And he didn’t know I knew.
I sat in the closet office with my phone hot in my hand and my heart slamming and the warmth pooled low and impossible to ignore, holding a piece of knowledge that changed absolutely everything, and I had no idea on God’s green earth what I was going to do with it.
A little. I was a little. He was a Daddy.
I put the phone down. I sat one more minute with my hand flat on the desk until my breathing came back to something I could walk out into the shop wearing. Then I stood, and my knee popped, and I went back out front.
It felt like I was floating. Like I was outside of my body.
I stopped in the doorway, head spinning. He hadn’t seen me yet and I watched him.
The rush was gone. The shop had emptied to the gray and the gold haze of settling flour, the radio low under it, and Tonio was crouched down by the storeroom doorway where Olimpo had his usual ridiculous spread. Tonio had a piece of yesterday’s koulouraki in his palm and he was feeding it to the dog one slow bite at a time, and talking to him. Low. Not for anyone except Olimpo.
The dog leaned his enormous drooling head into Tonio’s hand and Tonio took the weight of it, the whole heavy skull of him, and scratched behind the floppy ear and called him something that was probably an insult. A small bird landed on the new windowsill outside and Olimpo flinched the full-body flinch of a creature half his size, and Tonio laughed—quiet, just to himself, just to the dog—and steadied him,it’s all right, it’s just a sparrow, you coward, I’ve got you.
He looked up and saw me.
The air changed. He stood, slow, the dog’s head sliding off his hand, and we looked at each other across the warm empty shop with the radio going, and there was a beat where neither of ussaid the thing, the way we never say the thing, except now I had a thing of my own to not-say that was bigger than his.
He came over for the till count, or for nothing, for an excuse, the way I’d had an excuse for the office. We ended up close. Of course we did. He reached past me for the cloth on the hook and his arm brushed mine, and I didn’t move, and he didn’t move, and his hand came to rest a moment on the small of my back — barely, just the warmth of it, just steadying me past, the way he steadied the dog — and it held a beat too long. A beat we both felt. A beat where I knew exactly what that hand was, where it came from, what shape of man it belonged to, and the knowing went down my spine and settled somewhere low and unspeakable, and I had to grip the edge of the counter.
“Katerina,” he said. Low. The steel in it gone soft, the same voice from the chair, and my whole body answered before my brain got a word in, the want spiking so hard I nearly leaned back into the hand. He was gathering himself to something. I could feel it. The big easy body of him had gone still and careful, working up to a thing, and—
I thought he was going to say it.
For one suspended second I thought he was going to name it, the four letters, the whole thing,do you know what I am, do you know what you are,and my heart slammed up into my throat ready to lie, ready to say I didn’t know, ready to make him show me his hand because I am a woman who has to see the catch—
“Come to the Angela and Pietro’s wedding,” he said. “With me. As my guest.”
It wasn’t what I’d braced for. It was somehow worse, somehow more, it took the floor out a second time in one afternoon.
“It will be intense—I won’t lie,” he said, and his voice wasn’t smooth. It had a roughness in it, a nervousness I’d never heard, this man who walks through every room like he owns it asking a thing he wasn’t sure he’d get. “Three weeks. Two hundredand forty Sicilians at war over lilies. My brothers—my cousins—everyone—they’ll all be there. The whole family. Don Arturo flying in from Palermo.” He swallowed. “I want you there. With me. Not as—not as my boss. As mine.”
As mine.
Suddenly, I thought of my family. My mother who left when I was small, my father who struggled until the end. Now I had no one. No brothers, no sisters, no one. This man was asking me to walk into a room full ofhis—blood and chosen, the whole roaring clan of them, the brothers who’d stood in my doorway, the don off a plane from Sicily—and stand beside him where every one of them could see, and belong to something, and be claimed in front of everyone.
Imagine belonging like that.
It terrified me. If I belong to them, if they to me, then they can leave me. Just the wayBabadid. But there was another fear. Saying yes to the wedding was saying yes tohim, to all of it.
The speech rose up in me on reflex—nothing’s free, the bill comes later, I’d rather lose it on my own two feet, I don’t need, I’ve got it—rose up the way a heartbeat rises, and I opened my mouth to say it.
“Yes,” I said.
It came out before the speech could.
“Yes,” I said again, quieter, terrified, and hoping, God help me,hoping,which was the most dangerous thing of all. “I’ll come. As yours.”
The dog, in the doorway, thumped his tail once against the floor, like he’d known the whole time.
Chapter 9
Tonio
Shecamebackona Friday, which I’d half expected, because Angela doesn’t wait around. I looked up from the proofing rack, and there she was in the thrifted coat with a folder under her arm.
“We’re not really open for paperwork,” Katerina said from the bench. “A little grubby right now.”
