Chapter 2 - Tuesdays
On the second Tuesday, Vincent was waiting for Tessa with three questions and an unopened envelope.
He had spent the intervening week trying to reach Salvatore. Each call connected briefly, then dropped. An unfamiliar administrator at the front gate informed him that his oldest friend was no longer on the approved visitors list. Arya insisted the restrictions had been recommended by his doctor. His doctor, reached during a scheduled appointment, knew nothing about them.
Tessa arrived at eight with a paper cup of terrible coffee and a faint purple stain on her sleeve.
“Grape juice?” Vincent asked.
“Hospital vending machine attacked me.”
“How's your sister?”
“Opinionated. Which the nurses consider an excellent sign.”
She hung up her coat and checked the care plan. She never approached his legs without telling him what she was about to do, and she never lingered on the scar at his back. The routine had become the one stretch of the week he didn't dread. That realization made him unreasonable.
“You're late,” he said, although the clock read eight precisely.
“Would you like me to arrive yesterday?”
He exhaled. “Sorry.”
She looked up. “That sounded expensive.”
“For me, it usually is.”
As she helped him organize his medication tray according to the visiting nurse's chart, he studied her hands. A healing burn marked one thumb. Her nails were cut short. This woman moved with the practical speed of someone who'd never had the luxury of falling apart.
“Did you choose nursing?” he asked.
“I'm an aide, not a nurse. And I was studying business management before Ellie got sick. I chose whatever paid quickly enough to keep us together.”
He glanced toward the massive windows. “I wanted to design buildings.”
“You?”
“Is that difficult to imagine?”
“Considering this house has a grand staircase and a bathroom you couldn't enter until somebody tore out a wall? A little.”
He laughed despite himself. “My father bought this monstrosity.”
“What would you have built?”
“Places people actually needed. Libraries. Apartments with good light. A house where no one has to ask permission to get into the kitchen.”
Tessa stopped adjusting a cushion. “That's a different answer from what I expected.”
“Don't spread it around. It'll damage my reputation.”
The answer stayed with her. Later, when she wheeled a portable supply cart into the room, she found a rolled architectural drawing in the corner of his desk. It showed a low brick building with a wide entrance and a courtyard. The title read HARBOR HOUSE COMMUNITY CENTER.
“Did you draw this?”
“Twenty years ago. Before my father decided a Corvino should own a harbor instead of designing one.”
“It's good.”
“It's unfinished.”
“So finish it.”
He said nothing, but that night he asked his assistant for new drafting paper.
On the third visit Tessa found him scowling at a travel brochure. It advertised a restored train route through the Adirondacks, and he had tossed it aside because the photographs featured steep carriage steps. She retrieved it, searched the accessibility information on her own phone, and showed him where the operator listed boarding assistance and wheelchair spaces. He didn't book the trip. But he left the brochure on his desk, and Tessa noticed he stopped turning it facedown when visitors arrived.
Their arguments changed shape, too. When he refused an afternoon exercise because it made him feel clumsy, she reminded him that rehabilitation belonged to him, not to the people waiting for a perfect result. He attended the next session and later told her she'd been insufferable. She asked whether he planned to complain to her supervisor. He said he'd rather not give the agency the satisfaction. These exchanges weren't miraculous. On bad mornings he remained angry, and she remained exhausted. Their growing trust rested on the fact that neither had to pretend otherwise.
By the fourth Tuesday, their conversations had acquired a rhythm. Vincent asked about Ellie's treatment without demanding details. Tessa asked about his physical therapy without offering false promises about walking again. She was the first person to hear him admit that the hardest part of his injury wasn't the wheelchair.
“It's that every decision gets made in another room,” he told her while they sat near the window after his exercises. “People discuss me like I'm a building being sold.”
“Then make them come into this one.”
“Arya won't even have dinner with me.”
“Have you asked her why?”
“She says it hurts too much to see me.”
Tessa weighed her answer. “That may be true. It also doesn't explain why she doesn't let other people see you.”
He watched her for a long moment. “You don't like my fiancée.”
“I don't know her. I know you've asked to call your friends three times while I've been here, and each time somebody has told you it wasn't a good day.”
“Maybe everybody's busy.”
“Maybe. But you used to run an empire. You understand patterns.”
Her words echoed after she left.
That evening, Arya appeared with Dominic and a leather folder. His cousin wore a watch Vincent had once given him for his thirtieth birthday. He paused at the doorway as though wheelchair use were contagious.
“Looking good, Vince,” Dominic said.
“Liar.”
Dominic offered a laugh that died quickly. “We need to keep the harbor project alive. A simple authorization. I'll handle everything else.”
Vincent read the first page. The authorization gave Dominic control over a holding company Vincent had never heard of.
“Where are the supporting accounts?”
“They're with legal.”
“Then bring legal.”
Dominic shut the folder with unnecessary force. “You're making everyone's life difficult.”
“Strange. I thought being shot was the difficult part.”
Arya pressed her fingers to her forehead. “I knew this would happen.”
After they left, Vincent found a note tucked beneath the empty dinner tray. It was in Tessa's precise handwriting, left with his permission after she'd cataloged his appointment reminders.
Ask the clinic directly for your medical restrictions. Don't accept them secondhand.
He read it twice. Then he called his doctor.
The doctor confirmed that Vincent had no medical reason to be isolated from visitors and that his appointments had been canceled by somebody using the household office line.
Vincent's hand tightened around the receiver.
May you like
Outside his door, Arya was laughing at something Dominic had said. It was a carefree sound he hadn't heard from her in six months.
He wondered how long they'd been laughing together while he sat upstairs.
