Chapter 1 - The Man Who Asked Me to Stay
Are you alone right now?
That was his answer.
No clumsy reassurance. No promise that everything happened for a reason. Just five words that made the silence in my apartment suddenly unbearable.
I sat on the edge of my couch, still wearing the coat I had put on that morning when I believed I might have another year.
Yes, I typed.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Returned.
May I call you?
I looked at the painting beside the window. The unpainted water seemed almost accusatory.
Okay.
My phone rang immediately.
“Hello?”
“Hello.” His voice was low and carefully steady. “My name is Lucian.”
“Amelia.”
“Amelia. Have you eaten today?”
I almost laughed. It came out sounding broken.
“A doctor just told me I’m dying, and you’re asking about lunch?”
“I can’t help with anything else until I understand what you need right now.”
For some reason, that was what undid me.
I started crying without warning, the kind of crying that was physically humiliating, all breath and apologies and words collapsing into one another. He didn’t fill the pauses. He didn’t tell me to be brave.
When I could finally speak, I said, “You don’t even know me.”
“No.”
“You could hang up.”
“I could.” A small pause. “I’m still here.”
I pressed my palm against my chest. My heart had become a badly maintained engine, something that stumbled during the simplest tasks. Walking to the mailbox could leave me trembling. Sleeping flat had become impossible.
“Are you having trouble breathing?” he asked.
“Not more than usual.”
“Does your doctor know you went home alone?”
“He asked if someone could take me.”
“And you said no.”
I hated how gently he said it.
“I didn’t want anyone to feel obligated.”
“Wanting company doesn’t create an obligation. It gives someone a choice.”
Through the phone, I heard the faint opening of a door. A man said something about Singapore. Lucian answered away from the receiver.
“Cancel it.”
“Your flight?”
“Everything tonight.”
I went still.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“Who are you?”
There was a pause long enough for me to hear traffic outside my window.
“Someone who once received a call too late.”
I should have asked what that meant. Instead, I gave him the name of the neighborhood pizza place when he asked what I could manage to eat. He offered to order and leave it downstairs. I told him I could pay for my own food.
“I wasn’t questioning that,” he said.
Embarrassed, I stared at my chipped coffee table.
“Sorry.”
“You can say no without apologizing.”
“Then yes. Soup. If they still make it.”
He asked before taking my address. Asked whether I wanted a visitor. Asked whether I would prefer he simply remain on the phone.
That was how he got me to say yes to something I had refused all afternoon.
Company.
Forty minutes later, someone knocked.
I opened the door on a tall man in a dark coat holding a paper takeout bag. He looked expensive in a way I couldn’t have explained: no visible logos, no ostentatious jewelry, just clothes that fit as if someone had studied him before cutting them.
Behind him stood a broad-shouldered man near the stairwell.
“Your friend?” I asked.
“Daniel. He drove.”
Daniel nodded and stepped farther away, giving us privacy without pretending he wasn’t there.
“You came yourself.”
“You said company.”
I had expected someone ordinary. A retired accountant, perhaps. A lonely stranger with a free evening. Instead, the man in my doorway looked as if buildings made room for him.
He waited until I stepped aside.
Inside, he took in the apartment without the expression I had come to dread. No pity at the medication bottles. No discomfort at the folded walker near the bathroom. His eyes stopped on the painting.
“Yours?”
“Unfinished.”
“I can see that.”
“Most people say it’s beautiful.”
“Is that what you want me to say?”
“No.” I surprised myself by smiling. “I want to finish it.”
“Then that seems like a better conversation.”
We ate at my tiny kitchen table. He removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves. He didn’t check his phone once.
I learned he was forty, disliked sweet coffee, and had a younger sister who had died six years earlier. He learned I was thirty-one, used to teach painting classes at a community center, and had been sick so long that the word recovery felt like a cruel subscription I kept renewing.
“Heart failure?” he asked when I described the breathlessness.
“From inflammatory damage. There were treatments. Some helped for a while.”
“Are you waiting for a transplant?”
I shook my head.
“Dr. Shaw said I wasn’t eligible. Too many complications. He’s been treating me for years.”
Lucian set down his spoon.
“And today he said seven days.”
“Approximately.” I tried to smile. “Apparently death has an estimated delivery window.”
He didn’t smile back, but his eyes softened.
“Did he explain what could change that estimate?”
“There isn’t anything left.”
“Did he say those exact words?”
I thought of the folder closing. The practiced sorrow. My own inability to ask a single intelligent question.
“I think so.”
Lucian nodded once. He didn’t argue with me. Somehow that made it possible to keep talking.
I told him about the trip to Maine I had postponed. The lighthouse I wanted to paint. The brushes that cost too much for someone living on disability payments and freelance scraps.
“Don’t buy them,” I said immediately when his eyes flicked toward the jar of worn brushes.
“I haven’t offered.”
“You looked like you were about to.”
“I’ll work on my face.”
I laughed for the first time since the appointment.
