“He already sees that turn without knowing it,” I say. “Don’t give him a reason to learn your face.”
Nico sets his hands at ten and two.
“If they swing south, I take them,” I finish. “You hold the square and keep routine. No hero moves. We lose them clean and pick them up clean. That’s how we live.”
“Va bene,” he replies. He eases us out the way we came and lets the motel shrink in the side glass.
We roll back into town. Nico drops me off at the square. It holds its evening choreography. The barber stands in his doorway. He watches and does not watch. A woman wrestles a Christmas tree into a hatchback. The market is still open. Kids run between the stalls, coats unzipped, daring the cold before someone yells, “It’s time to go.” I stay far enough to look like part of it and close enough to count faces.
I take the long way past the river, where the metal bench sits empty and cold and the ducks drift in the morning in tight groups near the ice, their heads tucked down as if patience could change the season. The water moves slowly enough to sound tired. I climb School Street and watch the buses lined in the lot, most of them rusted at the wheel wells and dulled by salt, one too new for this district, still wearing a loan sticker on its glass. I write down the number.
The light has been gone for hours. Windows have taken over, glittering like stars. Streetlamps flare steadily. A man in a knit hat wipes a table outside the diner and tells me I am early for dinner.
“Then I’ll call it a reservation,” I tell him.
He grins, still wiping. “We don’t take those, but I’ll remember your face.”
The bakery door should be locked. This hour wants a closed sign. I turn the handle before I think, and it gives under slight pressure. No bell. The chime cord lies slack against the jamb. That tells me enough.
I step inside. The heat that belongs to ovens and people and a thousand mornings wraps me. The case light is on. The front looks like it does after hours, clean and ready for a new day. But something does not fit.
Lila stands in the middle of the room, an envelope clutched in both hands as if she is not sure whether to tear it or feed it to the flame. Her name, handwritten, sits on the front in neat block letters.
15
LILA
The envelope weighs nothing. It sits in my hands like a letter from a school office, small and thin, the kind of thing you tuck in a cookbook and forget. Except it carries my name on the front in block letters, and the ink sits heavy on the paper as if someone pressed too hard.Maria Hartis written first, then crossed out with a single line, withLilaprinted under it as if the writer adjusted mid-thought.
Matteo steps in and the bells don’t ring, the chime cord hanging slack. The door’s unlocked because I stopped thinking about locks when I saw my name on an envelope in an unknown hand.
Heat from the ovens blooms, warmth that can’t find me. The case light throws a sheet of shine across the floor, too bright, too calm. My heartbeat sits in my throat. I hold the envelope like it might cut me.
“Take it,” I manage. I don’t look at his face. I look at his hands, the way he doesn’t rush.
He reaches for it, fingers steady, and I let go like it carries a virus. He studies the printing for half a second, then turns theflap with a surgeon’s patience. He doesn’t tear the envelope or say it doesn’t matter. No tearing. No drama. He coaxes the glue loose and slides out a stiff piece of paper and a smaller card that slips out after, like it was waiting for its cue.
I already know what the photograph is before he turns it so I can see. I know because I feel the cold walk up my spine before the image hits my eyes. It’s grainy, shot from outside, angled up through the dark. The upstairs window of this building glows, the curtain pulled three fingers’ width, enough to see a piece of a room and a child on a stool by the radiator with a coloring book on his knees. He’s turned in profile. Dark hair falls over his forehead. His hands hold a crayon with the solemn intensity he reserves for stick figure families and trucks. My son looks small and busy and safe.
The small card is off-white. No letterhead. No signature. Two words in that same block hand.
Christmas Eve.
The room confines itself to those two words. I taste metal and burn where I bit my tongue. Matteo’s jaw tightens the way metal bands tighten around the tops of barrels, a ratchet that moves one tooth at a time. He neither swears nor flinches. He looks at the card, then the photo again, then me.
“This is a deadline,” he says, his voice calm. “Not a threat.”
It doesn’t soften anything. It sharpens the burn on my tongue. “That’s supposed to help?” I sneer, and my voice scrapes. I put both hands on the prep table because if I don’t, I’ll put them on him.
“It helps me make choices,” he says. He sets the card on the stainless surface with the care of a man laying a knife out of achild’s reach. The gesture infuriates me, yet somehow, my heart slows.
“It tells me when and where they will try. The pageant draws a crowd. They want noise and cover.” He holds my gaze, his mouth still, refusing even the shape of a smile.
I swallow. The card stares back like it can see me swallow. “How are you calm?” I ask. It’s not an accusation. It’s a demand from a woman whose hands are shaking and who doesn’t have space for someone else’s Zen.
“Calm is how you survive,” he replies. “You do not run at a fire with your eyes closed.”
“My son’s on that paper,” I point out. “Someone stood in the snow and shot my child through glass like he’s an exhibit, and you’re using words like calm and eyes closed.”
