Now it's a landmark.
Because there, on the Thursday before the streak begins, in the bottom corner of the day, in my own hand, is the dot. Small. Round. Certain. The last dot.
I turn the pages forward again, slowly this time, week over week over week. My fingers pinch the pages as I turn them through the streak, through the blank days I never filled in because I was on an island surviving with a ghost. Through the homecoming, through six weeks of dinners and chit chat, and I’m looking for a dot and there is no dot, there is no dot anywhere. I turn pages long after I know, the way you keep patting your pockets for keys you watched fall down a drain.
“Stress,” I tell the empty room, and the word comes out in a voice I don't recognize. It happens. It's documented. Trauma messes with this stuff... The weight loss alone.... Any doctor would say so.
The quiet version of me, the one who stands at a small distance and watches, doesn't say anything at all. She just looks at the diary in my hands, at the black streak, at the dot before it and the nothing after it.
And I sit on my bed with a pretty summer dress across my knees, doing sums a woman can do in half a second and refusing to finish. The house goes on breathing around me, warm and loud and safely oblivious. Five brothers and their wives and their babies and no idea, no idea at all.
My hands are completely steady. That's the strangest part. My hands are steady, and my heart is going like a stolen car, and somewhere out there in the dark of the world is a man whose last name I don't even know and have no way of contacting.
I thought I was alone in that cell. I thought I knew what total and complete loneliness felt like.
But it was nothing in comparison to this.
Yakob
The broker runs for nine days.
He's better at it than I expected. He burns his phones, empties two accounts, and buys a dead man's passport in Palermo. For a man who spent his career renting vans and looking the other way, it's respectable work. On the ninth night he stops running long enough to sleep in a cousin's apartment above a butcher shop in Cammarata, and that's where I'm waiting.
He tells me everything before I even ask. They always do. Names, dates, payments. Who wanted a white van with no plates, who paid, who passed the order down. I write none of it down. I don't need to. My memory has always been the best tool I own.
Then I finish the job, and I leave him where his own people will find him, arranged so they understand exactly what he died for. By morning it will be moving through the back rooms. A woman was taken. The men who did it are dying.
I stand at the window while the city sleeps, and I think about her.
That's the part no training prepared me for. Not the wanting itself. The constancy of it. Twenty years I kept my mind like my kit, nothing in it that didn't serve the work, and now she's in everything. I clear a stairwell and hear her telling me I move like bad news. I eat standing over a sink and think of her narratingevery part of making a simple meal. I check the corners of a room and feel her beside me.
I want a life with her.
There it is. I make myself think it plainly, the way I'd read a target's name off a page. A life. Mornings and afternoons. A kitchen with noise in it. Her hair on the pillow beside mine going gray over the next forty years. I want things I have no vocabulary for, and I want them with the same totality I used to bring to wanting nothing.
The spotter is next. The one who watched her for two weeks and mapped her routines. He photographed her whenever she left the Orlov estate over a few weeks. Had identified her car and passed that information back to Ramunno who bided his time. For that, he dies while on a job in Marseille.
Then the two men from the van who transported her halfway across the world. Then the compound's head of security, who got out of the villa that night and thought getting out meant getting away.
I take no pleasure in any of it. That surprises me. I expected this hunt to feel like the old work, and it doesn't. The old work was silence. This is grief with a to-do list. Every man I put down, I think, this one saw her afraid and did nothing, and the thought carries me through the door, and afterward there's no satisfaction, only the count going down.
Between them, I plan an entire life I have no right to.
I do it without meaning to, and then I do it on purpose. In a market in Lyon I stop at a stall of green glass bowls because the green is nearly the same shade as her eyes. Nearly. Nothing is exactly right, and I stand there like a fool pricing a bowl for a kitchen that doesn't exist. I catch myself reading the plaque outside a language school. Russian for beginners. I imagineteaching her the alphabet at a table, her getting the letters wrong on purpose to make me say them again. I lie in safe houses that have never held anything but weapons and I furnish them pieces that make me think of her.
It should alarm me. It's a vulnerability the size of a country, but I've stopped caring. She took a dead man's face in her hands and said his name until he answered. Whatever I am now, I'm not going back to what I was before.
The last name on the compound list is the one I've been circling for a week.
The guards scattered after Ramunno fell. Most of them were nothing, hired shapes in a hallway, and the ones who never touched her, never entered that cellar, I've let return to their lives. The chain is what matters. But there's one name I keep at the bottom of the list because of what she told me.
She was discussing her captivity out loud, turning it into a comedy because that's how she survives things, giving me Ken and Vinny with a full performance, and then her voice changed. “There was an older one,” she said. “Gray moustache. He never looked at me the way the others did. He hardly looked at me at all, actually, which was its own kind of manners. He brought the food and he'd saymangiaand pat his belly to help me understand, like it mattered to him whether I ate. I used to look forward to him, Yakob. Isn't that pathetic? He was the guard I liked.”
Moustache was the one who protected her from Ken. Ken who is now deceased and was indeed having an affair with Salvatore’s wife. I let her live, but only after slitting Ken’s throat while he was balls deep in her. I feel she learned a lesson.
His name is Turi. Sixty-one years old, thirty of them working for Ramunno, never rising, never trusted with anything that mattered, which is the only reason he's still breathing while hisemployers are not. He drew a wage from the operation that caged her. By the rules I've lived by, that's enough to make him pay with his life.
I find him in a hill town an hour away from Ramunno’s now abandoned vineyard, in a narrow house with washing strung between the balconies. I watch for two days.
