My brain said trap. My brain said Ferrara. My brain said this is exactly what a man like Enzo would do when the walls were closing in—use the same weapon, pull the same trigger, exploit the same grief that had worked once before.
But.
The seven-year-old was awake.
She lived underneath everything. She lived in the place where I kept the braids and the off-key singing and the canned soup on the stove and the word Mimi in a voice I could barely remember. She lived in the dark, in the quiet, in the hours between midnight and dawn when the rational mind slept and the child came out to grieve.
Maria.
The name moved through me the way it always moved through me — not as sound but as sensation. A vibration in the bones. Aresonance in the hollow places. The specific frequency of a dead girl’s name in her living sister’s body.
Your sister is alive.
Four words. Impossible. Absurd. Maria was dead. I had spent twenty years knowing she was dead. I had testified to her death in a room full of mafia dons.
But. But. But.
What if.
The phone screen went dark. The room returned to shadow.
Santo breathed beside me. Deep. Steady. Trusting.
I lay in the dark with the cold phone in my cold hands and the two voices in my head—the brain and the child, the logic and the grief, the woman who knew better and the seven-year-old who would never stop looking—and I felt the war begin.
Chapter 18
Santo
Weightonmychestwoke me.
Not Cora’s head—I knew the weight of that, had memorized it over nights I’d stopped counting. This was smaller. Warmer. Trembling.
Midge.
My hand found her in the dark. The small body—four pounds of bone and loyalty. She was curled tight against my sternum, her stub tail pressed flat, her good ear rotating toward my fingers when they touched her back. The trembling didn’t stop. It intensified.
Midge slept at the foot of the bed. Every night. The ritual was non-negotiable—she circled, she nosed the pillow, she collapsed with theatrical finality, and she stayed. She didn‘t move to my chest. She didn’t move anywhere. She held her position like a soldier at a post because Cora was beside her and Cora was the mission and the mission didn’t change.
She was on my chest because Cora had put her there.
My hand reached left. The sheets. Still warm—the residual heat of a body that had been there recently, the thermal ghost of a woman who had lain beside me and then hadn’t. My fingers found the shape of where she’d been. The impression in the mattress. The pillow still dented from her head.
Gone.
I sat up. Midge slid from my chest to my lap, her claws catching on the sheet, a small sound leaving her—not a bark, not a whine. Something between. The sound of a creature who had things to report and no language to report them in.
The room assembled itself in the dark. The nightstand. The sippy cup with silver stars, untouched. The chair where the moon pajamas should have been folded—empty. She’d put them on. She’d dressed. The rabbit was on the floor beside the bed, face-down on the carpet, knocked from the pillow or set aside. The coloring books still stacked. The lamp still off.
I listened.
No water running. No footsteps on the hardwood. No soft breathing from the bathroom, no rustle of pages, no small sounds of a woman existing in the dark.
She was gone.
My body was already moving. The stitches at my ribs pulled—the fresh ones, sewn last night with my own hands at the kitchen table while she held the gauze. The wound complained. I didn’t care. Bathroom. Empty. The steam from last night’s bath long dissipated, the mirror clear, the towels hanging where I‘d hung them after drying her. Hallway. Empty. The gap in the guest room door—four inches, the gap I always left—showing nothing but dark.
Back to the bedroom. Back to the nightstand.
