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I am going to call that number. Not at 7:15. Not on his schedule. Not inside the script he wrote before I was old enough to understand I was performing in it.

I am going to call my father, say the word Rivas, and listen to what happens to his voice when the last wall between his hidden world and his daughter comes down.

And whatever walks out of the silence after that word — whatever version of Emiliano Maritz emerges from behind twenty years of locked doors and controlled information and the meticulous, devastating fiction of a normal life — that is the man I will finally meet.

I am not ready for him.

But I am done being ready. Ready is another word for waiting. And waiting is another word for permission. And I have spent twenty years asking for permission to know my own father.

The asking is over.

9

guido

Thirty-Two Weeks

The kitchen smells like basil, and the lavender soap Nova switched to when the old one made her nauseous. Two details. Both tracked. Both filed in the part of my brain that never stops cataloging this household — the shifts, the adjustments, the way a family reshapes itself around a woman whose body is reshaping itself around a child.

Nova is thirty-two weeks pregnant, and the pregnancy is no longer something she carries. It occupies the room alongside her. A presence. A second gravitational field pulling every piece of this kitchen into orbit around the curve of her belly and the slow, deliberate way she moves through space now — one hand on the counter, the other drifting to the spot beneath her ribs where a foot or an elbow presses outward against stretched skin.

She leans against the counter. One palm flat on the marble. The other on the small of her back — a posture that arrived last week and has not left. The body compensating for a center of gravity that has migrated entirely to the front. Her ankles are swollen. She will not sit down. She will not admit the ankles are swollen. This is the daily war she wages against her own biology, and she is losing it with the same stubborn grace that made Romeo fall in love with her in the first place.

Romeo is watching.

He watches her the way a man watches weather he cannot control. Fascinated. Terrified. Besotted. His coffee sits untouched on the counter — the same coffee he moved to the top shelf two weeks ago because her doctor said cut the caffeine, the same shelf that nearly started a war that ended in Nova’s exact words: If you touch my coffee one more time, I will end you.

He surrendered. She won. But his eyes track her mug every time she reaches for it.

“Stop staring at me.”

“I’m not staring.”

“You’ve been staring since I walked in. I can feel it on the back of my neck.”

“That’s called love, baby.”

“That’s called surveillance. I know the difference.”

She does. Better than anyone in this room. Better than anyone in this city. The woman who ran intelligence for twenty years can clock a set of eyes on her body from across a continent. Romeo’s eyes are six feet away and carrying the specific, hair-trigger weight of a man who has been reading pregnancy books with the same intensity he once read intelligence briefs.

Dog-eared pages. Highlighted passages. Three different colored tabs marking a chapter on third-trimester complications that Nova found on his nightstand and reported to Marisol, who reported to me, who filed it as the most Romeo thing in existence.

The Knight who burned eggs and drove too fast and married a woman in a twelve-dollar dress is now a man who can recite fetal development milestones with the precision of a field medic. He knows the weight. The lung development timeline. The window where thirty-two weeks becomes thirty-four becomes thirty-six becomes safe, and every week between here and there is a week where safe is not guaranteed.

The Patek Philippe ticks against his wrist. Giovanni’s rhythm. The dead King’s metronome still marking time on his son’s arm.

But the rhythm Romeo tracks now is not his father’s.

His palm finds Nova’s belly the way it always does — the migration so practiced it looks involuntary. His hand spreads across the stretched fabric of her shirt. Fingers wide. The Patek Philippe pressed against the skin that covers his daughter.

The baby kicks.

I see it from across the kitchen. The visible ripple beneath skin and fabric — a foot, maybe an elbow, the impatient announcement of a girl who has not yet arrived and is already making her presence non-negotiable.

Romeo’s face does the thing it always does. The grin cracks open — wide, devastating, the full-voltage Romeo Rivas smile that has been aimed at his wife’s belly for three months and has never once looked calculated. The charm is gone. What is underneath the charm is worse. It is a man who loves something so much the loving has made him stupid and careful and terrified in equal measure.

“There she is,” he says. Quiet. His mouth close to Nova’s belly. “Right on schedule.”