Chapter 51 Elena's Assessment

Chapter 51 Elena's Assessment
Dante's POV

He'd been sitting outside Costa's room for twenty minutes when Elena found him again.

She came down the corridor with her white coat and her clipboard and the particular walk of someone who had decided to do something and was doing it before they could reconsider. She stopped in front of him and looked at the chair he was sitting in like she was deciding whether to stand or pull up another one.

She stayed standing.

"We didn't finish," she said.

"I thought we did."

"I have more to say." She tucked the clipboard under her arm. "You can tell me to leave and I will. But I'd rather say it."

Dante looked at her. "Say it then."

Elena glanced down the corridor in both directions. The kind of check that meant what she was about to say was for him and not for anyone else within earshot.

"I've watched men like you before," she said. "Not identical. But the same shape. Men who operate in worlds most people don't see and who come into contact with women like Aria and consume them. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes without meaning to." She met his eyes. "The result is the same either way."

"I'm not consuming her."

"Then what are you doing?"

The question sat there without any performance around it. Elena Russo didn't ask things she didn't want answered and she wasn't asking this one to make a point. She was asking because she wanted to know.

Dante thought about it the way it deserved to be thought about.

"Trying to be worth her," he said.

Elena's expression didn't change but something behind it shifted. She looked at him the way she'd looked at him in the meeting room earlier, the thorough assessment of someone used to reading people quickly and accurately.

The silence went on long enough that a nurse passed them in the corridor and nodded at Elena and kept moving.

"She came here at twenty years old," Elena said finally. "Fresh from medical school. Terrified but not showing it, which I recognized because I was the same way at twenty." She looked down at the clipboard. "Her mother had died that year. I didn't know that at first, she didn't tell me, I found out later from a form she'd filled in." She paused. "After her mother died she didn't speak for two weeks. Not a word to anyone outside of work requirements. Just came in and did her job and went home and didn't speak."

Dante stayed very still.

"One of the other residents told me. Said he'd tried to check on her and she'd thanked him politely and closed the door and that was the end of it." Elena's voice stayed even. "She doesn't break easily. She's one of the most resilient people I've worked with and I've worked with a lot of people over twenty years." She looked up. "But when she breaks, she breaks completely. Quietly. Without asking anyone for help."

The image of it sat in his chest in a way he hadn't expected.

Aria at twenty, fresh from medical school, her mother just died, coming in every day and doing the work and going home and not saying a single word to anyone because saying a word would have meant acknowledging how bad it was.

"Two weeks," he said.

"Two weeks before she started talking normally again. And then she just did, one day, like a switch. And she never mentioned it and nobody asked because she'd made it very clear that was how she wanted it." Elena straightened slightly. "I'm telling you this because you should know what you're dealing with if things go wrong. She will not tell you she's drowning. She'll just go quiet and keep showing up."

Dante filed that away carefully. Not as information. As something more important than information.

"I won't break her," he said.

"You may not mean to."

"I won't."

Elena studied him. The long specific look of someone deciding how much weight to give an answer.

"The situation with her father," she said. "The investigation. Whatever is happening outside this hospital that I'm choosing not to ask the details of. Is it close to being over."

"Getting closer."

"And when it's over."

"When it's over she's free of it." He held Elena's gaze. "Whatever she decides after that is hers to decide. I'm not making plans for her life without her."

"But you have plans."

He thought about Signora Lucia's café and a ring he hadn't bought yet and a future that felt more real every day and more fragile every day in equal measure.

"I have hopes," he said. "Plans require more certainty than I currently have."

Elena looked at him for another moment.

Then she did something he hadn't expected. She nodded once, not in agreement exactly, more like acknowledgment. The kind you gave someone when they'd said something that landed where you'd needed it to land.

"She trusts you," Elena said. "More than she should have given how things started. More than is probably wise." A pause. "Don't make her wrong for doing that."

"I'm going to try very hard not to."

"See that you do." Elena picked up the clipboard from under her arm and looked at whatever was on it. Back to business. The personal portion of the conversation apparently finished.

Footsteps came down the corridor.

Aria appeared around the corner, still in scrubs, hair still up, looking at her phone and then looking up and stopping when she saw them standing together outside Costa's room.

She looked at Elena. Then at Dante. Then back at Elena.

The particular look of someone assessing a situation and not immediately finding an innocent explanation for it.

"Should I be worried about this conversation," she said.

"No," Dante said.

"No," Elena said.

The word came out of both of them at the same moment, the same flat tone, which was probably not as reassuring as either of them intended because Aria looked between them with an expression that said she had significant doubts about that answer.

"That was very simultaneous," she said.

"Coincidence," Dante said.

"We were discussing Costa's follow-up care," Elena said.

Aria looked at them both for another moment. She was too good at reading situations to fully buy either of those answers and they all knew it.

"Right," she said.

She looked at Dante with the specific expression she used when she was filing something away for later rather than pushing on it now. He recognized it and made a mental note that later would arrive and he'd need to be ready for it.

"How is he," she said, nodding toward Costa's room.

"Stable. Sleeping." Dante stood. "You did good work."

"I did my job." She looked at Elena. "Are we done with the follow-up care discussion?"

"Completely," Elena said without missing a beat. She looked at Dante one more time, briefly, the look of someone who had said what they came to say and was satisfied with how it had gone. Then she walked back down the corridor the way she'd come.

Aria watched her go.

Then looked at Dante.

"What did she actually say to you," she said.

"That you don't break easily."

Aria absorbed that. "That's true."

"And that when you do, you break completely."

A beat of silence.

"Also true," she said quietly.

He looked at her in the hospital corridor with the fluorescent lights and the background sounds of a working floor and thought about a twenty-year-old who hadn't spoken for two weeks and had never told anyone she was drowning.

"I know," he said.

She studied his face for a moment, trying to read how much Elena had told him and what he'd done with it.

He let her look.

"Come on," she said eventually. "I'll buy you terrible coffee from the machine and you can tell me what Marco found out about the storage facility."

"You don't have to buy me terrible coffee."

"I want to." She was already walking. "It'll make me feel like things are normal for ten minutes."

He followed her.

Ten minutes of normal was worth terrible coffee.