In Love With My Ex's Cousin

CHAPTER SEVEN

Elena

The Hawthorne clients approved the revised boards at nine-twelve the next morning, then asked if the sofa could be “a little more sculptural” without looking like a statement. I wrote the request down, closed the call, and sat for a moment with the pen still in my hand.

Some days the work was design.

Some days it was translation.

I spent the first hour adjusting the living-room layout so the new request would not undo the last one. Sofia dropped a second coffee beside my keyboard without asking whether I wanted it.

“You look like someone who has been polite for too long,” she said.

“It’s a gift.”

She leaned against the edge of my desk. “Are you going back to the river place today?”

“I need answers before I can go further. Storage. The second bedroom. Whether the kitchen is for cooking or display.”

“So email him.”

“I will. Then I’ll go anyway. Rooms answer differently in person.”

Sofia watched me for a second longer than the conversation required. “Just don’t let the last name turn a site visit into something it isn’t.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

I sent the message before I could dress it up.

**I have a short list of functional questions that will affect the layout. Are you available at the property this afternoon for thirty minutes?**

His reply came at 10:41.

**Four o’clock.**

No greeting. No closing. I put the phone face down and went back to the Hawthorne file until lunch.

The afternoon moved the way office afternoons usually did. A junior designer asked me to look at a lighting plan that had too many pendants and not enough purpose. Marcus stopped by long enough to say the Riverside project was “a good win for the firm” and that he trusted me to handle it cleanly. I thanked him and did not offer details.

At three-thirty I left.

The river was a dull sheet under a pale sky. Eighteen Riverside Drive looked settled in the daylight, less private than it had the first time, more like an ordinary expensive building with ordinary expensive quiet. The same man was at the desk. He nodded when he saw me, as if my coming and going had already become part of the building’s routine.

The elevator opened on the fifth floor at 3:58.

Luca was already inside.

He stood near the windows again, not in the exact place as before, but close enough that the room seemed arranged around him without his having arranged it. Dark suit. No jacket this time. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled once. He looked up when I came in and did not waste the greeting.

“You’re early.”

“So are you.”

A faint shift at the corner of his mouth, not quite amusement. “Ask what you need.”

I set my bag on the long black table and opened the notebook to the list I had written the night before.

“The second bedroom,” I said. “Guest room or office?”

“Office. A guest room if necessary. Not both at once.”

“Do you work from home often?”

“Late. Not often during the day.”

I wrote that down. “The kitchen. Do you cook?”

“No.”

“Then it still needs to function. People who don’t cook still use a kitchen. They just use it badly if it isn’t planned for that.”

He glanced toward the empty counters. “Plan it so it works. I don’t need it to look used.”

“Storage?”

“Closed. I don’t want objects on display.”

“Books?”

“A few. Not a library.”

I moved through the questions the way I would have with any client who disliked wasting time. Where he dropped his keys. Whether he wanted a place to sit that did not face the windows. How much clothing storage the main bedroom actually required. If anyone else would be using the apartment regularly.

“No,” he said to that last one.

The word was simple. It still changed the brief.

I walked the hallway while I talked, checking the width against the notes I already had. He did not follow at my shoulder. He stayed in the living room and answered when I asked something, which I preferred. Some clients narrated every decision as if the house were a story about them. He treated it like a set of requirements.

When I came back, he had not moved far.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“For now. I’ll need to see the light in here after six before I lock the window treatments.”

“Then come after six.”

“Not today.” I closed the notebook. “I have another site first thing tomorrow. I’ll schedule it.”

He nodded once. That should have been the end of it.

Instead he said, “Adrian knows you have the project.”

I looked at him. “Should I care that your brother knows?”

“Not yet.” His eyes stayed on me, unreadable in the usual way. “Matteo doesn’t.”

The name sat in the empty room with more weight than the furniture that was not there.

“I assumed that,” I said.

“I didn’t tell him because there is nothing to tell. This is a redesign.”

“Then you don’t owe me an explanation.”

“I know.” He paused, as if deciding whether the next sentence was necessary. “I am telling you so you are not surprised if the name comes up.”

I slid the notebook into my bag. “If it comes up, I’ll handle it the same way I handle every other complicated client situation. Professionally.”

“Good.”

We stood there long enough for the river light to change against the floor. Not uncomfortably. Not comfortably either. Just long enough that I became aware of the quiet he had asked for, and how easily a person could mistake that quiet for something personal.

It wasn’t.

It was an empty apartment and a list of answers.

“Thirty minutes,” I said.

He glanced at his watch. “Twenty-eight.”

I picked up my bag. “I’ll send an updated layout by Friday.”

“Directly to me.”

“I remember.”

I left before the conversation could find another subject. The elevator doors closed on the same still room, the same dark water beyond the glass, the same man who had decided that honesty about his cousin counted as housekeeping rather than intimacy.

Outside, the air smelled like the river and coming rain. I walked two blocks before I took a cab, not because I needed the time, but because I wanted the meeting to stay behind me.

In the back seat I opened the notebook and added one line under his answers.

*No one else using the space.*

It was useful. It narrowed the design.

It did not need to mean more than that.

Sofia texted as the cab crossed back over the water.

*Well?*

I looked at the message long enough for the driver to change lanes.

*He cooks less than I do. The second bedroom is an office. Friday for layouts.*

Her reply came a moment later.

*That is either very boring or you are leaving the interesting part out.*

I put the phone away.

The interesting part, if there was one, was not the meeting. It was the fact that Matteo’s name could still rearrange the air in a room I had entered to talk about storage and window light. I did not intend to give that more space than it had already taken.

At home I changed, reheated leftover rice, and worked at the counter until the layout began to make sense. Closed storage. A kitchen that could function without pretending to be loved. An office that did not look like a guest room waiting for company.

By ten the drawing was cleaner.

I washed the bowl, set the keys on the dish by the door, and went to bed with the Friday deadline sitting in my mind like any other Friday deadline.

Work first.

The rest only if it arrived.

And if it did, I would not make the mistake of calling it something else too early.