Chapter 4
MARISA
ONE YEAR LATER, brOOKLYN
Brooklyn wakes like an old cat, slow and a little grumpy.
The trattoria downstairs bangs pans and argues in Italian that smells like garlic.
Radiator ticking. Steam on the window.
I am barefoot in an apron with orange zest under my nails, lining up tasting spoons beside a cooling rack of loaves.
My phone buzzes with two missed calls from Nico and a text from my aunt about nice girls and Christmas Mass.
I silence the phone, straighten a stack of pastry boxes, and tell myself the day will be quiet.
Footsteps climb my stairs. Heavy on the outside edge. A pause. Three knocks that sound like rent due.
I open the door because I was raised to be polite.
My stepbrother Cristiano Nico Conte fills the frame, cheeks pink from the cold, snow caught in the cuffs of a jacket he refuses to zip.
“Brought muffins,” he says, already stepping past me.
He sets a grocery bag on my counter and wipes his palms on his jeans like generosity is work. “Playing chef must keep you from eating.”
“Playing,” I repeat, setting out a plate. My voice stays even. I stack the muffins like evidence. “Wrong kitchen.”
He drags out a chair and sits without asking.
He leans back and takes up space that is not his. “You are wasting your time in an apron when you could be settling down.”
I smooth the edge of my towel and meet his eyes. “I like my apron. It pays my rent.”
He picks at the paper wrapper, crumbs flaking to the floor. “A good man will not want a woman on everyone’s catering calendar.”
“A good man tips and reads his own calendar,” I say, sliding the plate toward him and keeping my hand on it until he looks up.
He snorts and reaches anyway. “Ma would cry if she saw how you live.”
“My grandmother baked for the church and told the priest when he was out of line,” I say, steady as a metronome. “She would cry because you brought supermarket muffins.”
He bites and chews like the muffin wronged him. “You used to be sweet.”
I smile without showing teeth. “I am still sweet. I just do not let men take bites without asking.”
His lips press into a thin line of disapproval, and he shoves the half-eaten muffin back into the bag. “It’s a hobby, Marisa. Not a life.”
I walk to the door and curl my fingers around the knob. “The door is very good at its job. Watch.”
He stands so fast the chair legs screech. “Family cannot even give advice.”
“Advice is not an eviction notice. You can’t force it on me.” I pull the door open, and he shoulders past me. His jacket clips the rosemary on the sill.
The pot leaps, hits tile, and cracks down one side.
We both look at it.
He does not apologize. “Symbolic,” I say dryly, kneeling to fit the pieces together with two fingers. “You arrive messy and leave me to sweep.”
He mutters about respect and stomps down the stairs.
I close the door, the latch clicking.
The apartment exhales and I, in turn, inhale the familiarity of coffee and orange peel and whatever is left of my pride after a morning spent arguing with family.
The radiator clanks without conviction.
The window over the sink fogs as I breathe on it, then clears enough to show a slice of winter sky the color of pewter.
I pour cold brew over ice because I like the clean bite of it, and because a very large, very opinionated man in the mountains hates it, which is reason enough to keep the ritual.
I can see him in my mind so easily that it feels like a memory happening in real time.
Roman folds his arms, looks at the glass, and says espresso is the only acceptable caffeine delivery system, then proceeds to make a tiny cup that could fuel a truck and hands it to me with a look that says there is a right way to live.
I sip, then text a photo of the cold brew to our chat with a caption that reads, a perfectly respectable beverage.
The typing dots appear, disappear, appear again.
Deacon’s response arrives first, a single black square that means he is laughing in a way that does not disturb the surface of the water.
Then a photo of a mason jar on a shelf with a sticky note that says totally not cold brew, do not drink, and a time stamp from two in the morning.
I can hear his voice without the phone telling me anything.
He brews it nightly, simply to watch Roman rant, then drinks it with a priestly calm that makes Roman’s left eye twitch.
Roman finally replies with a skull, then a tiny cup, then a second skull. I smile into my glass.
Cruz sends a picture of his daughter Isla in a star sweater, holding a whisk like a scepter.
Under it he writes, queen decrees both are allowed if there are cookies, and the decree has icing fingerprints on it.
