Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Luca Saint, in the Dark
She fell asleep on the sofa.
It was the kind of sleep that ambushed her — the kind that came after three nights of insomnia, arriving without permission, pulling her under in the middle of reading something she would never be able to remember. The lamp was still on. Her shoes were still on. Her phone was somewhere in the cushions and the city outside was doing its usual patient thing of existing without her.
She went under, and under meant somewhere else entirely.
In the dream, the theatre was enormous — old and velvet-curtained and dark in the way of places built for spectacle, where darkness was not absence but the medium itself, the air into which the light was about to be born. The seats stretched back into shadow, row upon row of burgundy velvet, and every one of them was empty.
Every one of them except the seat in which Elena found herself sitting.
She was wearing something she did not own in waking life. Something deep burgundy herself, silk, open at the back, the kind of dress that existed in the version of her life where she didn't count things. Her hair was loose and her neck was bare and she was not afraid. This was the first thing she registered: the remarkable absence of the thing she carried everywhere. The weight that had been in her chest for three years — gone. Simply not present. She breathed into the space it had left and it felt enormous.
On the stage, a single spotlight burned gold and clean.
And in the center of it: Luca Saint.
She would have known him anywhere — the world knew him, that face that reproduced in newspapers and on screens and on the inside of strangers' eyelids after concerts, the famous dark eyes and the quality of stillness he had when he wasn't performing, which was its own kind of performance but not a dishonest one. His shirt was open at the throat. His hands were loose at his sides. He looked like a man who had been waiting, and had decided that waiting was acceptable, and had therefore made peace with it in a way that transformed the wait into something that looked almost like choice.
He was looking directly at her.
Not at the audience. There was no audience. There was only the empty theatre and Elena in the fifth row and the singular, devastating attention of a man who had spent his life being looked at and was now, for the first time, looking.
"Elena," he said.
Not the version of it Julian said. Not the transactional, satisfied pronunciation of a man who used her name to signal that he had learned it and planned to continue using it as currency. Not the version on the hospital forms or the debt collector's careful official correspondence.
Her name as it was meant to be spoken. As if someone had been carrying it carefully for a long time and was only now allowing themselves to open their hands.
The sound moved through her like the first bar of a song heard at the exact right moment.
She got up from her seat without deciding to.
In dreams you don't decide. You simply find that your body has already chosen, and you are following it somewhere you would not go awake, and there is a specific, unburdened rightness to that — the relief of wanting something without having first to negotiate with every consequence of wanting it.
She walked toward the stage. Down the velvet aisle, the carpet thick beneath her feet, the spotlight warming as she came closer. He watched her come. He did not hurry. He did not reach for her or call to her or make any of the dozen small gestures of impatience that men made when they wanted something and were not accustomed to waiting.
He simply watched.
And the watching was itself a thing she could feel — not predatory, not acquisitive, but present in the way that true attention is, which is to say total, and rare, and something she had been hungry for so long that being on the receiving end of it made her eyes ache.
At the edge of the stage she stopped. He crouched at the lip of it, bringing himself to her level without being asked.
"Come up," he said.
She took his hand.
The stage smelled of warm lights and old wood and something underneath both of those things that she could not name exactly — something like the smell of the air before a thunderstorm, electric and pregnant and just on the near side of dangerous. He drew her up and she was on the stage beside him, inside the light, and the theatre spread out behind her in darkness and it did not feel like being exposed. It felt like being chosen as the thing worth illuminating.
He was taller than he looked on screens. He was warmer, too — physically warm, his hand around hers, his body close enough that she could feel the specific heat of him, which was the kind of detail dreams get right when they are serious about their work.
"You always look like that," he said.
"Like what?"
"Like you're calculating when you can leave."
She opened her mouth to deny it. He smiled — slow, without triumph, the smile of someone who has understood something and is not planning to use it against you.
"You can stay," he said. "For once."
And that was all. That was the whole of it. You can stay, for once — four words that hit her somewhere central and lit everything up.
He touched her face, the backs of his fingers, a gesture more tender than anything she had permitted herself to want in years. Her eyes closed before she could stop them. She felt the warmth of the stage lights on her bare shoulders, the warmth of him in front of her, and the extraordinary quiet of a world that was, for once, asking nothing of her.
He said her name again, and this time it was so close she felt it as much as heard it, and she was reaching for him, her hands at his chest, the silk of his shirt —
The phone.
She surfaced through layers of warmth and velvet dark to find herself on her sofa in her lamp-lit flat, one shoe on the floor and one still on her foot, her neck at an angle that would announce itself more urgently tomorrow morning.
The phone was vibrating somewhere in the cushions. She found it by feel.
The screen lit up the room with its cold blue.
The number she didn't save.
She stared at it. Three seconds, four. The vibrating stopped. A missed call. Then a text that arrived fifteen seconds later, as if the number had considered its options and decided that words were more efficient than her answering.
We'll be expecting payment by Wednesday. All of it. Tell your brother.
All of it.
The entire remaining sum. Not an installment. All of it.
Elena sat up. The cushions shifted. The warmth of the dream was still faintly in her skin, like the ghost of a lamp that's been switched off — still visible, cooling, already becoming the absence of itself.
She sat on her sofa at — she checked — two-seventeen in the morning, and she let herself feel the specific texture of the transition. The dreamed world where someone spoke her name like a gift and she was allowed to stay. This world, which did not send messages like gifts.
Forty thousand pounds plus eight months of interest. She had done this mathematics before. She could do it again. She would do it again.
But not at two-seventeen. At two-seventeen she was going to set the phone down and lie back and try to find the dark of the theatre somewhere behind her eyelids, and she would not find it, which she already knew, but she was going to try anyway because she was a woman who did not stop simply because something was not going to work.
She lay back. Closed her eyes.
Burgundy velvet. The smell of warm lights. The extraordinary sensation of being looked at by someone who was looking for her, specifically, and not simply for anyone beautiful in a suitable dress.
The feeling dissolved the moment she reached for it. It was already gone.
In its place: the mathematics. The ward. The number she had not saved. Daniel not answering. The reserve account that was not a reserve.
She pressed her palms over her eyes and breathed through the whole weight of it, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
Then she got up. Went to the kitchen. Put the kettle on.
The flat was quiet and familiar and entirely hers in the way of places that are yours because no one else has ever been allowed to stay in them, and she stood at the counter waiting for the water to boil and thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was so tired of being the only person in every room who knew how bad it was.
She wanted someone to know.
Not to fix it. Not to manage it. Just to know, and to remain.
She made the tea. Added nothing to it because adding things felt indulgent.
Stood at the counter in her flat in the small hours of Wednesday morning, and told herself, for the hundred and sixty-fourth time since Daniel had come to her in November with his face white as paper and his confession in his hands:
It will be all right.
She said it into the quiet kitchen. Her own voice, small and deliberate.
She didn't entirely believe it.
But she had discovered, years ago, that the difference between the women who survived and the women who didn't was not a matter of circumstances. It was a matter of how many times you could look directly at something terrible and say it will be all right and mean it enough to get up in the morning.
She was still getting up.
She turned off the kettle.
Went to bed.
Slept dreamlessly until the alarm.
End of Chapter 3