“There it is,” Damián says quietly.
“There it is.”
We sit with it. Somewhere behind us a bus is loading. Somebody laughs. The ordinary world does its ordinary thing a meter from the worst and truest sentence of my life, and the strange part, the part I did not expect, is that I am still here. I said it out loud. The wall is rubble now. I am sitting in the rubble in the sun, and I did not die. That’s the thing nobody tells you about the wall. You think it’s holding you up. You find out it was holding you in.
“So,” Damián says after a while. “Now you know the true thing. You want the hard part, or you want another minute?”
“Give me the hard part. I’ve had too many years of minutes.”
“The hard part is this.” He turns his cold coffee a quarter turn, the way he does. “When you ran, it was still the worst thing you could do. It’s not anymore. Now the worst thing you can do is have this entire beautiful clarity on a step in the sun and then do nothing with it. Because doing nothing is safe, and safe is the only drug you have ever been addicted to.” He looks at me. “You reached him a hundred times when he was reaching back. It cost you nothing. He caught you every time. So the only version of choosing him that means anything now is the one with no net. You go and stand in his daylight. Nobody’s holding a net underyou. And you do it knowing he might not catch you, because that is exactly what he did for you, and you never once noticed it was brave.”
I sit with that, too.
“He’s in Naples,” I say. “I don’t have a box for this. For going to Naples to be seen wanting a man in front of his entire city.”
“No,” Damián says, and stands, and picks up his cold coffee, and picks up the untouched one by my foot, because he’s decided I’m not going to drink it. “You don’t have a box for it. That’s the good news, Marek. That’s the best news. You finally want to do a thing there’s no box for. Go find the man in Naples.”
He walks off toward the lobby and doesn’t look back, which is a mercy, because my face is doing something my face has never done in a public place.
I sit on the step a while longer. The camp empties around me. My flight goes to Prague first, where my parents will make my favorite dinner and ask me nothing and love me across a surface I built to keep them at.
I take out my phone. I don’t text him. It’s too soon and too small. Instead, I open the notes and start a list, because I am still me, and a list is how I think. What it costs. What I have to say. Who has to hear it and in what order. Where he is. What daylight looks like when you build it on purpose instead of hiding from it.
At the top, before any of it, I write the only line that matters. The one Damián handed me on a concrete step. I write it in Czech, so it’s mine and nobody else’s.
The building already fell. You are the one who has to go and rebuild it in the open, where he can watch you do it and decide for himself whether to come inside.
Then I open the airline app. The federation’s travel desk has already done its work. There I am, ticketed, Prague, tonight, the seat map holding my usual window on the left so nobody sits on my blind side.
Home, handled, one tap to check in.
The building stands, and the building even books your flights.
My thumb goes to the check-in button. I watch it go. Prague by morning. My mother’s table for Sunday dinner. Nobody has to know anything.
That is how close it comes. One tap.
Then I think about a table with a place set at it that nobody fills, and I back off the button the way you step back off a wrong pass, and I find the corner of the app that says change flight, and I type Naples into the field letter by letter.
Two years, and I only ever drove, because a flight is a record and a car is deniable. Even my travel was filed.
There is an overnight that lands in time for Sunday. One seat.
The change fee is a number I don’t let myself read, because some things you don’t price first or you’ll file them under unaffordable, and I am done filing.
The reflex screams the whole time. Howling that this is the exact thing the boxes exist to prevent. I let it scream. I have finally understood that the reflex was never protecting me. It was just faster than I was.
This time, for once in my life, I am faster.
I change the flight. Sunday lunch at the restaurant is at one. I have never once been inside it, but I know exactly where it is.
Chapter 19: Enzo
Sunday lunch at my father’s restaurant is the loudest room in Naples.
Eight tables, all of them ours, because it’s family and it’s Sunday and my father closed the doors to strangers the way he has closed them every Sunday of my life. Carlo is arguing with a cousin about a referee that ruined a match in 2019. Gianna films Mamma for reasons Mamma pretends to hate. My father works the pass, sweating and happy and yelling about the salt.
I’m at the back table where I have sat since I was a boy, home and finished, and both of those are true in a way that is still not the same as fine.