I smile at the picture in a way that makes my eyes crinkle at the corners, because Isla is just that kind of a kid; all kindness and quick feeling, remarkable given how long it’s been since her mother passed.
That is the kind of year it has been.
Not daily, never constant, but steady like the way mountains hold a horizon.
Check ins that taste like sugar and smoke, long texts about nothing that say more than they admit.
A photo of fresh snow on a timber beam.
A recipe shared. A song. A quiet call when I am up late prepping dough and someone else is out riding a border road in weather the rest of the world has decided to sleep through.
The ache between us softens, then sharpens, then decides to be patient again.
I learn what each of them takes with coffee and what each of them will eat for breakfast when left to their own devices.
Roman will not admit to pancakes, then eats them without comment if there is enough lemon zest in the batter.
Deacon likes his eggs soft and his toast burned because he claims it tastes honest.
Cruz keeps a recipe for molé behind a false brick in the lodge pantry like a secret door in a story.
He swears the day I make it will culminate in the best meal of his life.
Over the year I also learn the rhythm of their world, not from movies and not from anyone’s guesses.
The Black Jackals do not perform chaos.
They run on rules printed above the lodge door like liturgy.
No lies. No abandonment. No harm to women or children.
They run on early mornings with bikes idling in a line and mugs set on the rail so steam lifts against the frost.
They run on loyalty that is quiet until it needs to be loud.
They are not saints and they do not pretend to be, although one of them carries the name and all the weight that comes with it.
They handle things that cannot be handled by calling the police, and they feed their neighbors when the power lines fall.
They drink black coffee as a sacrament and keep the old hens as if Cleopatra and her legion are a separate government with veto power.
I clean the counter like a person restoring order to a coastline.
The rosemary is sulking in its cracked clay.
I rescue it gently, shake loose soil into a mixing bowl, and find an old enamel canister with a missing lid that will do for a new home.
Fresh potting mix, a pinch of coffee grounds, two fingers to tamp the roots, a slow pour of water until the surface goes dark and glossy.
“You and me both,” I tell it, tying a bit of twine around the canister like a bandage.
The catering app pings.
Holiday delivery, a couple hours out of the city, good pay, rush.
I accept because work is church and because I want the sound of my knives more than the sound of anyone’s opinions.
The pickup is clean. The menu is mine.
The client is anonymous through the app, the way it goes when an event planner farms out a job, so I load the insulated carriers, slide the trays into place like children in their beds, tuck the stollen into a basket lined with a red towel, and tell the cold to wait for me.
By mid afternoon the sky has shifted from pewter to steel.
The snow is not dramatic yet.
It hums at the edges like a conversation the city has decided to have without me.
I sing to myself as I drive north on roads that remember what winter used to feel like, old Dean Martin numbers I learned kneading dough on sleepless nights.
My hands move on the wheel, and I try not to think about two hands that know how to fix a generator and another that knows how to soothe a crying child and a third that knows how to press a rosary into a palm and make it feel like penance and permission at the same time.
North Hollow Road curves under the pines.
The GPS flips from bossy to blank where the tall trees harden the air.
The lodge appears the way it did the first time, out of a line of trees and then suddenly all at once, a dark body in snow light.
Tonight the whole place is wrapped in garlands and stitched with gold from the porch lanterns.
I pull up and watch my own breath leave my face and disappear.
My heart stumbles like it has forgotten steps it learned and rehearsed in the city where nothing I want feels allowed.
I tell myself it is just a delivery. Just food. Just a door I will not walk through with my heart in my hands again.
I lift the first carrier and the heat of it kisses my coat.
The wood porch stones my soles with cold.
The door opens before I can knock, and Cruz stands there with Isla on his hip, both of them beaming at me like I invented sugar.
Isla is bigger than the last photo, gap-toothed and fierce, hair a riot of espresso ringlets under a knit hat with a pom at the top that suggests a snowball took up permanent residence.
She wraps a hand around Cruz’s collar and leans toward me, although she has only ever seen me in video calls before.
The warmth is welcome and incredibly sweet, not to mention so good for my soul.
“You came,” she announces, as if it were prearranged by a small queen.
“I brought stollen,” I say solemnly, because I know my place.
She leans farther. “Do you have the kind with the tiny orange bits that taste like the sun?”
“I do.” I cannot help the smile that climbs over my face and stays.