“And Marco?” I asked, because I needed her to keep talking. Silence was where the fear expanded.
Dona’s mouth did something that was almost a smile. “Marco is easy. Marco is the person in the room you think is harmless, and then six months later you realize he knows your Social Security number and your mother’s maiden name and your coffee order and he’s never once asked you a direct question.” She paused. “He’s also genuinely sweet, which is the most dangerous thing about him.”
“Sweet.”
“He’ll bring you food. He’ll remember your name after hearing it once. He’ll make you feel like the most important person in the room.” Her voice softened. The hard edges filing down. “He means it, too. That‘s the thing about Marco. He means all of it. He’s just also collecting information while he does it.”
I looked at my hands. The scarred knuckles. The nails I’d been biting since childhood—a habit Maria used to swat my fingers for, the sharp tap of her hand and the exasperatedMimi, para. The nails were worse than usual. I‘d bitten them to the quick in the last week, the anxiety expressing itself through the oldest available channel.
“I won’t let them hurt you.”
I looked up. Dona had turned from the window. Her dark eyes were on me—Dante’s intensity, Santo’s fire, the combination aimed with a precision that felt like being pinned to a board.
“I don’t know who you are,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re in my brother’s house or what you were doing there or what any of this is about. But I saw the way he looked at you in that kitchen and I saw the way you looked at him and I’m telling you—whatever happens in that room—I won’t let them hurt you. Neither will he.”
The conviction in her voice was absolute. The voice of a woman who had drawn a line and would defend it with everything she had. I believed her. That was the problem. I believed all of them—the sister who‘d known me for thirty minutes and was already willing to fight for me, the brother who’d brushed my hair and read me French novels and saidI love you.
I believed them and I was lying to every single one of them.
My biggest fear wasn’t the meeting. Wasn’t Dante. Wasn’t whatever tactical calculation was about to be performed on my presence in their lives.
My biggest fear was this: Santo would find out who I was. Why I’d come. What I’d been carrying since I was seven years old and who had sent me to carry it into his house. And then the hands that had held me, the voice that had saidgood girl, the arms that had caught me when my body gave up—all of it would become the thing it had always been with everyone else.
Gone.
He would leave. Not physically—he’d probably still be in the room. But the warmth would go out of his eyes the way heat goes out of a room when someone opens the window in winter. Fast. Total. The cold rushing in to fill the space where the warmth had been, and no amount of closing the window afterward could undo the fact that the temperature had changed.
I’d survived a lot of leaving. Foster homes. Group homes. The shelter on the South Side when I was eleven. People left or I left or the system moved me and the result was the same: a door closing, a car pulling away, another place that had almost been something becoming a place that wasn’t.
I couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t rational.
But it had happened before—people found out who I really was, and just abandoned me. I’d gotten over it in the past.
But this. Him. The loss of this would be the one I didn’t recover from.
Bridgeport came in through the windows. Dense. Lived-in. The particular texture of a neighborhood that had been here long enough to stop apologizing for itself. Brick buildings with iron fire escapes. Corner stores with awnings. The streets narrower, the sidewalks cracked, the trees struggling against the concrete with the stubborn persistence of things that grew where they weren’t invited. I knew neighborhoods like this. I’d grown up in neighborhoods like this. The air was different here than in Oak Brook—heavier, closer, carrying the accumulated weight ofgenerations of people who’d lived stacked on top of each other and learned to make room.
Dona’s hand found mine.
The grip was firm. Not tentative, not careful. The grip of a woman who had decided to hold on and was not interested in discussing whether it was appropriate.
I let her.
Eventually, the car stopped. An alley behind a building with a green awning. The name in faded gold script—CARUSO’S—visible from the side mirror.
Santo killed the engine. Got out. Came around to my side.
He opened the door. His hand found the small of my back.
The warmth of his palm through the wool coat. The steadiness of it.
I walked into the heart of the Caruso family with his hand on my back and his sister’s grip still ghosting on my fingers and the name Maria Flores locked behind my teeth like a bomb I hadn’t detonated yet.
Thebackofficesmelledlike power. I could almost taste the conversations, the decisions that had been made here.People ordered dead? Lives altered forever? I’m sure it had all happened here.
It was a small room. Wood-paneled walls, a desk that belonged to a dead man, the particular weight of a space where things had been settled for decades that couldn’t be unsettled by anything as simple as new management. A window—high, narrow, the kind that existed to prove a room had one rather than to provide any meaningful view—let in a strip of grey November light.
Dante Caruso stood in that light.
