I laughed.
It came out before I could stop it—genuine, unguarded, the kind of laugh that lives in the chest rather than the throat and arrives without permission. I felt myself do it and couldn’t stop. The image of Marco Caruso receiving a business card from a federal agent while his brother watched in suppressed agony was somehow the funniest thing I’d heard in six days of my life being completely dismantled.
Santo looked at me. His eyes were warm. Warmer than I’d seen them—the humor reaching his face and changing it, softening the jaw and the set of the brow, making him look younger. Making him look like himself, I thought, and then wondered what I meant by that.
“He’s the baby,” Santo said. “They always let him get away with everything.”
“You’re the middle.”
“I’m aware.”
“The loud one.”
He pointed at me across the candle. “That‘s their word for it.”
“What’s yours?”
The pause was short. “The persuasive one,” he said.
I looked at him across the small table with the wine and the candle and the remnants of the rigatoni between us, and I thought: I didn’t expect you to be funny. I didn’t expect you to be kind.
I hadn’t expected any of it.
The restaurant had emptied around us. The silver-haired woman was at the bar, folding napkins, not watching us and watching us. The candle had burned lower. A second glass of wine had appeared at some point without either of us asking.
Neither of us mentioned the time.
Afterward,withoutaskingidI wanted to, he drove toward the lake.
I recognized where we were headed by the third turn—the grid of streets rearranging itself into the familiar approach, the city angling toward water. Everything in Chicago pointed east eventually. You could lose your bearings a dozen different ways but the lake was always there to find them.
He parked north of the harbor. We got out. The wind came off the water and hit like a hand—cold, flat, the specific chill of Lake Michigan in November, which took everything summer had built and dismantled it without apology. I pulled the wool coat tighter. The collar turned up. It smelled faintly of cedar and something else underneath, something I’d been cataloging without meaning to.
His closet.
We walked. The path ran parallel to the water—grey and choppy, white-capped further out, the surface moving with the restless energy of something that didn’t know how to be still. The skyline sat behind us, the towers going pale in the afternoon cloud. Ahead, the harbor, the boat launches empty, the summer infrastructure folded up and stored. A few people moved along the path at a distance, bundled and purposeful. Nobody looked at us.
Nobody except Sal, watching from a distance.
The silence between us was comfortable now. Six days ago his silences had felt like walls—strategic, fortified, the deliberate absence of speech deployed as pressure. Now it felt like the restaurant had felt, like the booth and the wine and the candle: just two people who didn’t always need to fill the space.
“I used to run here,” I said.
The words came out without planning. My feet knew this pavement. The body held routes the mind had let go of—a specific acceleration at the bend near the bird sanctuary, the way the wind shifted at the harbor mouth. Some reflex of familiarity speaking before I could think about whether to let it.
“I know,” he said.
I looked at him.
“I saw, at your apartment,” he said. Same flat delivery he used for everything that mattered. No apology in it, no embarrassment—the matter-of-fact acknowledgment of a man who had done a thing for a reason and was not going to perform guilt about it. “When I went for Midge. I walked through.”
“You walked through.”
“I looked around.” He paused. “Briefly.”
I turned back to the water. The waves pushed at the concrete lip of the path and retreated, pushed and retreated, the rhythm patient and indifferent. I thought about my apartment.
“How did you work that out from my apartment?”
