“Police,” I remind him again.
“Call the sheriff,” he decides. “Report the glass, the rag, and the tire tracks. He will make a note. He will not help much. But he will change his patrol by five degrees. That is enough.”
“Are you always this precise?” The words leave my mouth too clean to sound polite.
“Yes.”
I reach for the phone by the register and dial. I keep it simple, tell the truth, using the phrases small towns recognize. Words likevandalism,rag through the windowandsaw tire tracks. We’ve boarded it up. We’re okay. The dispatcher knows my mother’s voice. Mine’s a surprise. She tells me a deputy will swing by when he clears an animal call on Maple. Coyotes took a cat again. I thank her and hang up.
When I turn, Matteo’s at the base of the stairs, head tipped, listening. I hear it too now. The small clicks are only of the house at this hour. A faucet chooses to complain once. Heat pops in a pipe. A child turns over and sighs in sleep. All normal. The wrongness has passed.
“I need to check him,” I tell Matteo, already moving.
He steps aside and doesn’t follow. His shoulder rests against the post, and he watches the doorway like a man who will stop a storm by leaning.
My son lies on his side. My mother sits in the rocking chair beside him, the wood creaking in small, even breaths. She looks up when I enter, and I nod. She rises slowly, the kind of slow that comes from years of care, and moves toward her room. The chair rocks once, twice, as if it still remembers her weight.
I lean down and press my mouth to Marco’s temple. His lashes flutter. He makes a small sound that isn’t a word and turns onto his other side. The towel at the door is damp and cold. I nudge it back under the bed with my toe. The window draws my eye. Snow rims the sill, soft and clean. The glass holds a faint ghost of orange, only my nerves remembering the fire.
The upstairs hall light is off when I come back down. The front room’s dim behind the plywood, but the kitchen throws a steady glow against steel. Matteo stands at the same spot, motionless except for his eyes that keep working.
“We’ll clean the rest later,” I say. “We open at seven. I won’t scare customers with a crime scene.”
“We will be ready at seven,” he returns.
“You’ll be gone by then,” I counter on reflex.
He lets that sit, then shakes his head once. “I will be upstairs. You will pretend I am gone.”
I hate that it makes sense. I don’t like that my shoulders drop because a plan that keeps him near puts a crack in the fear. I pull a trash bag off the roll and start gathering the smaller pieces of glass that escaped the first pass.
He takes the bag from me. “No.”
I know the word isn’t control. It’s care in a language he speaks like a native. I let him have it, and I wipe the counter instead.
When the deputy arrives, lights off and voice mild, Matteo is gone, as if he were never there. I show the window, the rag soaking in the sink, the box of broken glass by the back door. He takes a few notes, studies the tire tracks, and nods once, certain of small things.
“Could be drifters. Could be kids with matches,” he says. He promises an extra patrol, maybe a word with his chief. He reminds me to keep the door locked and wishes us a better morning.
I watch him leave, his boots marking the stoop in perfect order, and know it won’t be enough.
By six, the floor’s clean. The room looks like a place where people buy scones and tell stories. Marco pads down in stockinged feet, hair sticking up, yawns into his sleeve, and asks if he can have the cookie with lots of red. I hand him a plain one. He pretends to be sad, then eats it without a complaint.
“Count with me to ten.”
He blinks, then grins and counts very loudly, trying to push the numbers at me like a joke. We both laugh. He has no idea what kind of glue that sounds like on a morning like this.
The first customer comes early, because fishermen think clocks are for other people. He looks at the board on the window and raises his brows. “Storm prep?” he jokes.
“Drafty frame,” I answer. “We’ll fix it after Christmas.”
He nods, pays cash, leaves a quarter, and tells me the river looks mean today. I tell him to mind his footing, and he tells me I sound like my mother. He’s not wrong.
Matteo is back from his rounds. He hovers on the fringe, part shadow, part solution. He keeps his distance from Marco without making it look like he’s keeping his distance. He watches the street through the side window. He spreads salt on the stoop while pretending to read the specials. Marco doesn’t mind him.
When the early rush peters out, he steps closer. “Tonight,” he says, voice low. “We will change locks. We will add a bar to the back door. I will bring another set of eyes for the alley, disguised as lights. Nico will take the last hour at the diner. Petro will be at the church hall. If you step out, send me a dot. If a car sits for more than two minutes, you tell me. If anyone asks questions that do not feel right, you give me a name.”
“I hate this,” I admit.
