“She married a man who gambled and numbed herself with prescriptions until she was too far under to fight for her own daughter.” I’m talking too fast. The words spilling out the way they do when my brain doesn’t know how to go quiet. “She knew. She knew what he did and she stayed because the alternative was scarier than complicity.” Lorenzo doesn’t move. Just listens. The way he always does. “Last time I talked to her, I begged her to help me find Sofia. She saidsweetheart, you need to move onin a voice so medicated it barely sounded human.” I pick up the water. Put it down. “I hung up. That was it.”
Lorenzo straightens. He rounds the island, picks up the water I poured, sets it closer to me. A habit now. Constant low-grade caretaking that used to infuriate me and now just makes me lean into it.
“She’s in a facility. Good one. Private.” His voice is low, factual. A beat. Like he’s deciding how much to say. “She’ll get help. If she wants it.”
I set the glass down. The sound is sharp in the quiet kitchen.
“You handled Paolo. You placed my mother. Both without telling me.” My voice is steady but my hands aren’t. “What else have you decided about my life?”
He absorbs it. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t argue. A long silence.
“You’re right.” Two words. No justification. No explanation. Just the concession, laid flat on the counter between us.
“If you want to see her someday,” he says, “that door’s open. If you don’t, it stays closed.” He meets my eyes. “Your call.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I say. “Since Sofia was taken, I’ve always known. Find Sofia. Save Sofia. That was the engine. And now she’s sleeping in the next room and I’m standing here with no objective.” I press the heel of my hand against my eye. “I don’t know if forgiveness is something I can give her. Or should.”
“You don’t have to know yet.” Ordinary words. In his mouth, in this kitchen, at this hour. Permission.
I round the island to him. Four steps. Moving toward the solid fact of him. The way I’ve been moving toward him since the night he kicked in my door and didn’t kill me.
I press my face into his chest. His shirt is soft and warm and smells like laundry detergent and skin. Not cologne. Not the sharp ozone of a recently fired weapon. Just the lived-in scent of a man awake in the small hours, mind still turning.
His arms fold around me the way arms are supposed to. No hesitation. His chin comes down to the top of my head.
And he holds me. In this kitchen where Nonna Rosa makes gumbo and Marco leaves coffee cups on every surface. In this room that smells like cayenne. I am held by a man who remembered how to touch because of me.
That’s enough. For now.
I keep waiting for the part where it breaks. Good things always do. Every safe place I’ve ever had came with an expiration date.
His arms tighten. Like he heard it.
I hold on anyway.
35
LORENZO
The compound is louder in the afternoon. I’m standing on the second-floor landing with a cup of espresso I’ve barely touched, and the house is full of sounds. Rosa’s radio in the kitchen, zydeco and old Cajun standards drifting up through the floorboards. Her voice carrying over the music: “Marco Santoro, you track mud through my kitchen one more time, I’m feedin’ your dinner to the dog.”
“We don’t have a dog, Nonna.”
“Then I’ll get one just to make a point.”
“Nonna, you’re allergic to dogs.”
“Then I’ll get a mean cat. Don’ test me, boy.”
A pot lid clangs. The smell of something dark and rich drifts up through the floorboards. Roux. Rosa makes it from memory, stirring for forty minutes without looking at the pot. Giada’s voice somewhere below, low and measured, the particular tone she uses with patients when she needs them calm. Marco’s footsteps on the back stairs, too heavy, too fast.
And underneath all of it, the quieter sounds. The ones you’d miss if you weren’t listening.
Sofia Vitale is eighteen years old and she hasn’t spoken since we found her. I watch her from the landing as she moves through the downstairs hallway, trailing Isabella by four feet. Not three, not five. Four. Consistent across days. Four feet. Close enough to confirm Isabella is still there. Far enough to run if she needs to.
She maintains it with the precision of someone who learned, in the worst possible classroom, exactly how much space a body needs to escape.
But the distance is growing. Last week it was three. Before that, two. She’s loosening her grip. Not letting go, not yet, but letting go enough that the space between her and Isabella looks more like a choice and less like a leash.
