I stand in my kitchen with flour on my shirt and actual dinner in front of me, wondering how I let a man like that talk me through a sauce. Then I decide not to borrow trouble from tomorrow.
Before eating, I add one more line to the back of my mother’s card—“No heat near cheese.”
I grab a bowl and pause for a moment.
He hadn’t called me Pennino. He had said “panini.” Like on the cup.
“Did he just call me a sandwich?” I wonder out loud.
Chapter Nine
Luca
The room is glass and concrete. It screams government with its drab colors, a camera in the corner that blips with a green light every few seconds, and ugly carpet that likely hasn’t been cleaned in ages.
Two deputy marshals post at the door and there are likely more behind the glass. They don’t even pretend to be doing something else.
They’re watching me.
Roberto claims a chair. Elena stands opposite him with a file already open, tabs organized in every color. The pretrial techis a thirty-something in a button-down with rolled sleeves and a badge on a lanyard. He has my ankle in his hands and a little diagnostic puck the size of a matchbox pressed to the transmitter.
He’s nervous, and his hands are shaking a bit.
“Leave event at oh-one-twenty-two,” the tech says, eyes on the laptop. “Device reported outside municipal polygon for twenty-one seconds, then re-acquired inside.”
“Outside the city,” Elena says, flat. She doesn’t look at me when she says it. She’s pinning Roberto with a look. “His conditions bar leaving the city without prior approval.”
Roberto spreads his hands, the picture of patience. “It’s false. It pinged wrong. My client was at home all night.”
“So you say. That remains to be seen. According to the ankle monitor, Mr. Conti took a midnight stroll outside the city limits,” she says. “We’re here to see if that’s true.”
The tech taps the keyboard. The wall monitor wakes up to a map—gray tiles, a bright blue circle for my house, a red dot jumping across a faint line, and then snapping back. A timestamp in the corner.
“Of course it’s true,” Robert says, getting irritated now. “We’ve already said that it’s false. Your faulty equipment is the problem here. Not my client.”
The tech doesn’t look up. There’s a bead of sweat on his forehead. “Strap integrity is good. No tamper flags. Battery healthy. Firmware current. I’m not seeing an obvious fault.”
Elena’s pen taps once against the folder. “So the hardware behaved as designed and still shows Mr. Conti outside the city.”
“That’s what the log shows,” the tech says. He toggles another screen. The same red blip hops the line and snaps back. “Outside polygon for twenty-one seconds, then inside again. Regular heartbeat before and after.”
Roberto leans back, eyes narrowed. “Your machine’s fine, therefore my client isn’t? That’s the leap you’re making?”
Elena doesn’t rise to it. “I’m making no leaps, Counselor. A condition reads, ‘Do not leave the city without prior permission.’ The system recorded leaving the city. We verify. That’s all.”
“You dragged my client out of his home at 2:00 in the morning in cuffs for verification?”
“There were no cuffs, Mr. Conti,” Elena says mildly. “He was brought in to be present for a check. Standard.”
“Well, he’s here, and now you’re accusing him of violating the conditions of his release,” Roberto says.
Despite it being nearly 4:00 now, Elena is dressed as professionally as I’ve ever seen her. Her dark hair is pinned backneatly, not a hair out of place. Her suit today is a deep blue, fitting her as if it were made for her.
She looks like she’s been up for hours.
The exhaustion in her eyes says otherwise.
“Mr. Conti,” she says. This time her eyes flick to me, quick and sharp. “Where were you between oh-one-hundred and oh-two-hundred this morning?”
