My mother slides me a mug, a cinnamon stick, untoasted marshmallows, real whipped cream, and a small cup of coffee. I let the steam hit my face and feel my shoulders drop a degree. Danger lives everywhere, including in rooms like this, but it has a harder time squeezing past flour and neighbors.
“You came fast,” she says after Marco’s third “and also,” when he is finally quiet and fully occupied with a chocolate mustache.
“It felt like time,” I answer.
She searches my face for clues. She’s got a way of finding them in the place near my temples. I give her a smile that is true and not the whole story. Her mouth firms for half a second and then relaxes. She knows there are narratives you can only peel when the child’s asleep.
The afternoon is the kind of busy that warms hands. People stop on their way home to pick up bread and gossip. Mrs. Nolan insists on paying exact change and adds two nickels as a tip because “your girl is back and that is worth something.” A teenager asks if we do gluten-free and looks hopeful when I say sometimes. Someone asks if I’ll stay this time, another wants my skincare secret, an old lady in a hat says Mom must be proud. Marco stands on a stool, handing out gingerbread men like a diplomat. The town treats him like he’s wearing a badge.
Work lives in my body in every reach for a spatula, every way to stack scones so they look like a small hill and not a pile. My mother hums along with a radio station that never learned new songs. I slide her a look when the bell hits hard and three men in hunting jackets come in at once. She lifts her chin once to saywe’ve got it. We do.
Dusk falls fast through the front window. Marco plays under the counter with the serene focus of a child who knows he’s safe.
The bell rings, and a man, my mother says is old Mrs. Amy's son, steps in. He buys a coffee to go and asks if the cookies are still two-for-one at five. They are on Fridays. He rounds up the bill without saying why. In Wrenleigh, that counts as conversation.
We close when the street turns that soft blue I once hated for meaning homework and bed. Mom hangs her apron, flips chairs, and waves me off, then lets me help anyway. We mop, stack trays, and ready the mixer. The air smells of flour, clean, warm, and ours.
Upstairs, the back room is exactly the same and a little smaller, the way rooms from your childhood always are when you return. Marco finds the box of old toys and unearths a yo-yo and an action figure that used to belong to a cousin who moved. He linesthem up on the dresser like a parade. My mother fusses with the radiator even though it works fine, then pulls an extra quilt from the closet for the extra peace she needs.
We eat a simple dinner of soup, bread, a plate of ham and cheese that looks like a story from my childhood at the kitchen table. Marco tells his new audience everything about sprinkling snow, then the runway, then the candy cane. She makes all the right noises in all the right places, and he glows like a lamp at full wattage.
When he starts to nod off, I carry him to the small bed and tuck him under the flannel. He turns on his side and curls around the dog on his favorite sweater, smiling-eyed and tongue-lolling, the kind of face caught halfway between a laugh and a tumble. I smooth his hair and watch his face slacken the way it does when sleep takes the day.
The house gets its evening sounds. The neighbors on the landing close a door. Someone in back laughs once, loudly, then stops. I stack plates in the sink and let my hands move through warm water. My mother stands beside me drying and doesn’t ask yet.
Instead, we talk about safe things while we fold towels—who married whom, which store closed, which teacher retired. Snow starts again, thin and relentless. I text Maya a photo of the bakery window fogged with heat and a note that reads,We made it. She replies with a string of stars and a skull, which is her way of sayinggoodand alsoI’ll end whoever tried it.
We turn off lights in stages. My mother kisses Marco’s forehead, then squeezes my arm and goes to her room. I lie on my bed and look at the ceiling. The paint’s new, but the cracks know me. I breathe in the faint scents of pine and old polish and the snow-smell that always finds its way through the window, even when it’s shut.
Somewhere outside, a car idles and doesn’t move on. I sit up. It could be a neighbor warming the engine. It could be someone on the phone. It could be my nerves making shapes out of sound. I count to thirty. When I reach twenty-five, the engine revs once, and the car pulls away. The silence that follows is neither comfort nor fear. It just stays.
I do the small things a mother does in an old house. I put a glass of water by Marco’s bed. I fold the throw on the chair. I check my phone and resist the urge to refresh the camera feed I installed last year when my mother had three break-ins in one summer. Wrenleigh’s safe and not safe, like any place. I check the front door and the back one more time and crawl under the quilt.
Morning comes in a spill of pale light over the counter downstairs. My mother’s up first, as always. She has coffee and a plan. Marco skid-slides into the kitchen in socks and claims a stool while she sets a slice of breakfast pound cake in front of him. He talks with his mouth half full, she tells him to chew, he swallows and grins.
“Someone came by,” she says, handing me a mug. Her voice is casual, the way she talks about the mail. “A man in a black coat. Yesterday afternoon. He asked when you might come home.”
7
MATTEO
Present day, New York
A breath drawn before a storm is not calm. It is compression. I feel it in the marble corridor outside Vincent’s private office as the city lifts into a grey morning beneath glass.
ModernCapido not live in crumbling villas. They buy the horizon and the lines of control. Vincent keeps a full floor over the Hudson. Three elevators answer only to his fob. The concierge never raises his eyes. The cameras belong to us, not the building.
The corridor smells of money and danger. I know both. At the end is a door trimmed in leather and steel. I stop in front of it, hands easy at my sides, eyes on the handle. Patience looks like this. In my head, I mark the angles, the exits, the pull of silence, a reflex the corridors and dirty alleys taught me well. The door opens without a sound. Luca, his aide, nods once and steps aside.
Vincent sits at a long table of black glass and pale steel. Morning light cuts through the panoramic windows, white and cold. Theoffice itself is a dark vessel—polished wood, low light, silence measured in breaths. Beyond the glass lies the terrace garden, green and absurdly bright, still wet from the night rain. Lemon trees in ceramic planters, vines on trellises, a wrought-iron table set for breakfast. All of it behind bulletproof, UV-filtered, electrochromic glass that can turn opaque at a command. A place built for the surface of peace.
Vincent is composed, silver hair exact, posture absolute. He wears a dark suit, no tie, cuffs precise. An espresso cools beside his right hand. The other hand rests on the trackpad of a laptop that holds a message designed to die.
“Matteo,” he says.
“Capo,” I reply.
He turns the screen. I read. My expression remains still, though the pulse in my neck marks each word. The jaw tightens by instinct. My eyes narrow until the light fades to a line. I take one slow breath, already running numbers in my head.
