I save the address. I don't go tonight. Tonight I plan. Tomorrow my brothers arrive.
Tomorrow we move.
Chapter Sixteen: Grace
ThefirstmorningIwake up truly feeling like Graziella Ferrara, I make coffee.
Not because I want coffee because it's habit. No, I want to make my own coffee and start a new routine. As Graziella. Grace wakes up, takes her pill, makes coffee, walks to the bodega, walks to work. But now, I have the chance to make a new routine that feels good. That feels like me.
Whichever me I am that day, anyway.
I stand at the counter and watch the water drip through the filter, and I try to figure out which parts of me are real.
The restaurant is real. Four years of tables and plates and tips and Marco screaming about the sear. That's mine. I built that. Nobody placed me there. I applied for the job and earned theshifts and learned the menu and became good at it. That skillset came from somewhere dark, but the job is mine.
Javi is real. He chose me. I chose him. Nobody assigned him to me, nobody paid him to be my friend, nobody wrote a monthly report about our conversations. He showed up and stayed, walked me home every night and made me laugh. He never pushed past the wall, and he's the most real thing in my life because he exists entirely outside the lie.
Rosa is real. The bodega. The sidewalk cracks. The apartment. The cracked window at the restaurant. My life in Philadelphia is real. It was built on a false foundation, but the building is real.
My name is Graziella Ferrara. I was born into an Italian family. I was taken at eight, trafficked until thirteen, drugged and placed and monitored for eleven years. My body kept everything my mind was told to forget. The tapping, the triggers, the flinch at Italian, the fragments that leaked through the pharmaceutical wall like water through concrete. All of it was my history trying to reach me.
It reached me… and I'm still standing. I'm standing in my kitchen making coffee, and the coffee is dripping and my finger is tapping the counter and I'm alive and I know who I am for the first time in sixteen years.
The tapping is different now. I notice it. I feel it. I know where it started, and I don't stop it. I let my body do what it needs to do. It's the oldest thing I own.
I pour the coffee and drink it standing up, looking out the window, wondering if Carmelo is watching me before pulling on a sweater and heading to the bodega.
Rosa looks at me over the counter. "You look different today."
"Different how?"
"I don't know. Awake. You look awake for the first time since I've known you." She hands me the cup. "Still too thin, though. And your hair..."
"Is fine, Rosa. Actually, can I have a scone instead of a coffee today, please?"
"Did you hit your head? Should I call the ambulance?” Rosa grumbles, eyeing me up and down before getting me a scone and putting it in a bag with a small tub of butter. She passes it to me with a frown. “You are strange today, my girl. I hope this is a good change.”
Rolling my eyes, I leave five bucks and walk to work. Three blocks. Every crack. But the walk feels different today because I'm walking it as someone new, or someone old, someone who existed before Grace and is now standing inside Grace and looking out through Grace's eyes at a world that is the same and completely different.
The familiar bell greets me as I walk into the restaurant.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
He looks at me. The long look, the one he does when he's reading me. "Something's different."
"You sound like Rosa."
"Rosa's a wise woman. Something is different. You're standing up straighter."
I am. I hadn't noticed. My shoulders are down, my spine is straight, my chin is level. For four years I've walked through this restaurant with my shoulders hunched and my body folded in on itself, taking up as little space as possible. Today I'm taking up all of my space. All five-three of it.
"Good night's sleep," I say.
"Bullshit. You haven't slept in a week. I can see the circles under your eyes from across the room." He polishes a glass. "Does The Rhino have anything to do with this?"
"His name is Carmelo."
