Teo, now Matteo, tells me about Milan, the gala night, the corridor, and the hotel suite.
“They had you followed.” His voice sends shivers down my spine. I remember Marco's burnt toy, the card.We know about the boy.What am I up against? Who is Matteo?
“We were careful. You were,” I manage.
“Careful is not invisible,” he says. “A house staffer sold a picture from that night. A runner overheard a name and a city. A cheap tail sat on your block long enough to see a pattern. That is all it takes. It is not your fault.”
He makes it sound like a recipe that went wrong in the final step, a hand that slipped on a bag of sugar. This isn't pastry. This is blood.
“Do they know you?” I ask, looking at his jaw. It's safer than his eyes. “Do they know what you do?”
“They know enough to give me space,” he admits. “They will need reminding.”
I look past him to the river. Two ducks cut a line through the skin of ice, and everything around them mends. The accountant. The security.Believe what you want, he had said with a smirk. I look directly at him. “My life isn’t yours to fix.”
“Your life is yours to keep,” he says. “Let me make that easier.”
He rests his forearms on the table. Pale scars run across his knuckles, stories I don’t want today. Ink curls down his inner forearm in a line of script I didn’t read out loud the night I traced it. He radiates calm without having to arrange it for me, and I hate that my body reads that like heat.
“You can't stay here,” I tell him. “People will notice.”
“They noticed when I walked into the town,” he says, almost amused. “By nightfall, they will know which building I am in and whether I take my coffee sweet.”
“This isn't funny.”
“It is not,” he agrees. “It is simple. I will keep men off your street. I will post eyes at the edges and not in your pockets. I will not ask for anything you do not want to give.” His mouth tips the slightest degree at the end of that line, and I feel my face get hot because my memory decides to play the wrong reel. I push away from the table and stand.
“I'm going back in,” I tell him. “We've got a lunch rush.”
He rises, gives me space on the path, then falls in at a respectful distance. He lets me open the back door, and he doesn't reach for it first.
Inside, the bakery’s a softer noise again, the kind that fills your head and keeps the bad thoughts from finding elbow room. My mother shoots me a look I can't read, my mind elsewhere, and then hands me a bag of scones for Mrs. Doyle wrapped in wax with a neat length of red twine.
“Is everything all right out there?” The words sound casual but land too softly to fool anyone.
“Fresh,” I answer, because it's the only word that'll come out.
She looks past me at Matteo and lifts her chin. “Coffee’s fresh too,” she adds as Matteo makes himself small at the far end of the counter and nurses a refill like it's a job.
He watches the door and the sidewalk through the fogged glass. He watches the mirror under the shelf. He doesn't watch me unless I make him.
“Looks like he’s got all the time in the world sipping his mug,” my mother says, voice almost light.
“He’s working,” I say. “He just makes it look like coffee.”
Lunch brings the town in. The high school math teacher buys two paninis and leaves with a third for a neighbor who plowed her drive. A kid with a chipped tooth asks if we have anything shaped like a dinosaur. I cut a sugar cookie freehand, and he looks at me like I did a magic trick. Three men in blaze orange come in and bring a clean stripe of cold with them. Everyone clocks the stranger in the coat and decides how they feel about him. Curiosity wins, then caution.
“New boyfriend?” Mrs. Doyle whispers when I hand her the bag, voice bright with appetite that keeps people alive in small places.
“Cousin,” my mother answers from behind me, smooth as icing.
“Ah,” Mrs. Doyle says, a long vowel that says she doesn't believe a word of it and will still repeat it with gusto.
I want to laugh, and I want to cry, and I want to kick a wall. Instead, I fold another box, lift another tray, reach for the espresso portafilter, and live in the small motions that have always saved me. Marco knows better than to show his face when the room’s got this much interest in our side of the counter. He’s upstairs in the back room with crayons and a book, the radiator humming low, my mother’s old clock ticking slowly on the wall. I keep that picture in my head like a talisman.
The bell rings, and a woman I don't recognize steps in, dark hair tucked under a knit cap, a gray coat too thin for this town, nails that live in a salon. She scans the racks and keeps scanning. Her gaze catches me and skids to Matteo, then returns to me empty. She leaves with nothing. Matteo’s eyes cut to the window, then to the mirror. He puts his cup down without finishing it.
“Friend of yours?” my mother asks me under her breath.
