"Yes."
"That's my name."
"Yes."
Her finger taps my shoulder one more time. Then her hand opens flat against my chest, palm down, and the tapping stops.
"I need to go home," she says. "Alone. I need to think."
"Okay."
"Don't follow me. Don't watch me from your window. Don't come to the restaurant tonight."
She knows about the window. She knows about the apartment. I don't ask how because it doesn't matter.
"Okay," I say.
She slides off the bar and pulls her pants up. She picks up my belt from the floor and holds it out to me, and I take it and our fingers touch and she doesn't pull away but she doesn't hold on.
She picks up her bag and walks to the door. She stops with her hand on the handle. "Carmelo."
"Yes."
"If I had known the truth from the beginning, I still would have wanted you to walk me home. You never needed to lie to me."
She opens the door and steps into the cold and the bell rings. The door closes behind her and I'm standing in the empty restaurant with blood on my lip and her teeth marks on my neck and the smell of her on my hands.
I pick up the knife from the floor. I put it back on my belt. I right the cocktail napkin holder. I wipe the bar where she was sitting.
Then I go back to the apartment, and I don't stand at the window because she asked me not to.
It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
Chapter Fourteen: Grace
Thememoriescomeassoon as I get home, as soon as the adrenaline wears off and I have a moment to breathe, to think.
Not fragments. Not flashes. Not the single-frame images that have been bleeding through the cracks for the past week. These are full, continuous, unbroken sequences that arrive in my body before they arrive in my brain, so the first thing I feel is the cold before I see the room, and the first thing I hear is the door before I know what's behind it.
I'm in my apartment. It's four in the morning. I haven't slept. I've been lying in bed since midnight, staring at the ceiling, running Carmelo's words through my head on a loop that won't stop.
Your name is Graziella Ferrara.
You were taken when you were eight years old.
You were trafficked for five years.
The words are in my head but they're not in my body yet. They're information. Data points. Facts about a person named Graziella who was taken and trafficked and drugged, and I've been lying here for four hours trying to connect those facts to the woman lying in this bed in this apartment in South Philadelphia, and the connection won't form because the pills spent eleven years building a wall between the facts and the feeling and the wall is still standing.
At four eleven, the wall comes down.
It starts with the cold. My feet go numb. Not the apartment, not the temperature. My feet go numb from the inside, the way they went numb on a concrete floor in a room with no windows when I was nine years old, and I know this because I'm there. I'm in the room. I'm not remembering the room. I'm IN the room. My body is in my bed in Philadelphia, and my mind is on a floor in a place I don't have a name for, and the two realities exist at the same time and neither one will let go.
The floor is gray. The walls are gray. There's a metal door with a slot at the bottom where food comes through, when it comes, which is not always. The light is a single bulb above the door, caged in a metal box, always on. There's no window. There's no clock. Time doesn't exist in this room. Only the door exists, and what happens when it opens.
I know what happens when it opens.
The memory arrives and I hear myself scream from very far away, from the bed in Philadelphia, from the apartment above the restaurant, from the life I built on top of a lie. The scream is in Italian. I know this now because Carmelo told me I was Italian, and the language coming out of my mouth is the language I spoke when I was a child. The language that made my skin crawl every time I heard it for eleven years because my body associated it with the room and the door and the men who came through it.
