“Oh, no. No, no, no, no…”
I told Matt about Darla Hart’s visit, and her threat of legal action. After that we sat silently, just staring.
“My god,” I said, “for once you weren’t kidding. The situation is dire.”
“She could own this place by the time she’s through,” said Matt.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“I’ve renewed the insurance coverage,” Matteo said. “It just about emptied my checking account, but it could have been worse. I was honest with him about what happened, and he did what he could, which is sign us up to cover anything that happens in the future—”
“So we’re not covered for Anabelle?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“No, we’re not covered for her,” Matteo said. “But when the police report about Anabelle’s accident is filed, it will be too late for the parent company to deny our renewed coverage or raise our rates. We owe Gordon big time for this favor!”
I nodded in agreement. At least the business was now covered in case another barista took a tumble down the stairs, or a customer slipped on a wet napkin. That was something, at least.
But for me the real surprise was Matteo. I was always the level-headed, pragmatic adult in our relationship, he was always the Peter Pan, yet I didn’t even think of checking with the insurance company—something I should have done immediately after the incident (I still didn’t think it was an “accident”). Matt, however, was right on it, and he may have saved our butts and our business—at least from future liability. His generous gesture of paying the insurance bill was doubly unexpected.
“We can’t tell Madame,” I admitted to Matt during that same conversation. “Not about Anabelle, not about the insurance. Not now.”
“Why not?”
I told him about St. Vincent’s cancer ward, about her saying she was too “tired” to come to see Joy for dinner. Matteo nodded, his face grim.
“No, we can’t tell her,” he agreed.
I sighed, remembering the look on Matt’s face as he said that. Then I slid the cheesecake into the oven, and set the timer.
Maybe Madame would beat the cancer, I told myself.
And Anabelle…maybe Anabelle would wake up tomorrow, tell us all what happened, and everything would be solved. Maybe.
But then I recalled the girl’s butterfly pulse, her pale face, her twisted rag-doll body at the bottom of the steps, and I felt my heart despair.
Suddenly, a series of rhythmic knocks sounded at the front door. There was only one person who knocked that way—my pride named Joy. I smiled, my spirits lifting.
Fifteen
I opened the door to the apartment, fully expecting to find Joy standing on the threshold. Instead I found Matteo, arms weighted with grocery bags.
“Thanks,” he muttered. “I bought so much stuff I couldn’t get to my keys.”
“I thought you were Joy,” I said.
“Why?”
“The knock,” I said. “Rat-tat-uh-tat-tat. That’s Joy’s knock.”
“Who do you think she picked it up from?” he said, breezing by me and making a beeline for the kitchen.
I could smell the freshly grated Pecorino Romano wafting up from the grocery bags. Two crusty brown loaves of baguettes rustica protruded from another paper sack.
“It’s dinner for three, not thirty,” I called over my shoulder, closing the door.
“I only bought a few essentials,” he replied. “If I’m going to stay here, I’ll need some staples.”
Except you’re not staying here! I thought. At least not for long.
“Fine” is the word that actually came out of my mouth.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Matt called. “And don’t worry. You can have the bedroom. After dinner I’m going to clean out the storage room upstairs. It used to be my bedroom when I was a boy. I can haul up the foldaway bed from the basement, and I should be set for the week.”
Then Matt threw me a teasing leer. “Unless of course you’ve got a better idea for the sleeping arrangements.”
“No,” I said. “Sounds like you’ve got it figured out just fine.”
Matt rolled up his sleeves and checked his watch.
“You still have that thing?” I asked, surprised.
“I love this thing,” he said with a smile.
It was a sporty self-winding duograph chronometer from Breitling (list price new: $5,000; “gently” used price at Torneau’s resale shop: $1,500). I had scrimped and saved during our first year of marriage and even borrowed some money from Madame so I could surprise Matt on our first anniversary. It moved from time zone to time zone with ease and even displayed the correct time in two zones at the same time—the perfect timepiece for a globe-trotter traveler like Matt.
“Wow, it’s late! I’d better start cooking,” he said.
“Well, don’t open the oven,” I warned. “You’ll ruin dessert.”
While I prepared the items for the cheesecake topping, Matt went to work behind me, bumping and elbowing me the entire time. God, he was annoying in the kitchen!
First he set a pot of water on the stove and lit the fire under it. A moment later I heard the crinkle of shopping bags as he dumped his plunder onto the counter.
“They had Maytag Blue Cheese—for once,” Matt said as he tossed a blue-marbled brick of soft cheese into the refrigerator.
I arched my eyebrow. “‘Essentials,’ you said. Frightfully expensive blue cheese is an essential?”
“It is—in my house,” he said.
Just let it go, I chanted to myself. Don’t take the bait. Just let it go.
“And here,” he added. “Look at this!”
Matt proudly displayed a slab of bacon the size of Rhode Island.
“So you’ve brought home the bacon at last,” I blurted. Whoops.
“Very funny.”
Matt loaded the crisp green leaves of Romaine lettuce into the vegetable bin, and plastic containers of grated cheese onto the refrigerator shelf next to a pint of heavy cream.
“So,” he said, “speaking of, uh, ‘bringing home the bacon’—is that why you came back here from New Jersey to manage the Blend? Are you having money problems?”
“No.” I bristled. “I was doing just fine, thank you very much.”
“So what’s the reason then? Why did you come back?”
Matt leaned a hand on the counter. With his rolled-up shirtsleeves, his muscular forearm caught my eye. Tanned by the Peruvian sun and slightly dusted with fine black hair, it reminded me of the first time we’d met on a brilliant June day along the Mediterranean.
I was a college student at the time, spending the summer with my great-uncle’s family while studying Italian art history. He was backpacking across France and Italy, heading for Greece. I’d thought he was a Michaelangelo statue come to life. Stop it, Clare. I warned myself. Stop it.
His dark brown eyes locked onto my green ones—he was waiting for an answer.
“I, uh…I guess I wanted a change,” I told him, attempting to change something else in that moment—my focus. I forced my eyes to shift away from his forearm and over to a two-pound bag of Carbone’s homemade fettuccini. “The suburbs were nice enough, don’t get me wrong. I mean, New Jersey has its charms—”
Matt snorted.
“It does. And it’s a good place to raise a child. I was happy there, at least in the beginning. But now that Joy’s gone away to school—never to live with Mom again—I thought I should try making a change, take Madame up on her offer to start again.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you mean, ‘That’s it’? Gail Sheehy created an entirely revised version of her book Passages based on that premise alone.”
Matt stared blankly.
“You know,” I said, “New Passages?”