“Stage right’s secure,” Petro reports. “Kitchen corridor funneled. Lights are up. I can cover the alley and the wings, not both at once.”
“You position the upright piano at forty-five degrees between you and that door,” Matteo orders. “The bench turned sideways. It forces a step around and gives you cover. Keep the broom in your hand and look like you’re working overtime. For the pageant. If anyone asks, you are fixing a squeak. You call me every minute.”
“You’re coming?”
“I will.” The trouble in his voice isn’t for the hall. It’s for me. He ends the call and faces me fully, coat open, shoulders squared like he’s bracing.
“I may be gone twenty minutes,” he says. “Maybe less. You stay here with your mother and the boy. Chain on. If anything shifts outside, you pull the cord. I will hear it.”
I want to tell him I’m not a cord to be pulled. I can stack tables and tie curtains and make jingles sing. He’s watching me the way men watch the horizon, not because they doubt it’s there, but because they want to see it safe first.
“What are you risking?” I ask the question that’s been clawing to get out. “Right now. By being here.”
He doesn’t answer right away. His jaw locks. He stares at the pencil he has flattened with his thumb, then at the map like the paper might volunteer to speak for him. The silence stretches so long, I almost fill it. I do not. I wait him out.
When he looks up, something in his face has slipped. Not off, not entirely, just enough that the man under the code shows.
“If I lose you,” he says, every word precise, “and the boy, I do not recover. I do not know how to build again.”
The floor tilts a little. I grip the doorframe, the paint cool, real. I know what it costs him to put those sentences in the room. He doesn’t dramatize. He doesn’t barter with promises he can’t keep. He tells the truth like a book he’s got to balance, the only way he can make himself true.
A small sound cracks the quiet. Glass, brittle and mean, the kind when a hard object meets a pane that has known better days.
We both look up. The ceiling vibrates in that tiny way wood does when it takes a hit it can’t roll with. Another sound follows, a thud that lands on the upstairs floorboards and vibrates down the walls.
“Marco,” Maria calls from her room, alarm tight. “What’s happening?” Her silhouette breaks the hall light, and in the next breath she’s beside him, sleep gone from her eyes.
I’m already running. Matteo’s behind me, silent and fast. The light in the hall is too bright now, as if the building flinched and turned on its skin.
Shards glitter on the rug outside Marco’s door, small triangles that catch the bulb. A rock sits at the far wall where it bounced, ugly and sure of itself. Paper clings to it, a strip of twine looped twice around.
I grab the twine and yank. The paper unfurls. Black marker, thick and patient, the kind a person uses when he wants the message to be read from fifty feet.
One More Night.
24
MATTEO
Snow falls in a steady curtain, fine and quiet. I walk the square and mark every corner as if I am writing a report to myself. The flag at Town Hall snaps once and then hangs, heavy. Wreaths sit on the brick like medals. A single lamp burns in the clerk’s window. Across from it, the tourist guide kiosk is dark behind its plexiglass, a rack of faded trail maps and a basket of brochures that promise summer concerts no one attended this year.
The bitter winter steadies me, but it does not quiet what is underneath. Anger sits close to my chest, white and cold. They threw a stone through her window and went home to their dinners, thinking fear would freeze because it happened in the dark. They do not know what I know—how to turn fear toward them until it cuts.
Tomorrow, I need this town to hold together with tape and borrowed trust. No backup. Nico’s still lost. Too many doors. Too many good people who think safety is a prayer.
I walk the loop again until anger becomes focus and focus becomes plan. The church hall sits just off the square, its old double doors facing the gazebo and the diner. A banner readsPAGEANT TOMORROWin blocky paint. The windows throw weak gold from the emergency lights.
I stand off to the side and count what matters. One main entrance with scuffed mats, a kitchen corridor that runs east to a service exit near the dumpster, the narrow path between the florist and the hall that lets a person move unseen for twenty steps, and clear sight lines from the gazebo to the steps. The alley has what every alley does in winter—bins, pallets, and enough shadow to cover mistakes.
I let my eyes run the loop until the route draws itself again in my head without effort. The nativity set leans half-built just inside the hall, the shepherd board a little crooked. There is a gap behind it wide enough to hide a man if the overheads ever failed. They will not. I have already told Petro to keep them full.
The rectory is dark. The priest is away tonight, covering services in the next parish. That is bad luck. One less pair of eyes that might read danger before it reaches us. The light that usually burns in the rectory window will not mark the square tonight, and the sound of a latch turning in the dark will have no answer. The town feels thinner for it. Still, we have learned not to wait for fortune. We will hold the edges of the night ourselves.
Shops line the square in a tight row. Hal’s hardware gate is down, a paper sign taped inside the glass,Open 7 to 3 Christmas Eve.Across the street, dark windows throw back pieces of the square. When a cruiser passes, blue light flashes over the glass and catches my reflection.
The diner’s half full. Men in caps lean over coffee and talk through smoke they don’t need. The florist’s window holds one white star. The pharmacy stays bright and sterile. The alley between is too narrow to escape.
I cross to the small park that runs along the river. Two swings hang stiff with ice. The path bends to the blind curve by the water. Good approach, bad retreat. I walk back to the square. Christmas lights try hard here. Strings of white around the tree on the green. Bows on the lampposts. Painted candy canes staked in dirt that is now as hard as iron. It reads cozy if you do not know what you are looking at. I know what I am looking at.
