“No,” I said. “I behave like someone who refuses to disappear just because it would be more convenient for everyone else.”
For a moment the whole room seemed to tighten around us.
Then he nodded once.
“Keep going.”
That afternoon, when rain started pelting the windows, he stayed.
He stood by the map wall while I worked and asked questions he pretended were about the books.
“You studied history?”
“Communications.”
“That explains the stubbornness.”
“That’s not what communications is.”
“No?”
“No. That’s Irish Catholic father, dead mother, Manhattan rent, and public school theater.”
He looked at me longer than necessary.
“Your mother died?”
“When I was two.”
He went still.
“I’m sorry.”
The sincerity of it disarmed me.
“My father says I smile like her when I forget to be careful.”
“Do you?”
“Forget to be careful?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him, at the rain threading silver down the window glass, at the room I had made usable with my own hands.
“Less than I used to.”
He looked like he wanted to say something else.
Instead, he said, “Nico nearly died five years ago.”
The shift startled me. “What?”
“A car accident.” His voice had changed, gone lower, more human. “Three weeks in a coma. He was twenty.”
I set down the book in my hands.
“What was that like?”
Roman looked out at the storm. “Like discovering fear can move into your bones and renovate.”
I swallowed.
“No one does it well,” I said quietly.
