Chapter 3 - A Day to Touch the Sky
"I need a father for the park," Sophia announced.
For a moment, nobody in the war room spoke. The rain sounded suddenly louder against the glass. Maria stared at the floor, wishing she could collect the words and put them safely back inside her daughter's mouth.
"Sophia," she said gently, "we talked about this."
"I know. But he's tall. He could push the swing really high."
Alessandro's expression did not change immediately. He sat with his hands folded on the table, as careful with his silence as he had been with threats earlier that evening.
"Is it a special trip?" he asked.
"Family Saturday. Everybody brings somebody." Sophia bent over her drawing. "Lena's daddy can make her fly. Charlie's grandpa brings chocolate ice cream. I want to touch the sky, but Mama gets dizzy when she pushes too high."
"I do not get dizzy," Maria protested.
"You say my shoes are going to hit the moon and then you get scared."
"That's because your shoes are very dangerous."
Sophia giggled, delighted that her mother was answering rather than ending the conversation. She had been talking about Family Saturday for two weeks. Maria had promised balloons, a picnic, and the park across from their apartment, but none of those things had solved the problem of the empty space in Sophia's crayon drawings where her classmates put a father.
"You don't need to borrow anyone," Maria told her. "You have me. You have Aunt Rosa. We have plenty of family."
Sophia nodded. "But I still want to ask."
Alessandro remembered a school photograph from his own childhood. Every boy in his class had been instructed to invite his father to a sports afternoon. His father had sent a chauffeur instead, with an apology written by a secretary. Pietro had come, wearing shoes too large for him, and cheered from the sidelines until he lost his voice. It remained the only school photograph Alessandro kept in his desk.
"What exactly would my responsibilities be?" he asked Sophia.
Maria looked up sharply. "Mr. Moretti—"
"I'm gathering information."
Sophia straightened, suddenly all business. "You have to come on time. Seven in the morning. We get pancakes, but not the burned ones. Then the park. You push the swing, and we get pink ice cream."
"Pink ice cream?"
"Strawberry. But pink is the important part."
"Understood. Anything else?"
"If I get scared on the big slide, you don't laugh."
Something shifted in Maria's chest. Sophia had fallen from that slide two weeks earlier. She hadn't been hurt, but she was embarrassed by the older children who had watched her cry. Maria hadn't realized the memory still troubled her.
"Nobody will laugh," Alessandro said.
Sophia studied him. "You look like you yell a lot."
"Sometimes I do."
"Mama says yelling makes people feel little."
"Your mother is right again."
Maria could feel her careful boundaries weakening. Alessandro's kindness might be sincere, but his world came with consequences. Marco Ricci had spent years proving that people who worked for Moretti learned to take whatever help was offered and never ask what it cost. Maria refused to let Sophia become another obligation in a ledger of favors.
"Thank you for entertaining her," she said, rising. "Really. But we should go. Tomorrow is a workday, and she needs sleep."
"Tomorrow is Saturday," Sophia said.
"And I work on Saturdays."
"Not tomorrow," Alessandro replied.
Maria stared. "I can't afford to miss a shift."
"You'll be paid. And you'll still be employed on Monday."
She crossed her arms. "I don't accept gifts from employers that put my position in question."
For the first time, he looked genuinely impressed. "Then it isn't a gift. Call it compensation for what happened today. My security system shouldn't have allowed a child upstairs. I owe you a safer workplace."
"You're very good at making arguments," she observed.
"I pay lawyers to practice on me."
Sophia looked between them. "Are you going to be friends?"
"We're negotiating," Alessandro said.
"That's what friends do when they want the same cookie."
Maria laughed despite herself, then pressed her lips together. It had been a long time since laughter had surprised her. Alessandro watched her for a heartbeat before turning back to the child.
"I could visit the park for a few hours," he said. "If your mother agrees, and if you understand that having a visitor doesn't mean you need to change your family."
Sophia thought deeply about that. "Could you still push the swing?"
"Absolutely."
"Then okay."
Maria looked toward the rain-streaked windows. She imagined the hospital bill waiting for Rosa, the rent due next week, the wooden box hidden beneath her closet floor. Most of all, she imagined the kind of man who could sit across from a little girl without frightening her, while men outside that room were waiting for his permission to make other families afraid.
Maria looked again at the yellow dress, now streaked at one hem with purple wax. Before Isabella died, she and Maria had talked about all the firsts they would share: Sophia's first shoes, the first trip to a beach, the day she would finally learn to write her name. Maria had done every one of those things alone, sometimes smiling for photographs she couldn't bear to look at afterward. She had never planned for a father-shaped gap in the child's imagination. She had only planned for survival. Sophia's request was a reminder that surviving and growing were two different things, and she couldn't protect her daughter by forbidding every unfamiliar possibility.
"One day," she said. "No photographs. No security parade. No promises you can't keep."
"Those sound like reasonable conditions."
"And I don't want Sophia anywhere near your business. Ever."
Alessandro's gaze darkened for a fraction of a second. "Neither do I."
Sophia held up her drawing with great ceremony. "Here. Now you can remember everything."
Alessandro accepted the paper. The crooked building and its angry bird sat beneath three smiling stick figures. One wore a yellow dress. One had long hair. The last figure was taller than the entire building.
"That's me?" he asked.
"Your hair is hard," Sophia explained. "I used all my purple."
May you like
He smiled again, but Maria's attention was fixed on the symbol above the little building. An old, almost forgotten warning stirred in her memory. Isabella had once shown her a photograph of an arched doorway with a bird carved over it. She had begged Maria never to go near that place.
For the first time that evening, Maria wondered whether Sophia had walked into the war room by accident—or whether a secret Maria had buried three years earlier was beginning to find its way out.
