Page 46 of Ricardo

A practical request. A simple one.

Also an agreement to see me again tomorrow.

I button my jacket and turn off the sitting area lamp before I leave.

Tomorrow, then.

Chapter Five

Julia

Saturday morning should feel like a gift.

That is what I tell myself when I wake without an alarm, without a calendar reminder, without an email marked urgent by someone who has never learned what the word means.

The apartment is quiet, sunlight slipping through the pale curtains in thin white bands, the city beyond the windows still alive and busy, even on the weekend.

For the first few seconds, I lie still and wait for panic to arrive.

It does not. The absence of it should feel peaceful.

Instead, it feels suspicious.

I reach for my phone on the nightstand and check the screen. No missed calls. No emails that require an immediate response. No messages from Mario’s office. No text from my father about lunch tomorrow, no message from my mother asking whether I have reconsidered dinner with the Ellisons next week, no unknown Connecticut number that makes my stomach tighten before I even open it.

Nothing.

A normal person would enjoy a morning like this.

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.

The apartment is too quiet.

During the week, I can pretend the quiet is peaceful and practical. I leave before the building has fully woken and come home after most reasonable people have already eaten dinner. I drop my bag by the console table, kick off my shoes, shower, answer the last few messages, and fall asleep with a lamp still on because turning everything off makes the place feel emptier.

On a Saturday morning, with nowhere to be and no one waiting for me, the quiet has room to spread.

I sit up.

The bedroom is tasteful. That is the first word anyone would use. Tasteful. The kind of bedroom a real estate listing would call serene. Soft gray upholstered headboard. White duvet. Pale wood nightstands. A rug I bought because the saleswoman said it would warm the room, though I have never once looked at it and felt warmed.

Most of the apartment is like that.

Tasteful. Acceptable. Temporary in a way I did not intend.

I rented it quickly when I came back to Chicago because I needed somewhere. A safe building. A good neighborhood. Enough space. Enough light. A quiet building with a doorman in the lobby and, most importantly, outside of my father’s influence.

At the time, that felt important.

Now, it feels like I chose a hotel room, albeit one with a lease.

I get out of bed, pull on leggings and an oversized sweatshirt from Yale, and pad barefoot into the kitchen. The apartment opens into a living room with high windows and a view of other buildings, other people’s balconies, other lives behind glass. A few boxes sit against the far wall, still taped shut. I have moved them twice now, from one corner to another, as if relocation counts as unpacking.

I make coffee in the small machine on my counter, which does not hiss, threaten, or require Ricardo Conti’s supervision.

That thought invades my mind a little too easily.

I stop with my hand on the mug.