Chapter 29: Courted, Slowly
The flowers arrived at Sullivan's on a Thursday morning, while Maya was on a ladder in the back room with a tape measure in her teeth, arguing happily with an electrician about where children could and could not reach with a violin bow.
The delivery boy — sixteen, unimpressed, in a coat too big for him — carried the arrangement through the shuttered bar like an offering. It was not small, and it was not the kind of flowers a man sends to make a point about money. Winter roses, dark red, and white ranunculus, and something green and wild-looking threaded through them. The card was tucked in an envelope that had not been typed or left to an assistant.
She knew the handwriting before she opened it. She had seen it on set lists and contracts for three months.
For Maya — because the room deserves them while it is becoming itself. V. Corso.
His own name. Signed in full, in ink, on flowers sent openly in broad daylight for the whole street to see arriving. Vincent Corso did not sign his name carelessly anywhere in Chicago. Maya stood on the ladder with the card in her hand and understood that this was not discretion. This was declaration, done his way — quietly, in writing, and letting her decide what anyone made of it.
"He sends good flowers," the electrician observed.
"He does everything deliberately," Maya said, and climbed down to put them in water, in the only vase Sullivan's still owned, which was a cut-glass thing her father had kept for exactly one regular's anniversary in 1997.
The dinner invitation, when it came four days later, came as a formal request. Not a text. Not an assumption. Vincent came to Sullivan's at the end of the working day, stood among the drop cloths and paint tins in his good coat, and asked — with Lucia, shamelessly, pretending not to listen from behind the bar — whether Maya would allow him to take her to dinner on Friday. At a restaurant of her choosing, if she had a preference; he had a place in mind if she did not. Seven o'clock, or another time. He could collect her from her flat, or meet her there, whichever she preferred.
It was, Maya realized, a speech. He had prepared it, and somewhere in the middle the head of the Corso family — a man who gave orders that moved money, men, and once, an entire truce — actually faltered, just slightly, on the phrase if that would please you.
"It would please me," Maya said, because there was no earthly reason to make him suffer longer, and because it was true. "Seven is good. Meet me there. Send me the address."
"You'll meet me there," he repeated.
"I have a door now, Vincent. I like using it. I'll meet you there at seven, and I'll be the one in the dress I bought myself, and you can tell me I look beautiful and I will believe you, because I'll have chosen it."
His smile, then, was not the careful one he wore for the world. "Friday," he said. "Seven. I'll be the one trying not to arrive at six."
The restaurant was small and old and Italian, on a side street, with twelve tables and an owner who greeted Vincent by name and then, with a discretion clearly instructed in advance, treated him for the rest of the evening like any other man who had booked the corner table and hoped to impress a woman in a new dress.
There was no business. That was the thing Maya noticed first, and kept noticing. No phone on the table. No lieutenant at the door. Vincent asked her about the school. Not the bar, not the money: the school. How many children did she hope to start with? Would she teach herself, or hire? What did a seven-year-old need to learn first — really learn, not scales, what was the thing underneath the scales?
"Nobody's ever asked me that," Maya said.
"I am asking everyone that from now on. It's a better question than most of mine." He turned his wine glass a quarter turn. "Your father taught half your street. You're building him a bigger room."
"I am building me a bigger room," she said, gently. "He'd be glad. But it's mine."
"Yours," Vincent agreed at once. "I stand corrected. Tell me about your room, Maya."
So she did. She told him about the seven-year-old she had been; about Ellen, singing; about the tuner he had sent, who had argued with her for an hour and then played the old upright with tears in his eyes and tuned it for half price; about being afraid, some mornings still, in the bright new flat — not of Ryan, never of Ryan anymore, but of the sheer open size of a life that was finally hers to fill. He listened the way he had listened in his office, which she now understood was simply how he listened to her: entirely, without rearranging what she said into something he could answer.
He walked her to a taxi afterward — her taxi, her arrangement, made with the restaurant phone because she liked ending an evening by her own hand — and stood on the cold pavement while the city moved around them, and did not so much as reach for her hand without invitation.
So Maya reached for his.
She took his hand on that pavement, in the December cold, with the taxi waiting and its driver studying the far distance with theatrical loyalty, and she rose — she was in heels, she barely needed to rise — and she kissed Vincent Corso. Briefly. Once. By her timing, at her pace, ended by her stepping back with her hand still in his and her decision plain on her face: that much, chosen freely, and more when she chose it.
He did not pull her back. He did not ask for more than she had given. He stood there in the cold holding her hand like it was something he had been entrusted with, and he said, very quietly, "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Maya said. "It's not a favour. It's a beginning. There's a difference, and you're a man who understands contracts, so I expect you to respect this one."
"I will respect this one above every contract I have ever signed," Vincent said, "and I have signed some solemn documents in my life, Maya Sullivan."
"Good," she said, and got into her taxi, and gave the driver the address of her own flat across town, and rode home through the lit streets with her fingers pressed lightly to her mouth, smiling at her own reflection in the dark window — a woman coming home from a date, at twenty-seven, as though her life were an ordinary, extraordinary thing she was finally allowed to begin.
Chapter 30: Stay Close, By Choice