Before we finished eating, he asked what I had taught my students first.
“Not to apologize before showing me their work.”
His gaze moved to the canvas.
“Did you follow your own rule?”
“Absolutely not. Teachers are hypocrites.”
He smiled, and I found myself telling him about a retired bus driver who painted every tree purple because green made him think of his ex-wife’s living room. About a woman who came to class after her husband died and spent three weeks painting nothing but doorways.
“What did she paint after that?”
“A chair.”
“Was that progress?”
“She said it was somewhere to sit while she decided what came next.”
Lucian looked down at his hands.
“I think I would have liked your class.”
“You’d have been impossible.”
“Why?”
“You’d want to know the correct way to do everything before you started.”
He considered objecting, then laughed quietly.
“You have no evidence.”
“I have eyes.”
Outside, an ambulance passed, its siren rising and fading between the buildings. Automatically, I stopped speaking until the sound was gone.
Lucian noticed.
“Does that happen often?”
“What?”
“Everything reminding you.”
I looked at the spoon in my hand.
“Sometimes I forget for ten minutes. Then something ordinary happens. Someone says next summer. A store asks if I want to renew a membership. It feels like the world keeps offering me plans I’m not allowed to make.”
He didn’t tell me I would have next summer.
Instead, he asked, “What would you do with tonight if you didn’t have to make it meaningful?”
The question surprised me.
“Watch something terrible. Complain about the ending. Maybe order dessert I’d only eat three bites of.”
“That sounds like an evening.”
“Not a very inspiring one.”
“Does it have to be?”
I looked at him for a long moment.
“No,” I said, and felt some small part of my body unclench.
We watched half an episode of a renovation show while the soup cooled. He had strong opinions about load-bearing walls. I had stronger opinions about painting every kitchen white.
For eighteen minutes, I was not performing courage for a stranger.
I was a woman arguing about cabinets with a man on her couch.
I hadn’t realized how much I missed being allowed to be unremarkable.
Later, while he washed our dishes despite my objections, his phone finally lit up on the table.
The screen showed a news alert.
MORETTI HOLDINGS CHAIRMAN EXPECTED TO ADDRESS MERIDIAN DEAL.
Below it was a photograph of the man standing at my sink.
I looked from the screen to his broad back.
“Lucian.”
He turned.
“Moretti?”
His expression changed. Only slightly, but enough.
“Yes.”
I remembered magazine covers at doctors’ offices. Financial headlines on television. A man whose name appeared on a hospital wing across town.
I pushed back my chair.
“Is this some kind of publicity thing?”
“No.”
“Did someone set this up?”
“No.”
“How did I get your number?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at him, suddenly aware of the old couch, the stained dish towel, the fact that I had cried until my nose ran in front of a man who probably owned islands.
“You should leave.”
He put down the towel.
“All right.”
The immediate agreement hurt more than it should have.
He collected his coat. At the door, he stopped, keeping his hand off the knob until he finished speaking.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to spend the evening deciding what I wanted from you.”
“And what do you want?”
“To know you’re not alone tonight.”
“Why?”
He looked toward the painting again.
“My sister kept saying she would finish something when she felt better.”
The apartment became very quiet.
“What was her name?”
“Sofia.”
Something moved behind his expression, grief so old it had learned to stand upright.
“You don’t have to turn me into her,” I said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He considered that instead of defending himself.
“I intend to.”
I looked at the door, then at the second chair at my table.
“You can stay until nine.”
He checked his watch.
“Then I have fifty-three minutes.”
He took off his coat again.
We spent those minutes making a list. Not a bucket list, I insisted. I hated how the phrase made my life sound like errands before a flight.
Things I still wanted.
Paint the water.
See the ocean.
Tell Caroline the truth.
Lucian looked at the third item without asking.
“My sister,” I said. “We haven’t spoken in eight months.”
“Would you like to call her?”
“Not tonight.”
He nodded and handed back the pen.
At nine, he stood. This time I didn’t ask him to stay.
At the door, he said, “Would you consider another medical opinion?”
“I don’t want my last week spent being sold hope.”
“Neither do I.”
“You can’t buy me a different ending.”
“No,” he said. “But you deserve to understand the one you were given.”
I agreed to one consultation. No promises. No cameras. No decisions made without me.
He repeated each condition as if we were negotiating a treaty.
When he left, I sat by the window and opened our messages again.
Thank you for answering, I wrote.
His reply came before I could put down the phone.
Thank you for letting me.
For the first time all day, I looked beyond the blank water on the canvas.
I noticed there was still light outside.
At 11:18, my phone rang again.
This time it was Dr. Shaw.
“Amelia,” he said, his warmth a fraction too deliberate. “I understand you’ve been speaking to Lucian Moretti.”
I sat up.
I hadn’t told anyone.
“How do you know that?”
A pause.
“Listen carefully. Whatever he’s offering you, you need to be very cautious.”
“Why?”
May you like
His next words made my hand go cold around the phone.
“Because his family already has a history with your medical case.”
