "I just needed someone to hear it."

"I'm glad you told me." Elias said.

He was waiting in the library on the fourth afternoon with a stack of books balanced on the reading table, and Elena, who'd wandered in only to be somewhere quiet, stopped short at the sight of them.

"The book I mentioned," Elias said. "I thought you might want first pick."

"You didn't have to do that." Elena said.

"I know. It gave me something to do that wasn't sitting around waiting for the house to stop being tense." He slid the top volume toward her. "This one has a terrible cover and a good first chapter. I'd start there."

Elena picked it up, turning it over in her hands, and found herself smiling despite everything. "You read the first chapters of all of them?"

"Only the ones I intended to recommend." Elias said.

They settled across from each other at the table, and for a while neither spoke, Elena paging through the book, Elias sorting the others into piles by some system only he seemed to understand.

The afternoon light slanted through the tall windows, warm on the worn spines, and the quiet in the room felt like something she'd been owed for a long time.

"My mother used to sew in the evenings," Elena said, without quite meaning to. "By the window, because the lamp was too dim and she wouldn't waste the electricity. She'd hold the fabric right up to her face. I used to tell her she'd ruin her eyes."

"Did she listen?" Elias asked.

"Never." Elena smiled at the table. "I don't even know if she's well. Nobody's told me anything. Not one word, in five months."

Elias was quiet a moment. "I can't tell you she is," he said. "I'd be lying, and I think you'd hear it."

"I would," Elena said. "Thank you for not."

"My mother made the same soup every Sunday," Elias said after a pause, his gaze on the pile in front of him. "It was terrible. Too much salt, every time. My father ate it like it was a feast, and never once said a word about it. I didn't understand why until much later."

"Why did he?" Elena asked.

"Because she made it for him." Elias shrugged, a small, rueful movement. "I think that's most of what people mean when they say they miss someone. Not the big things. The terrible soup."

Elena's eyes stung, and she looked down at the book in her hands until the feeling passed. "I miss the terrible soup," she said quietly. "That's exactly it."

"I thought you might," Elias said, and left it there, and didn't try to fix anything, and Elena was more grateful for that than for any comfort he could have offered.

The days settled into a new rhythm after that, one that excluded Luca almost entirely.

Elena took her first pick from the stack and read it curled in the corner of the sitting room, and found, more than once, that Elias had wandered in to sit with his own book, the two of them sharing the silence without either of them needing to fill it.

She laughed more than she had in weeks.

She noticed it herself, and noticed, too, the particular relief of an hour in which nothing was being weighed or measured or held against her.

Luca did not come looking for her.

She didn't decide whether that made it easier or harder.

He finished the book a little after two in the morning, alone in his study, the fire burned to embers he hadn't bothered to feed.

It was the one Elena did left on the small table near his hearth, weeks ago, the one he had told himself he was only reading to understand what held her attention so completely on certain evenings.

He had never once admitted to her how far he'd gotten.

He read the last pages twice, then closed the cover, and sat with it in his hands longer than the act required.

He could not have said what he'd expected to feel.

There was no lesson in it he could file away, no advantage he could name.

He only knew that somewhere in the middle of it, he had stopped reading to understand her and had started reading simply because it was hers, and that the difference had gone unnoticed until now.

He didn't go to her door.

He walked the length of the dark corridor to it, stood outside for a long time with the book in his hand, and then set it down carefully against the wall beside the frame, the bookmark resting on the final page, and went back the way he'd come.

Elena found it in the morning when she opened her door, propped against the wall where anyone might have left it, and knew it at once by the cracked spine and the corner she'd folded down in the third chapter, months ago, before any of this.

The bookmark sat on the last page.

There was no note tucked inside, nothing written in the margins, no sign of who had left it there beyond the fact that only one person in the house had ever had reason to touch it.

She stood in the doorway holding it, turning it over in her hands, trying to work out what it was supposed to mean, whether it was an apology, or only a book returned, or something he couldn't say aloud and hadn't known how to put on paper.

She didn't know.

She stood there a long while, and the not knowing did not get any lighter for being held.