"Did you keep looking?" I ask.
"Every day. Sixteen years. I spent money I didn't have on investigators who found nothing. I used Castillo resources, contacts, favors. I followed leads that went nowhere. I went to cities where girls matching your description had been reported and they were never you. I put your picture on websites and missing persons databases, and I checked them every morning and every night and you were never there."
"And then Carmelo."
"Not Carmelo directly. I asked Emilio to keep an ear out and Carmelo listened. A favor, one underboss to another. I didn't expect anything. Sixteen years of nothing teaches you not to expect. Then Carmelo called me three months ago and said, 'I found her. She's in Philadelphia. She doesn't know who she is yet.' And I sat on the floor of my kitchen, and I didn't move for an hour."
"He didn't tell you to come."
"He told me to wait. He said you weren't ready. I told him I'd been waiting sixteen years. He said, 'Then you can wait until she's ready.' Five words. That man speaks five words at a time and every one of them means something."
I smile. "He does that."
"He loves you," Renzo says with a soft sigh. A father's observation, delivered with the calm certainty of a man who knows what love looks like from the outside because he lived inside it for the years he had with Anna.
"I know."
"Do you love him?"
I think about Carmelo. The window across the street. The nail curls on the sill. The pork shoulder and the thirty percent and the knife on his belt. The way he said my name the first time, just "Grace," and it sounded different. The way he said it the last time, "Graziella," and it sounded like home. The way he sat on the floor beside the bed and didn't touch me and didn't speak and just stayed, because staying is his language and I've learned to adore it.
"Yes," I say.
Renzo nods. He releases my hand, slowly, and puts both his palms on his knees and looks at me with his gray-blue eyes, my eyes and smiles a deeply sorrowful smile.
"What do you want to do?" he asks.
"What do you mean?"
"With your life. Now. The Bonaccorsos will protect you. Carmelo will kill anyone who tries to reach you. I will do whatever you need. But what do you want?"
Nobody has ever asked me this. Not the Marinos, who managed my life by checklist. Not the pills, which kept me compliant and contained. Not even Carmelo, who made decisions for me in the name of protection. My father, who lost me for sixteen years, is the first person to sit across from me and ask what I want.
"I want to stay here," I say.
"In Philadelphia?"
"At the restaurant. In my apartment. On my three blocks of South Philly with the cracked sidewalks and the bodega and the laundromat. I built this life. It was built on a lie, but what I put inside it is real. The job is real. Rosa is real. The regulars are real… Javi was real."
My voice catches on his name.
"Javi was real," I say again, steadier. "And losing him doesn't make what we had less real. It makes it the most real thing I've ever had, because he chose me."
Renzo listens. He doesn't interrupt. He doesn't tell me it's dangerous to stay, doesn't tell me the network might send more men, doesn't tell me I should come back to wherever the he lives and let him protect me behind walls and guards. He listens, because he's a man who lost his daughter once by not listening to the danger, and he's not going to lose her again by not listening to what she needs.
"I'm not running," I say. "I'm not hiding. I'm not relocating. I've been relocated once and it cost me sixteen years and my childhood and my mother and my best friend. I'm done being moved. I'm staying."
"Then you stay."
"And I want to know you. I want to learn who I was before they took me. I want to learn Italian properly, not in fragments from withdrawal. I want to come to your house and see the garden and the piano and the lemon tree, if it's still there."
"It's still there. Anna's lemon tree. It's the stubbornest tree in Pennsylvania."
This time I do smile. Small. The corner of my mouth and a tightness in my eyes that might be tears if I had any left.
"And I want to tell Javi's mother what happened," I say. "Not the details. Not the network. But I want to look at her and tell her that her son was the best man I knew and he died protecting me and I'm sorry."
"I'll go with you."
