Tiernan: Do not make this harder than it has to be.
Sean: Call me. Now. You owe me an explanation.
My brother’s name lights up the screen again, and I almost laugh, a strangled, useless sound. He’s in the air already in a private jet slicing toward JFK. His arrival time has that terrifying certainty that makes the whole world tilt. He needs blood. He needs answers. And I have neither.
Damn it, I should leave.Fucking walk away, Cat. I should burn everything and dissolve into somebody’s nothing. The logic is clear, but the courage to move is absent.
A flicker of movement catches my eye across the street.
Matteo emerges from the building, coat pulled tight, and the morning light catching the blunt line of his jaw. My heart staggers. For a breath, the rooftops drop away and there is only him in the world, the way he carries himself like a man who has always been allowed to take up space.
My feet answer before my brain gives permission. Habit is a louder command than fear. I follow, keeping to the shingles, jumping over the little chimneys like a ghost. My body is a machine and a traitor. It moves with the old precision, the taught strides that used to bring me home with money and no questions. But today, my chest is a drum that can’t be hushed.
He doesn’t look up; of course he doesn’t. He wouldn’t know the roof opposite him had a woman pressed against its stone thinking terrible, soft things all night long. He turns the corner,briefly out of sight and I’m sprinting toward the fire escape before I can stop myself.
When I reach the street, I’m panting, chest heaving not from the run but from the fear of having lost him. Somehow, miraculously, I catch sight of the top of his dark head of hair amidst the masses and trail after him. I’m careful and silent, the city swallowing my footfalls with its million waking noises.
Every instinct screams at me to sprint for cover, to vanish into the crowd and never look back. But when he pauses, leaning briefly against a lamppost to check his phone with that distracted, dangerous calm, something like shame or maybe grief blooms. I was taught to kill without feeling. That feelings are exactly what gets you killed. Maybe Da and Donal were right.
Matteo’s profile is a map of the boy I loved and the man I nearly betrayed. Sea air knots my hair; he laughs beside me, promising a future with a certainty I once called fate. The memory blooms, soft and unwelcome. I press my back to a cold brick wall and count: three, four, five. I am not here to watch him recollect me. I am not here to collapse into the past. I am here because I failed and because if I don’t move, other people will move for me, and they will not be merciful.
Matteo continues down Central Park West, and I hope he doesn’t hail a cab, or I’ll lose him for sure. He has the sort of gravity that makes taxis appear when he needs them. Luckily, he doesn’t, and I continue tailing at a safe distance. Crowds are a blessing at any hour in my profession. I’m swallowed in the wave of businesspeople and dog-walkers, into a tourist with a camera and a delivery man cursing at his manifest. My steps are the steps of the invisible: measured, matched, and paced.
Every time he glances over his shoulder I freeze behind a streetlamp, pretending to tighten my scarf, rearrange a bag, or check my phone. My hands are steady, but my stomach is a nest of glass.
Matteo stops at a food truck and orders two coffees with a voice rough from too little sleep. I tuck myself into a row of trash cans across the way and pretend to tie my shoe. When he pays, his hand brushes the cheap plastic of the coffee cup, and I want to reach out and touch that warm hand. The wish is childish and dangerous, and it tastes entirely forbidden.
My phone buzzes.
Donal: JET LANDED.
I close my hand around the device until it hurts. Panic is a tide, and I will not survive the storm.
Matteo walks, careless and human, oblivious to the tempest that clouds my periphery. He turns down a quieter street and the pace of the city thins. My breathing becomes a series of small, deliberate acts. I could call Donal and tell him to stand down. I could make a scene, stop Matteo, push myself into his life and hope the truth buys me mercy. Those avenues are each paths to a different ruin.
A part of me, a naïve, stupid part, imagines gripping Matteo’s arm and whispering, “Don’t let them take you.” Another part, older and harder, whispers that doing so is the last hope of a woman who still believes in fairy-tale endings.
He stops at a crossing, and the light turns. He steps into the street with the impatience of someone who has never been told to wait. The cab behind him screeches to a halt and the driver shouts, his voice slicing through the morning. For a sliver of time the city goes very loud and then very quiet again. I watch the muscle of his neck flex, the way his jaw sets.
The weight of decision is a terrible thing. This is the first time in a while I’ve allowed myself to make a choice: move toward Matteo and ruin everything I planned or let him walk and hand the execution over to my family.
My feet move before my head can order them back into patience. I cross against the light, the traffic a blur. I fall into step a few paces behind him again, beneath the shadow of his coat. The proximity is a new kind of danger because I can smell his cologne now, a faint tang of cedar and something sweet. It makes my chest ache in a way that almost feels like hell. I want to say his name. I want to warn him in the way mothers warn children from a playground: Stop. Don’t. Come back inside.Live.
Instead, I keep my mouth shut and watch him move, and each step he takes is a step toward an inescapable reckoning. Again, I question everything. Do I run and survive, or do I stay and face the ruin I made of a life that once promised me everything?
The answer should be obvious.
Matteo turns another corner, away from the main road. The crowd thins. My pulse drums against the inside of my throat. An alley with a dead end. He walks with the same casual arrogance that once endeared him to me and infuriated me in equal measure.
Why would he corner himself like a trapped animal?
My mouth opens, the young girl in me, the one who kept the summer and the baby alive like contraband in her heart, struggles to form words. Whatever I do next will change more than my plans. It will change the way the world ends for a lot of people.
Matteo suddenly spins around, a coffee in each hand and wild eyes locking on mine.
CHAPTER 19
CAT AND MOUSE
