Every creak of the building makes my spine lock.
Pipes groan from down the hallway in the bathroom.
The radiator clicks loudly when it kicks on in the living room.
A door slams from the neighbor’s apartment next door, and I nearly come out of my skin from the stress before I finally settle back down to my usual state of on-edge.
All I can do is listen and hope that this feeling of fear eventually passes so I can claim some sleep before sunrise.
But no matter what I do, my mind won’t stop spiraling back through every lie I’ve ever told since stepping onto U.S. soil with a forged passport and a fake surname I answer to without hesitation now.
The documents that say I was born somewhere I’ve never been have all but become muscle memory at this point, lines recited with simple prompt and little flair.
My neighbors only know me as the quiet single mother from Florence here on a work visa soon-turned-citizenship.
They wave to me every morning when we leave for the bookstore, always commenting on how polite Luca is whenever he greets them back and wishes them a good day.
None of them know the truth.
They don’t know that Luca’s father is a man whose name still haunts me whenever I think about it.
A man I once loved when I never should have allowed myself to.
He is someone whose world destroys everything it touches because that’s all men like him have ever known.
I can’t even say it out loud without feeling like I’m summoning an ancient curse down on myself.
No one knows that my son carries the blood of the Cosenza empire in his veins.
That his gray-green eyes that dozens of strangers compliment him on come from a family built on power and violence and loyalty written with dead bodies in their wake.
That if the wrong person looks at him too closely, or recognizes his features in any way, he won’t be just the child of a broke single mother anymore.
He’ll be used as leverage against the very family I ran from four years ago.
I press my hand over his forehead, brushing his soft hair back, and whisper, “I won’t let them take you… I swear it.”
I don’t realize how long I sit there until the darkness in the room begins to brighten, gray light creeping in through the windows like an unwelcome guest.
Dawn arrives quietly, indifferent to the night I’ve spent unraveling and torturing myself.
Luca stirs, mumbling something unintelligible under his breath, one small hand brushing the mattress as he turns in his sleep.
It forces me to stand, the movement sending a wave of dizziness through me.
I pause, gripping the edge of the nightstand until the room steadies, then make myself walk into the kitchen.
Locking myself inside this apartment all day won’t pay rent.
It won’t keep food in the fridge or on the table, and it definitely won’t get Luca into a better school someday far from this block and this tiny apartment with too-thin walls.
If I ever want that kind of future for him, I need every shift I can get and every dollar I’m given under the table.
I let out a soft, tired sigh and pull a pan from the rack. The familiar weight of it in my hand steadies me somewhat. I set it on the stove, twist the burner on, and listen to the quietclick-click-clickof the flame catching before turning the temperature back down again.
I crack a few eggs into the pan, the yolks blooming yellow against the dull metal.
The smell of it hits the air, the comforting smell completely at odds with the chaos still twisting in my chest.
