The silence that followed had a different quality than the silences before. This was the silence of a man recalibrating not just the information but the person giving it to him.
"I hope I'm not interrupting." I turned to see Lucia appear in the doorway carrying a large tray, her eyes moving between us with the practiced neutrality of a woman who had learned long ago to read a room without reacting to it.
"Please, Mrs. Venosa, let me help you." I was on my feet before I'd thought about it, crossing the room and taking the tray from her hands. The smell of food hit me and my stomach growled audibly, reminding me that I hadn't eaten since before my shift at the coffee shop.
"This smells wonderful," I said, and meant it.
Lucia smiled at me — a real smile, the kind that reached her eyes — and touched my arm briefly as I set the tray on the table. It was a small gesture. It undid something in me that I hadn't realized was still wound tight.
"Mother." Constantine's voice was careful. "I need to go speak with Pop."
Her face changed. A slight tightening around the eyes, there and gone. "Are you sure you need to?"
"Yes." He looked at me, then back at her. "He needs to know."
She held his gaze for a moment with the expression of a woman who understood and didn't like it and was going to accept it anyway. Then she nodded and took the chair across from me at the table. "I'll stay with Cecilia."
Constantine paused in the doorway and looked back at me. Something passed across his face — not quite reassurance, not quite apology. Acknowledgment, maybe, of everything that had just happened in this room.
Then he was gone, and I was alone with his mother, and I sat down at the table and tried to remember the last time I'd sat across from a woman who looked at me like I was simply a person rather than a problem to be managed.
I thought it might have been Nicola.
I pressed my hands flat on the table and breathed.
"Eat," Lucia said gently. "There is nothing to be done until he returns."
I reached for the napkin, set it in my lap, and did as I was told.
"I heard Signor Venosa is ill," I said after a moment. "I'm very sorry. And I'm sorry I've brought these problems to your doorstep. That was never my intention."
"Thank you." She poured wine into both glasses and set one in front of me. "In this life we don't ask for most of the problems that land in our laps." She looked at me steadily. "You seem like a good woman, Cecilia. And you don't deserve to be married off to Hector Lombardi."
I stilled. "How do you know about?—"
“My son told me.” She said it the way people said things they had made peace with long ago. "Hector is my oldest brother as you know.” She shook her head slowly. "You deserve a marriage built on something real. Not to spend your days waiting for an old man to die." She picked up her wine glass. "I didn't fight Constantine when he brought you in. I hope you understand why."
I looked at this woman, this woman who should by every measure of the world we lived in have sent me back out the door, who had every reason to see me as an enemy and had chosen instead to see me as a person — and I felt something shift in my chest.
"I got my best friend killed," I said. The words came out raw. "She was supposed to come when I had a good job and a safe place. She was supposed to come and live with me and have a life that was her own. And now she's gone because of me."
Lucia set her glass down and looked at me with an expression that was neither pity nor platitude.
"Listen to me," she said quietly. "You can sit here and be consumed by this. Or you can decide what you're going to do with it." She leaned forward slightly. "People need to remember her name. You can make sure of that. But first you have to decide what you're going to do." She held my gaze. "Because if I know my son, he's going to need your help."
I looked back at her and thought about Nicola, who had smiled through her tears and said you bet your ass I will.
I thought about what it meant to honor that.
"Tell me," I said, "what you think I should do."
And Lucia Venosa, who should have been my enemy, poured me more wine and began to talk.
CHAPTER 6
CONSTANTINE
My father was sitting up when I knocked. There were days he couldn't manage it, days when the effort of pushing himself upright against the pillows cost him something visible, and on those days I kept my visits short and my expression neutral and drove home the long way afterward. But tonight he was sitting up with his reading glasses on and a file open across his lap, which meant he was having a good night, which meant I could tell him the truth.
