He Loved Me in Secret, Until I Became Someone He Could Never Have novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Next Door

Dario admits he buried her promotions but won't say why, and as Renata leaves his house, Chiara lets herself in with a key.

Stiles Street was four blocks from the bank.

I walked it in the rain without an umbrella.

My parents' row house was dark, the porch light off since my father went into the hospital.

The house next to it had every light on.

Dario had grown up in that house.

When his father moved to the big place in Roland Park, Dario stayed.

Half of Baltimore thought it was modesty.

I used to think it was because of me.

A black sedan idled at the curb with two men in the front seat.

The driver rolled down his window.

"Miss Mazzola. He's not taking visitors."

"Then he can tell me that himself."

I went up the marble steps and pounded on the door with the side of my fist.

It opened on the third hit.

Dario was in his shirtsleeves, tie gone, collar open.

There was a glass of whiskey in his left hand and a pistol on the hall table behind him, next to his keys.

He looked at my wet hair.

He looked at the street behind me.

"Get inside," he said.

"No."

"Renata. Inside. Now."

I went in because the men in the car were watching, not because he told me to.

His kitchen was the same kitchen where his mother used to feed us pizzelle after school.

Same yellow tiles.

Same crack in the window over the sink, from a baseball I threw when I was nine.

He'd never fixed it.

"Your father came to the bank tonight," I said. "With a ring."

"I know."

"In front of the whole lobby."

"I know, Renata."

"He said you kept me small for him."

Dario set down the glass.

He didn't say anything.

"The Fells Point review," I said. "The port study. Both promotions. You killed them."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms.

The white scar across his right knuckles caught the light.

He got that scar the summer we were ten, when I steered his bike into a fire hydrant on Fawn Street and chipped my front tooth.

He'd carried me home on his back, bleeding all over both of us.

"Because I wanted you to quit," he said.

It hit me in the chest.

"Five years," I said. "You could've just fired me."

"I could have."

"So why didn't you?"

He looked at me for a long time.

I'd known that face my whole life.

I couldn't read it at all.

"Take the oath on Sunday," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting. Swear in. Sit in that bank. Don't come to Holdings, don't come to this house, don't come near my father, and don't come near me."

"You don't get to tell me where to go anymore. I don't work for you."

"Good."

"Good?"

"It's the first smart thing you've done in five years."

I laughed, because otherwise I was going to throw his whiskey at him.

"You know what the worst part is?" I said. "I defended you. Every time somebody on that floor called you cold, I said, you don't know him. He's not like that with me."

Something moved in his jaw.

"You were right," he said. "I'm not like that with anybody else."

I stepped closer.

Close enough to smell the whiskey and the rain on my own coat and the same cheap soap his mother used to buy.

"Look at me and say you think I'm worse than the intern."

He looked at me.

His gray eyes were very steady.

"Go home, Nata."

Nobody but my mother had called me that since high school.

He used to.

He stopped the week I started at Holdings.

"Don't," I said. "You don't get to call me that."

I turned around and walked down his hall.

My hand was on the doorknob when it turned under my fingers.

The door swung in from the outside.

Chiara Bonetti stood on the top step in a cream trench coat, shaking out a little umbrella.

She had a key in her other hand.

A brass key on a red ribbon.

She'd let herself in.

She looked me up and down, from my wet hair to my wet flats.

"Oh," she said brightly. "I didn't know he had company."

Behind me, Dario said nothing at all.

Chiara slipped past me into the hall, close enough for her perfume to fill the doorway.

She dropped the key on the table beside his pistol.

"Lock up on your way out, would you?" she said.

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