Unless someone told him to.
Or unless something happened that he needed to confess.
I sit with both possibilities. Neither resolves in the time I give it.
I tell Enzo to pull the church records for Santa Maria della Sanità for the past month, which is information we shouldn't technically have access to and will have access to anyway within six hours. I want to know if Salvatore's name appears in any appointment ledger. I want to know if he had prior contact with the church.
I want to know who runs confession appointments at Santa Maria della Sanità on Monday afternoons.
Father Domenico Ferraro. Valentina's uncle. Who has been my confessor for eleven years. Who buried my father. Whose seal I have never had any reason to question.
I think for a long moment. Then I set it aside, firmly. There's no evidence under it and would damage something irreplaceable if you acted on nothing.
I need facts. I don't have them yet.
At six I go to Valentina.
I don't plan to. I'm in the car heading back to the penthouse and I tell Petrocelli to change direction without explanation. She's home. The light in her window is on, her motorino on the street below.
She opens the door before I've knocked a second time.
She looks at my face. "Come in."
The kitchen. The table. The lamp on the shelf, the street noise through the window, the particular quality of this apartment at this hour that I've stopped trying to describe to myself accurately because descriptions require comparisons and I don't have one.
I sit. She puts coffee on without asking.
"A friend," I say. "From childhood. He's dead."
She sits across from me. She doesn't say she's sorry. I know why she doesn't and I'm grateful for it: sorry is for acquaintances. She waits.
"His name was Salvatore. We were eight when we met. His father worked with my father, same world, different role. Sal built gelato shops, stayed out of everything I'm in. He called me last week about dinner. We were goingto go this Friday."
She's quiet.
"The method doesn't match anything I recognize. My people are working it. The Ferrantes are a possibility, but the signature doesn't fit their operation." I look at the table. "He was thirty-six. He ran a clean business. He had Elena and two daughters and a sister in Calabria who he called every Sunday." I stop. Start again. "He was the last person I knew who still treated me like someone he went to school with. Not what I've become. Who I was before."
She looks at me. The specific quality of her attention in this moment is the same as it always is: complete. She's not managing me. She's not performing sympathy. She's here, in the room, receiving what I'm saying without immediately converting it into something she can respond to.
"What do you want to do," she says.
"Find who did it." I pick up the coffee. "Hold them to it."
She nods. She understands this without requiring explanation, which I notice and file the same way I've been filing things about her for months: quietly, without yet deciding what to do with the accumulation.
We sit in her kitchen for two hours. After a while she talks about other things: a passage in the book she's reading,something that happened at the restaurant that made Giulia genuinely laugh, the latest development in the Concetta situation at the market, which has been evolving over several weeks in ways I've been following closely enough to understand the context. She's keeping me in the present. Keeping my attention in the room. I'm aware she's doing this and I let her, which is different from not noticing.
I watch her hands while she talks. Still, always. She picks up her cup, sets it down, gestures occasionally, never fidgets. A person who has learned to occupy space without apologizing for it or explaining it. I've been sitting across from her in rooms for months and I still can't entirely account for the quality of her stillness.
At some point I say: "I didn't know where else to go."
She looks at me. "You came here."
"Yes."
"Then that's where you went." She says it simply. Not comfort. Fact.
I reach across the table and put my hand over hers. She turns it palm up and closes her fingers around mine.
