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A grunt of familiarity.

“You’re the best earner I have, Vincenzo. Definitely one of the best lieutenants the family has ever had. I’m not telling you how to run your house. I’m telling you, the man who never leaves work eventually finds he has nothing else, and nothing else is a very cold place to end up.”

I stare at my reflection in the black glass of the office window. Dark suit, no tie, jaw shadowed, green eyes the shade my mamma used to call verde della salvia. Sage-leaf green. The only piece of her I carry on my face.

“Noted.”

“Buonanotte, Vincenzo.”

The line goes dead.

I pocket the phone. Open the door.

Sal is where I left him, waiting the way he waits for everything. Eleven years he’s stood at that kind of door, and I have never once had to tell him to.

“Have the car brought round. I’m heading home.”

His mask flickers. Just the smallest thing, a shift at the corner of his mouth. The boss doesn’t go home this early. Not once in the years Sal has arranged my house’s cleaning schedule around my absence, and never before ten in the morning. Sal doesn’t ask, though. Sal never asks. He calls down for the car.

By the time I’m in the back seat, the freeways are as empty as they ever get, and I am pretending that I am going back to the house to get away from the city, get a few hours of sleep.

I’m not.

The city slides past the window in that pre-dawn gray that flattens every color into the same soft blue. I try to keep my mind on the take. On the Russian. On the shipment that moved clean and the small circle of buyers I need to keep clean with.

But it’s the biscotti I keep coming back to.

Not this week’s biscotti. The first ones. Nine or ten months ago, one of the handful of nights I’d actually used the house for a few hours of sleep between shifts. I’d walked into my kitchen and found the plate sitting square in the middle of the marble island. A folded linen napkin under it. Six biscotti, still warm.

I stared at it for a full minute. Half convinced it was poisoned, because that’s the kind of man I have made myself into. Then I picked one up and ate it standing over the sink, and it was the best biscotti I’d had since I was ten years old. I had not thought about being ten years old in twenty-nine years.

That was the first time.

After that, I started noticing.

Small things at first. A pillow I’d left crumpled fluffed on my return. The bed turned down that I hadn’t turned down myself, corner folded neatly, a chocolate on the pillow the second time and then never again, as if she’d tested the gesture and decided the chocolate was too much. A candle on the entryway console I did not remember owning and could not name the scent of, only that it was warm and green, and something in my chest did a thing I did not have a name for when I walked past it.

I have been to the house maybe two dozen times in the two years my maid has been in it. Never during her working hours. She works from one to eight in the morning, seven days a week, and takes herself off the property for the daylight hours in between. Sal set the arrangement up the week she was hired. I said keep the house clean and stocked with water, coffee, and scotch. No cooking. I said don’t touch anything that isn’t strictly the job. I signed off on her salary and I did not think about her again for a year.

Then the biscotti.

In the last two months, I’ve been to the house more often than I’ve been to it in the previous ten years since I bought it. I keep telling myself it isn’t because of what I might find on the counter. I keep being lied to by my own mouth.

Cinnamon rolls, warm from the oven. A ceramic pot with a plant in it, heart-shaped leaves, on the sink windowsill. A folded throw draped over the back of the couch I bought ten years ago and have never once sat on. Two weeks ago, that candle again, freshly lit and burned three-quarters down, was on the console when I came in. I stood in my hallway that night for longer than any grown man should stand in a hallway. My mamma used to burn a candle like that on Sundays. It had been twenty-nine years since I’d smelled it, and it took me four seconds to be ten years old again.

I don’t do that.

I made a whole life out of not being who I was for the first ten years of my life.

And this woman I have never met has been quietly reaching into my house and lighting a candle that reminds me of my childhood on my entryway console, and I don’t know what she wants. I only know that she was told on her first day to do the bare minimum and nothing more.

She is doing everything except the bare minimum.

Even her name is a small trouble. I read it off a payroll form once, months ago, and it has been sitting in the back of my mouth ever since. Rosalie. Rosa. Rosalina. The Italian shapes of it that my mamma would have used. I have not said any of them out loud. I don’t intend to. Names have a way of becoming a thing one keeps.

The freeway sign for my exit slides past. I realize I’m speeding, and I let myself keep speeding, because the man who is honest with himself would have to admit he doesn’t want to arrive a minute later than he has to.

The gates open before the car has fully stopped in front of them. Cameras track me up the drive. First light is just starting to warm the pale stone of the house, and my chest is doing that thing I don’t have a name for again.