That job kept Midge in food for a month. Which was the only moral framework I could currently afford—not good or bad, not right or wrong, just fed or not fed, sheltered or not sheltered.
I texted back one word.Fine.
The same word I'd given Gil.
Three hours. I had three hours until Giardino, which was too much time and not enough. Too much because there was nothing to do. Not enough because doing nothing was the hardest thing I knew how to do.
I cleaned my boots.
I sat on the floor with a rag and a stub of saddle soap I'd been stretching since September and worked the leather in slow circles, pressing into the creases, working out the salt stains from the last rain. The boots were the only expensive thing I owned—sixty dollars at a thrift store on Milwaukee, originally worth ten times that, broken in perfectly by whoever had them before me. Good boots mattered. Good boots were the difference between walking five miles and limping five miles, and my life was measured in miles walked.
I cleaned them and I didn't think.
At quarter to two I put on the clean boots, zipped Midge into my jacket, and locked the padlock behind me. Victor was still coughing through the wall. The hallway smelled like damp carpet and cabbage. The stairs creaked on the second and fifth steps, a pattern I'd memorized the first week because memorizing exits was something my body did automatically, the way other people's bodies remembered to breathe.
Outside, November had settled into its midday version—still grey, still cold, but with a thin watery light that made everything look slightly more honest than it deserved. I walked south on Kedzie and then east on Grand, Midge's warm head poking out of my collar, her one ear turning like a satellite dish picking up signals I couldn't hear.
I walked toward Giardino and I walked toward Toni and I walked toward whatever he was going to offer me, because that was how I'd gotten everywhere in my life.
By not having anywhere else to go.
GiardinohadpretensionstoItalian authenticity that extended as far as the plastic grapevines stapled to the awning and died a quiet death at the door. Inside it was just a café—Formica tables, fluorescent lights, a display case of pastries that had been sitting there since the morning and showed it. The espresso machine was real, at least. You could hear it from the sidewalk, hissing and clanking like something alive and deeply unhappy about its circumstances.
Toni was at the back table. Of course he was. Toni was always at the back table, in every place he chose, because Toni liked walls behind him and sight lines in front and the particular theater of being found exactly where he'd arranged himself. He had an espresso in front of him that he wasn't drinking—the cup untouched, the crema still intact, a prop in the same way his jacket was a prop. The jacket was leather, butter-soft, the color of dark honey.
It cost more than my monthly rent. Both rents. Old and new.
"Cora." He said my name like we had a history that involved warmth. We didn't. "You look good. Sit."
I sat across from him. Midge, pressed against my ribs inside the jacket, had already started. The growl was low and sustained, originating somewhere deep in her tiny chest and radiating outward with the focused intensity of an air raid siren designed for close range. She didn't growl at everyone. She growled at men whose energy she didn't like, and she had never been wrong.
Toni leaned back. "The dog has no manners."
"The dog has excellent instincts."
He grinned at that. White teeth, practiced angles. Toni was handsome in the way certain men were handsome—all surface, all arrangement, the features assembled correctly but without anything real behind them. His eyes were dark and flat and they watched me the way a person watches a vending machine, calculating what they could get if they put in the right amount.
"So," he said, tilting his espresso cup in a lazy circle without lifting it. "How you been? How's the apartment? You still in that place on Kedzie?"
There it was. The circling. Toni always circled. He asked questions he already knew the answers to because the asking was the point. It demonstrated that he had the information, that he'd been paying attention, that the distance between his knowledge of your life and your knowledge of his was a gap he enjoyed maintaining.
"Let’s get down to business," I said. Which answered everything and nothing.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
He smiled. Wider this time. Toni liked resistance the way some men liked it—not as a boundary to be respected but as a texture to be enjoyed. A taste of something before the real meal.
"You need money," he said. Not a question.
I didn't answer. He didn't need me to. We both knew why I was sitting here. Money was the gravity that pulled me into Toni's orbit every time, and he knew it, and knowing it was the thing he liked best about our arrangement.
He leaned forward. Elbows on the table, fingers laced. The jacket creaked.
"I've got something special for you. Real work. Four figures." He let the number sit there, gleaming. "But first."
A pause. Toni loved a pause.
