His room was not what I expected, which was becoming the theme of everything about him.
I had expected something aggressively masculine and cold, the bedroom of a man who treated intimacy as a transaction and decoration as a waste of attention. Instead, it was just, real. A bed that was large and dark-framed and made with the kind of precision that suggested either a very attentive housekeeper or a man with deep feelings about corners. Books on the nightstand, two of them, one face down, which meant he was reading it actively. A lamp that gave amber light instead of white. A chair in the corner with a jacket over the back that was the only disordered thing in the space, the one place the control had slipped.
I stood in the doorway with my bag in my hand.
Matteo was at the window, checki
