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“Go win,” he says. “And do it the right way. Make the old man proud in spite of himself. And Enzo, call Matthew. Do it as soon as you can. He’s a tough kid, but he’ll want to hear that his old man is all right. Kids need to hear their dad’s voice.”

I leave the hospital with a plan in mind. I’ll work with the elders, not against them, using pressure and leverage, just like my father did. They’ll see who Luca really is.

CHAPTER 37

STEVIE

Three days at the lake, and it’s peaceful. So peaceful that it doesn’t feel like my own life.

The afternoon has the perfect amount of chill in it. From the bedroom window I can see gold light slanting through the pines and the lake throwing it back in pieces. Down at the bottom of the road, Danny sits in the black pickup with the engine off. The Kowalski brothers walk the tree line in slow, bored loops, rifles slung, breath steaming. Every hour on the hour, Pyke’s radio crackles and each of them checks in. I’ve started counting the check-ins the way other people count sheep.

Matthew is napping, worn out from an afternoon of hunting frogs along the shore while Pyke trailed us at a polite distance and pretended to be interested in rocks. He hasn’t asked many questions yet. For now, he believes this is a little vacation his dad planned for us. But Matthew notices everything. Any day now, he’ll notice that vacations don’t usually come with men carrying rifles.

Enzo texted at noon. Dinner. I’ll call. Three words, and I’ve read them maybe forty times.

I realized this morning, out on the dock, that neither of us has said it yet. I told him I was his, in a room with a door I locked myself, and he called me his, and neither of us said the word that actually matters. I know what I feel. I like to think he’s somewhere in the city, kicking himself for not saying it first.

And if he never comes back up that road, I’ll never know.

The thought comes the way they’ve all been coming since he left, sideways and sharp. I make myself breathe through it. I picture the black car coming around the last bend, and Enzo stepping out, and the look on his face that says it’s over.

In the front room, the radio crackles. Top of the hour.

I wait for the check-ins. Pyke’s low voice first. Then the truck.

Nothing from the truck.

Pyke says Danny’s name again, sharper. Then the brothers, one after the other.

Nothing. Nothing.

Then the front door comes off its hinges, and Pyke’s voice roars down the hall.

“Stevie! Back window! Now!”

I’m already moving. I’m in Matthew’s room before the first shot, scooping him out of bed, blanket and rabbit and all. He wakes with a startled cry against my shoulder.

“Mama?”

“I’ve got you. Hold on to Mr. Bun.”

The shots in the front room are close and enormous. Two guns, then three, then too many to count. Pyke shouts something I can’t make out. A body hits the floor. Then another.

I get the window halfway up before I see them: men at the tree line, where the Kowalski brothers should be. Four of them. Five. Coming across the grass in no hurry at all.

Behind them, down at the shore, there’s a boat I’ve never seen, nosed up against our dock.

There’s nowhere to run. I know it the way you know you’re about to fall.

So I do the only thing left.

The phone is in the back pocket of my jeans. The phone Enzo put in my desk drawer on the first day, the one that tells him where I am every minute of every day. The night I found out, I wanted to throw it in the river. A week later, in a lawyer’s office, when he offered to do it for me, I told him to leave it on.

Mr. Bun still has that split seam in his belly. For once in my life, I’m glad I never got around to sewing something. I jam the phone into the stuffing, all the way in, and pinch the seam closed with my thumb, and tuck the rabbit back into Matthew’s arms.

“Hold him tight, baby,” I whisper. “Whatever happens, don’t let anybody take Mr. Bun. Okay? That’s your job.”

His eyes are huge. He nods. He wraps both arms around the rabbit like it’s the most important thing in the world.