Trapped In The Billionaire’s Name

CHAPTER 41

Damian's Pov

I was at her door at nine with coffee and no agenda, which was the specific combination she'd asked for and which I'd understood meant she wanted the day to feel unhurried from the first moment.

She opened the door already in her coat.

"You're ready," I said.

"I've been up since seven." She took the coffee. "I couldn't sleep past six anyway. I never can on Sundays."

"Why Sundays?"

"My mother used to start cooking early," she said, coming out and pulling the door closed behind her. "The smell would wake the whole apartment. I've been a Sunday morning person ever since." She looked at me sideways. "You're a six AM person regardless of the day."

"Yes."

"We're compatible that way."

She said it simply, factually, the way she noted things that were true, and kept walking. I fell into step beside her and felt something warm and uncomplicated in my chest that had nothing to do with the coffee.

We walked for twenty minutes before we got in the car. Her choice, she'd said slow morning and she meant it literally, which I'd learned meant using her feet and the cold air and the city at its Sunday pace before committing to any destination. I walked beside her and said nothing and let her have the morning the way she wanted it.

She bought a newspaper from a corner stand. Physical paper, which I hadn't seen anyone do in years.

"For your mother?" I said.

"She likes the crossword. I do it halfway and leave the rest for her." She folded it under her arm. "She can't always finish it but she likes having something to work at."

I looked at her profile. The particular quality of her face when she was thinking about her mother — not sad, not performing anything, just present with it. Devoted in the specific way of someone who had decided love was a verb and kept conjugating it every week without requiring acknowledgment.

"What?" she said, feeling me look.

"Nothing," I said. "Paying attention."

She didn't tell me to stop. She just looked ahead and the corner of her mouth moved slightly.

Gloria was having a good day.

She knew Reina immediately, said her name before Reina had crossed half the room, and looked at me with the focused recognition of someone who remembered the last visit.

"You came back," she said to me.

"Yes," I said.

"Good." She looked at Reina. "He came back."

"He did," Reina said, sitting down and taking her mother's hand.

"That's important," Gloria said. Definitively, like she was closing an argument. Then she looked at the newspaper Reina set on the table. "You did the cross clues again."

"I left you down."

"I know your tricks." She pulled it toward her, already reaching for the pen Reina produced from her coat pocket. "Sit. Both of you. You make me nervous standing up."

We sat. Gloria worked on the crossword with the focused pleasure of someone doing a beloved thing. Reina watched her with the open expression she kept for this room — the version of herself she protected everywhere else because it was too real to show without cost.

I sat beside her and kept quiet and let the room be what it was.

At some point Gloria looked up from the crossword and looked at me directly.

"What do you do?" she said.

"I run a company."

"What kind?"

"Real estate. Finance. Some development." I paused. "We're building a hospital unit. Pediatric. Reina is helping design it."

Gloria looked at Reina. "Is that true?"

"Yes," Reina said.

"She's good at that," Gloria said to me. Firmly. "She sees what people need before they know they need it." She looked back at her crossword. "You should listen to her."

"I do," I said.

"Good." She filled in an answer. "Most people don't."

Reina was looking at the window. Her jaw was the slightly controlled version it got when something had moved through her that she wasn't going to show in front of her mother.

I put my hand over hers on the arm of the chair. She turned it over. Held on.

Gloria glanced at our joined hands and said nothing. But she looked satisfied in the private way of someone whose opinion had been confirmed.

We left at two.

The afternoon had warmed slightly — the specific New York winter mercy of a clear afternoon that almost convinced you the cold was optional. We walked for a while without direction. She was quieter after the visit than before it, which I'd come to understand was normal — the visit cost her something and then gave back more and the recalibration took time.

I let her have it.

At some point she leaned into me slightly while we walked. Not taking my arm, not making a gesture of it. Just fractionally closer. Her shoulder against mine.

I adjusted without comment.

"She said you came back," Reina said eventually.

"She remembered."

"She doesn't always." She paused. "She chose to hold onto that."

I looked ahead. Felt the specific weight of it — a woman losing pieces of the world daily and keeping that particular one.

"I'm going to keep coming back," I said.

"I know," she said. "That's why she kept it."

We walked in silence for a moment that was full rather than empty.

"I'm hungry," she said.

"Brooklyn," I said. "The place with no reservations."

"No reservations," she confirmed. "No one knows your name."

"Anonymous dinner."

"The best kind."

She took my hand properly then — not the shoulder-lean, not the incidental contact, but fully and deliberately, fingers laced through mine, the way you held someone's hand when you wanted to and had stopped finding reasons not to.

I tightened my hand around hers.

The restaurant in Brooklyn was small and warm and the owner seated us without recognition and the food was extraordinary in the uncomplicated way of places that didn't need to prove anything.

We ordered without strategy. Ate without agenda. We talked about small things — a book she was reading, a conversation with Julian that had made me laugh, something ridiculous Marco had texted about the drawer situation.

Just dinner. Just us.

Exactly what she'd asked for.

I watched her across the table — unhurried, present, the composed exterior completely at rest — and thought about the woman who had opened a door with divorce papers and a morning shift and had somehow become the clearest thing in my life.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing," I said.

"You keep saying that."

"Because it's everything," I said. "And everything doesn't fit in a sentence."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she picked up her fork.

"Eat," she said softly.

I ate. She smiled at her food.