I kneel in the front pew. The wood is hard under my knees. The large crucifix above the altar holds the last of the afternoon light in its bronze contours. Christ in agony. The weight of the world's sin pressed into metal and mounted above the tabernacle for every parishioner to see.
I pray.
Not for guidance. I have guidance. I have always had guidance. The work is clear. The system is intact. The mission continues.
I pray for Valentina.
I pray that the man in her life, the Don with the silver temples and the open collar, does not reach the parts of her I've spent fourteen years protecting. The parts that believe. The parts that kneel before a crucifix at night and cut herself open and offer her blood as evidence that the killing is sacred. Those parts are mine. Not his. Not anyone's.
She is my life's work.
I pray for my brother. For Tomasso. For the man in the photograph who smiled too easily and loved too broadly and left a daughter behind who doesn't remember the sound of his laugh.
I remember.
I light a candle for him. Not the system candles. A votive, near the side altar, the small rack of prayer candles where parishioners pay fifty cents to light a flame for the dead. I don't pay fifty cents. The priest doesn't pay at his own church.
The flame catches. Small. Steady.
I watch it burn.
"Proteggila, fratello. Proteggila come non ho potuto proteggere te."
(Protect her, brother. Protect her the way I couldn't protect you.)
I stay on my knees until the light leaves the clerestory windows. Until the church fills with the grey blue of early evening. Until the votive candle for my brother burns downto a pool of liquid wax that holds the flame at its center like a secret held in a cupped hand.
Thursday. The new appointment. The candles will do what the candles do.
Valentina will come back to the work. She always comes back.
She has to.
I stand. Cross myself. Walk to my office. Close the door.
The photograph of Tomasso watches from the desk.
I turn it slightly. Toward the window. So he can see the courtyard where the fig tree is cracking its pot. So he can see the light fading over Naples. So he can see something other than his brother's face.
I sit down. Open the parish accounts. Begin the evening's work.
Chapter 15
First Time
Valentina
The date is a disaster in the best possible way.
He takes me to a place in Vomero, up the hill, a trattoria with checkered tablecloths and a proprietor who calls every womanbellaand every mandottoreregardless of qualifications. It's the opposite of the Posillipo restaurant. Loud. Crowded. The kind of place where the tables are too close together and you can hear the couple next to you arguing about whose mother makes better ragù.
He chose it because I told him I was tired of restaurants that feel like performances. He listened. He always listens. That's the thing about Niccolo that undoes me faster thanhis hands or his mouth or the way he says my name. He listens the way a man listens when he believes the person speaking has something worth hearing.
The food is extraordinary. Gnocchi alla sorrentina with mozzarella that pulls in long, obscene strings between the fork and the plate. A carafe of house red that tastes like cherries and volcanic soil. He orders for both of us because the menu is handwritten in Neapolitan dialect so dense that even I struggle with it, and he grew up speaking dialect with his grandmother before he learned proper Italian.
We talk about nothing important. His mother's moka pot, which he still uses every morning. My neighbor's cat, which climbs through my window at 3 AM and sleeps on my books. The worst customer I've ever served at La Terrazza, a German tourist who sent back his pasta four times because it was "too Italian." He laughs at that. The full laugh. I'm collecting those the way some women collect jewelry.
Under the table, his knee presses against mine. Not accidental. A deliberate point of contact that he established when we sat down and hasn't broken for the entire meal. The warmth of it radiates up my thigh. My skin is hyperaware of every degree of pressure, every shift in angle.
