My eyes move across the street without my head turning. An old man reading a newspaper at a café. Two women arguing over a vegetable stall. A cluster of tourists photographing a church facade. A dark sedan parked at the corner, tinted windows catching the last of the light.
Nothing unusual. Nothing that should trip my internal alarm.
You’re being paranoid, Murphy. Too many espressos.
I force my shoulders to relax, but my stride quickens anyway, just a little. The building where I’m staying is four blocks away. I count the steps like I used to count steps from church back home, measuring the distance to my door.
The prickling sensation fades as I turn onto my street.
I’m probably being paranoid. But I walk faster anyway.
My apartment key sticks in the lock, it always does, and I have to jiggle it while pushing with my shoulder before the door gives way. The narrow stairwell smells like garlic and my neighbor’s cigarettes. By the third floor, I’m slightly winded, because stairs built by people with no concept of standard riser height will do that. The building has been here longer than my country has existed. The plumbing is temperamental, my neighbor plays accordion at odd hours, and the stairs are actively trying to kill me.
But I’ve made it home in the way I make everywhere home. Inside, I lock the door behind me and breathe in the quiet. My narrow bed is covered with a secondhand knitted blanket, my grandmother’s rosary hanging from the lamp, and on the windowsill—bright ceramic tiles, a tiny painting of the harbor, a bowl of blood oranges I’m working through one a day.
Home.
For now, anyway. Six months, and then back to the States. Back to the next project, the next broken beautiful thing that needs saving. It’s a good life. It’s the life I chose.
And if sometimes, late at night, the quiet turns hollow… well, that’s the price of admission. You can’t have both. Connection and freedom. And I made my choice a long time ago.
The blood oranges glow on the windowsill, catching the last purple light of dusk. I pick one up, dig my thumb into the peel, and let the juice run down my wrist in a thin red line.
Outside, the city settles into evening, Vespas giving way to dinner conversations, church bells marking the hour, the eternal rhythm of a place that has outlasted everyone who ever walked its streets.
2
ELIO
The light goes on.
Her apartment is on the third floor, second window from the left. The one with the ceramic tiles on the sill and the bowl of blood oranges she replenishes every three days from the market stall on Via Roma. The vendor’s name is Giuseppe. He overcharges her by thirty percent because she’s American and doesn’t haggle, and she tips him anyway because she’s the kind of person who leaves money under plates for waitresses who refuse it.
Twenty-three days of watching her, and I know Violet Quinn Murphy the way I know the provenance of a painting. Every brushstroke, every restoration, every crack in the varnish. She carries South Boston in her vowels and her stubborn jaw, carries her dead father in the way she flinches at raised voices, carries two older brothers’ protectiveness in the way she checks over her shoulder when she walks home after dark. Danny and Sean. Both with records, both reformed, both under the impression their baby sister is safe on the other side of an ocean.
If they only knew what kind of man watches her now.
I shift in the leather seat, the Maserati’s interior dark enough to swallow me whole. The cigarette between my fingers has burned down to nothing. I don’t remember lighting it.
Control.
That’s what this is. Reconnaissance. Due diligence on a Foundation employee. She’s onmygrant, after all. The Marchetti Foundation’s money pays for her apartment, her supplies, her access to that crumbling cathedral she disappears into at dawn.
Not nine in the morning like a normal person. Not even at eight like someone who values sleep, but six fifty in the morning. She stops at Café Prima for a double espresso—no sugar, room temperature water on the side—and spends exactly twenty-seven minutes sketching in a notebook with a green leather cover before walking across the piazza to work.
She tucks her hair behind her left ear when she’s concentrating. Only the left. The right side falls forward, brushing her cheek, and she ignores it until it gets in her way, at which point she blows it aside with a sharp exhale that makes her lips purse in a way I’ve studied from seventeen different angles.
Cazzo.I’m losing my mind.
The light in her window flickers. She moves through the apartment, and my hand tightens on the steering wheel. Through the gauze of her cheap curtains, I can make out her shape. Narrow shoulders, the curve of her waist, still in the clothes she wore to work today. Dark jeans, gray sweater, sensible boots. The same uniform she’s worn every day this week with minor variations.
She doesn’t dress to be seen. Doesn’t style her hair or paint her face or do any of the thousand things women do to signal availability.
She dresses like she’s already given up on being noticed.
Too late, tesoro. I noticed.
A vibration rattles the center console. I don’t look at the screen already knowing who it is. The same person who’s called five times today, each time with increasing irritation. Cicero Marchetti doesn’t like being ignored. It’s one of his defining characteristics, right up there with complete lack of conscience and the charming habit of viewing his child as a chess piece rather than a person.
