“She went to an interview and came home crying.”
I sat down slowly.
“What happened?”
“The interviewer asked what she’d been doing all those years.”
“What did she say?”
Marco gave a humorless laugh.
“She said she’d been raising me.”
He turned the token over in his fingers.
“They asked what she had been doing professionally.”
My anger softened just enough for me to listen.
“Afterward,” he continued, “we sat in that laundromat watching the dryers spin. Mom kept saying she had nothing to put on a résumé.”
His voice dropped.
“And I remember thinking, ‘But she does everything.’ I just didn’t know the words yet, Gigi.”
Bills.
School.
Meals.
Appointments.
Repairs.
His mother handled all of it.
Marco held up the token.
“Years later, I did.”
I looked around the office again.
The dresses.
The camera.
The mirror.
The measuring tape.
None of it looked suspicious anymore.
It looked intentional.
And somehow, that made the next part even harder.
“Do you know what I did last night?” I asked.
Marco closed his hand around the token.
“Gigi…”
“I cooked dinner.”
“I know.”
“No. You know there was dinner.”
I stood.
“I set the table. Lit candles. And waited.”
He looked down.
“I reheated the sauce at nine, Marco. At ten, I blew out one candle.”
“Gigi, I’m sorry.”
“At eleven, I put everything away.”
He moved toward me.
I raised my hand.
“You spend all day teaching women that their time counts.”
Marco stopped.
My voice cracked.
“When did mine stop counting?”
He had no answer.
Good.
I needed him to sit with that.
Finally, he said quietly,
“It never did.”
