Gentle for an Interrogator

"You're rather gentle for a man who interrogates people for a living."

The words were out before I could cage them. William looked up from the desk, and for one horrible second I thought I'd finally said the thing that would give me away.

Instead, something crossed his face that I couldn't name. Not anger. Something older.

"Who told you what I do for a living?"

"Sophia talks in her sleep." I folded my arms. "And the woman at the front desk looked at those documents like they were radioactive."

He almost smiled. Almost. Then he turned to the window, and the city lay grey and endless below us, and he said — quietly, as though to himself — "I promised someone I'd build her a house by the sea. Windows all along the front, facing the water. Nothing but grass in the yard, because she said she'd never learned to garden and didn't want to pretend."

My heart stopped. Then started again, too fast.

I knew that conversation. I'd had it at two in the morning in February, curled under a duvet with the screen glowing, and I'd typed *I'd want grass. Just grass. No flowers to fail at.* And he'd written back *Then grass it is*, and I'd laughed into my pillow like an idiot.

"Mr. Duca—"

"Don't." He turned back, and his grey eyes landed on me and stayed there. "Don't call me that. Not in this room."

"What should I call you, then?"

He didn't answer. He came around the desk instead, and held out his hand. "Your phone."

"Excuse me?"

"We're following each other on social media. I'd like to confirm it."

"That's—" I actually laughed, a short, panicked sound. "That's the strangest thing anyone's ever said to me."

"Is it?" He waited, hand still out. "You're in my house, you're in my headquarters, you wandered into my study at midnight. And yet I know nothing about you but your first name. Give me the phone, Nicole."

*Nicole.* Not Nikki. He said it carefully, the way you'd hold something breakable.

I gave him the phone because refusing would have looked stranger than agreeing, and because some cowardly part of me wanted to see what he'd do. He tapped twice, found the request, accepted it, and handed it back. His profile picture was a photograph of a coastline, no face. Of course it was.

"There," he said. "Now you can't pretend we've never met."

"I've never pretended that."

"You've done nothing else." He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse.

A knock. Marco's head appeared around the door. "The pharmacy sent Sophia's prescription up. And Mrs. Duca's asked me to settle the account for Miss Hartley's delivery."

I was already reaching into my bag. "I'll pay for it. I said I would."

William waved Marco off, and the door clicked shut, and then it was just the two of us and the low hum of the heating and the envelope on the desk between us.

"Let the family cover it," he said. "It's nothing."

"No." My voice came out sharper than I meant. "I don't like owing people. I pay for what's mine."

"Pride."

"Independence." I put the notes on his desk — crumpled, counted out, everything I'd been saving for the term. "Take it or I'll walk to the chemist myself and buy it twice."

He looked at the money. Then at me. Something shifted behind his eyes, and I couldn't read it, and I hated that I couldn't read it.

"You're a difficult woman, Nicole Hartley."

"I've been called worse."

"I imagine you have."

And then my phone buzzed in my hand.

Once. Twice. Three times.

I looked down without thinking, and the world tilted.

**Luna.**

**Luna, answer me.**

**Just let me hear your voice. One call. That's all I'm asking.**

My thumb moved before my brain caught up. **It's over. Stop.**

I locked the screen. My face felt hot and cold at once. When I looked up, William was watching me — not my phone, *me* — with an expression I'd seen once before, in a photograph Sophia had shown me at dinner, of him at his father's funeral.

"Everything all right?" he asked.

"Wrong number," I said.

"Three times?"

"She's persistent." I was already moving towards the door. "I should take this medicine up to Sophia."

"Nicole."

I stopped with my hand on the handle. I didn't turn around.

"Whatever it is you're carrying," he said quietly, "you don't have to carry it alone."

I laughed — genuinely, horribly — because he had no idea. He had absolutely no idea that the woman he was texting was standing three feet away with her back to him, counting her own heartbeats to keep from crying.

"Goodnight, Mr. Duca."

"William."

"Goodnight, William."

I made it to the corridor. I made it to the stairs. And halfway up, in the dark, with the medicine box digging into my palm and my phone burning a hole in my pocket, I had to stop and press my forehead against the cold wall because I couldn't breathe.

He'd promised her a house by the sea. He was still texting her. And I had just told him, for the second time, that it was over.

The worst part — the part that would keep me awake until morning — was that some small, selfish, starving piece of me had wanted to say *it's me. I'm right here. It's been me the whole time.*

I didn't. I climbed the stairs instead, and I said nothing, and I told myself that was kindness.

It didn't feel like kindness. It felt like cutting off my own hand to save a finger.