PAID IN VOWS

CHAPTERTWO

I did not sleep that night, which was not new, except that this time the insomnia had two separate sources instead of one, grief for a man I had buried that afternoon, and the unwelcome, circling memory of a stranger standing close enough that I had been able to smell cedar under the lilies.

I told myself the second thing did not matter. I told myself this with enough conviction that I almost believed it, right up until I caught myself, somewhere around two in the morning, trying to remember the exact color of his eyes, and realized I had spent more time on that particular detail than I had spent crying.

By morning I had convinced myself Dante Moretti had been testing me somehow, gauging how far he could push a grieving woman before she pushed back, and that there would be no follow up. I believed this for exactly as long as it took me to check my email and find a message from a law firm I did not recognize, informing me that Calloway Shipping's outstanding obligations to Moretti Holdings would need to be addressed within the week.

I called the number at the bottom of the email before I had even finished reading it twice, and a woman with a voice like a closed door told me Mr. Moretti's office would reach out when it was convenient for them, and hung up before I could ask which Mr. Moretti she meant, though some unhelpful part of me already hoped it was the one from the funeral.

I spent that afternoon at Calloway Shipping's actual office, going through the filing cabinet in my father's office that nobody had touched since he got sick. I found the original loan documents behind a folder labeled TAXES 2019 that had nothing to do with taxes at all. Two hundred thousand had become four hundred thousand through interest rates that should have been illegal.

My father's signature was on every page, small and tight, the same signature he used on birthday cards. I sat in his chair and let myself cry for the first time since the hospital, not entirely for him, but for the version of him I had apparently never known.

I called my mother that evening and asked, as gently as I could manage, how much she actually knew about the loan.

"He didn't want you to worry," she said finally. "He said it was handled. He said the men he borrowed from were businessmen, not what you'd think, not like in the movies."

"Mom, they want the money back. All of it. Now. Four hundred thousand."

I watched, in my mind's eye, the color leave her face in stages, the way it does when a number is too large to process all at once.

"I knew the name," she said. "I didn't know what it meant. Your father handled all of it."

That was the truest thing either of us said that night. I did not tell her about the marriage. I told myself I was protecting her, and some honest part of me understood, even then, that I was simply doing exactly what he had done, for exactly the same reasons, and that it had not worked out well for him.

I thought about calling Sofia. I picked up my phone twice and put it down twice, because saying it out loud would make it real in a way that saying it to myself in an empty apartment somehow hadn't yet. I told myself I would call her in the morning, once I had a plan.

I did not have a plan by morning. What I had was a text message from an unknown number, sent at exactly eight o'clock, three words long.

Three days left.

I did not need to ask who it was from, and I was aware, reading it a second time and then a third, that some part of me had been hoping it would come, not because of the deadline, but because it meant I would have to speak to him again.

I stared at that admission for a long moment, standing alone in my kitchen, and did not like what it said about me, grieving my father and already finding my attention snagging on the man who had used his funeral to deliver an ultimatum. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink, and told myself, with no real conviction, that it would pass once the panic did.

It did not pass. If anything, over the following two days, it only sharpened, the way a splinter you cannot quite reach only announces itself more insistently the longer you leave it alone.

I spent that morning doing the one thing that had always steadied me when nothing else would, which was work. I drove to the warehouse and spent four hours going through invoices with Marcus, catching up on the small, ordinary business of keeping a shipping company alive one manifest at a time, and for those four hours I managed to think about almost nothing except cargo weights and delivery windows, the blessed, uncomplicated arithmetic of a business that had nothing to do with debts or the men who collected them.

It did not last. By the time I got back to my car, the three words were waiting for me again in my head, patient and unbothered, the way real deadlines always are, indifferent to how hard you have worked to forget them for a few hours, and tangled in with them, uninvited, the memory of a voice on the phone that had gone warm for exactly half a sentence before the composure came back down over it.

I called my mother that evening, not to tell her anything, just to hear her voice, to remind myself there was still a reason underneath all of this that made the coming decision feel less like fear and more like something closer to purpose. She talked about the garden, about a neighbor's dog that kept getting into her flower beds, and for twenty minutes I let myself simply be her daughter, nothing more complicated than that.

When I hung up, the clock was still running. I sat for a long while afterward, phone resting in my lap, turning over the strange, unwelcome fact that I had spent more of that day thinking about the shape of Dante Moretti's voice on the phone than I had spent thinking about the actual size of the debt he represented, and understood that whatever came next, I was going to have to be honest with myself about that, even if I was not yet ready to be honest with anyone else.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror for a long moment before finally going to bed, looking at my own reflection like it belonged to someone else, someone newly orphaned and newly indebted, and also, inconveniently, someone who kept catching herself smiling at nothing when her mind drifted back to the particular stillness of a stranger's face at a funeral. I did not like what the smiling said about my own grief, about how quickly a person's attention could be pulled sideways even in the middle of the worst week of her life. I told myself it was simply the mind protecting itself, reaching for anything that was not loss, and that explanation satisfied me for almost as long as it took to turn off the light.

I thought, lying there in the dark, about calling Sofia after all, just to say the words out loud to someone, there's a man and he terrifies me and I can't stop thinking about him, but I could not make myself dial. Some part of me understood that saying it to her would mean admitting it to myself in a way I was not yet ready for, not with my father three days in the ground, not with a debt still hanging over my mother's house, not with a deadline ticking down that had nothing to do with my own complicated, unwelcome feelings and everything to do with survival. I fell asleep eventually, somewhere past three, the three words from his text still glowing faintly behind my closed eyes, and dreamed, absurdly, not of my father, not of the warehouse, but of a dimly remembered warmth at the back of my neck that I would spend the whole next day pretending I had already forgotten, and of a voice, low and certain, saying my name like it already belonged to him in some way neither of us had agreed to yet.

I woke with a headache and the specific, heavy exhaustion of grief compounded by too little sleep, and lay in bed for a long while before finally forcing myself up, reminding myself, with each small task of the morning, coffee, a shower, a phone call to Marcus about the week's shipments, that whatever else was circling in my chest, the actual, practical shape of my life still needed tending to, debt or no debt, stranger or no stranger.