Chapter 5 #2
I get closer, step by step, keeping to where the old floorboards are less vocal. The door is open two inches. Maybe three. I breathe through my nose and listen.
“—not tonight,” my mother says. Not the sharp restaurant voice. Frayed. Harried. “We’re… It’s busy.”
“It won’t take long,” the man says. His voice is steady and smooth. No rush. No attitude. The kind of voice that belongs to someone who never needs to raise it to be heard. “I can be quick.”
“It’s not about quick,” she says. A paper rustles. A chair ticks as someone shifts. “It’s about timing. After the funeral—”
“We’re keeping it respectful,” he says. “I don’t want to make a scene in your dining room. I’m here so you don’t have to hear about it from someone else later.” A pause. “You know why.”
I hold my breath until my lungs complain. The hum from the light gets louder. I angle my ear toward the crack. My mother swallows loud enough to carry.
“I said I would handle it,” she says. “I will.”
“You will,” he agrees, like he believes her, but also like he’s the kind of man who keeps a calendar. “That’s all this is. A reminder.”
“Tonight?” she asks. The break in that last syllable is small, and if I weren’t her kid I wouldn’t hear it.
“Because I respect your kitchen,” he says. “And your mother.”
I step closer before I think about it. Close enough to see the corner of the desk through the gap. The same battered wood, the jar of rubber bands, the stapler that bites your thumb if you aren’t careful.
I can see the edge of my mother’s sleeve. White. Pressed. Her wrist bone sharp against the desk when she rests her hand there. I can’t see him. Just the angle of a shoulder in the chair opposite. Dark fabric. Broad.
“Francesca,” he says, and hearing my mother’s name in that voice makes my stomach drop like I missed a step. “This isn’t a door I like knocking on. You know that.”
“I know,” she says.
There’s a small silence. Not empty. Waiting.
What are they talking about?
Their voices lower even more, and I can barely catch the words. Debt? Terms?
That’s all. Those two words make heat crawl up my neck.
My pulse beats hard enough to feel in my mouth.
I press my fingertips to the wall to anchor myself and think of the ledger’s columns and how neat Nonna kept her numbers.
Always neat. Always honest. I think of my mother’s jaw grinding at 3:00 in the morning over payroll.
I think of the new key heavy in my pocket.
What debt? Mr. Caruso said there was no debt. Just a line of credit and the rent.
“After service,” my mother says. “Please.”
“Tomorrow,” he says, making a small shift I hear in his chair legs on short carpet. “I’ll call at 9:00. We will be finished before you open.”
“8:00,” she says, fast, like she wants it earlier to get it over with, or to keep him from choosing the time. “I’ll be here.”
“8:00,” he agrees.
Chairs scrape. Panic sparks stupid and hot under my ribs—animal quick.
I don’t want to be crouched at the door like a child.
I don’t want anyone to see me listening and pin that on my mother.
I back up fast, and my heel bites on the bad strip of carpet.
I stumble into the closet door behind me, and the knob clicks in my palm.
I shove it open and slip inside just as the office door moves.
The supply closet is small and packed. Shelves on both sides, a metal mop bucket low on the floor, the mop itself leaning against my shoulder with a damp head that smells like bleach and oregano because everything in this building smells like oregano.
Aprons hang on hooks. My shoulder brushes a stack of paper towel sleeves.
The air is too close. I pull the door almost shut, leave a slit to see through, and try to slow my heart down to a normal human rhythm.
Footsteps on the hall carpet. One set. Measured. No hurry. The light from the office swings, jumps, and then it’s just the dim hall bulb again.
He walks past.
I don’t know his name yet. But I know this: he doesn’t move like a customer looking for the bathroom. He doesn’t do the head swivel people do when they’re lost. He doesn’t make noise to be noticed or noise to pretend he wasn’t here. He isn’t hiding. He’s just… not performing.
Suit, dark. Definitely not off the rack. Shoulders under the suit that work for a living, not made in a gym. Hair dark too, with a few silver streaks shot through it, trimmed clean at the neck. No hat. No flashy watch he wants the world to see.
But the world can see it anyway in the way he holds himself.
His hand brushes the edge of the frame when he passes, not touching, just close, and his knuckles are scraped in that way that says he doesn’t sit at a desk all day.
He smells like something clean and expensive that doesn’t try too hard.
Something far out of the budget of our regular clientele.
He pauses.
His head turns a fraction toward the closet door as if he heard my heart beating too hard in my chest. I hold still. I could be another mop. I could be a shadow. The sound from downstairs lifts, a swell of laughter right then. His eyes go that way—toward the sound—and I see them.
They aren’t soft. But they aren’t cold. They’re the kind of eyes that notice everything in a room.
The kind that skim you once and have you memorized.
I’m used to older men around here with soft bellies and too much cologne and eyes that stick.
He’s not that. Definitely not soft. But careful and controlled.
He takes one more step, and the light hits his jaw. A small white scar catches it, a nick on the line that says he’s learned things the hard way and remembered those lessons. His mouth is a straight line that gives nothing away.
He looks down the stairs. His hand goes to the rail. The tendons in his wrist show when he grips it.
Attraction is stupid in moments like this.
It doesn’t care that I’m in a supply closet with a mop kissing my shoulder and my mother walking behind him, panicked.
It doesn’t care that I’m running hot and cold at once.
It just rolls through me without asking.
Awareness. That’s all. A small flare in the chest that says: notice me.
He starts down the stairs, not looking back. As I wait for them to go down, a small detail hits me in the throat. There’s only one set of creaks on the old floorboards, and they are my mom’s.
Skills like that aren’t learned by accident.
After the creaks on the steps stop, I stay in the closet and count to twenty because I don’t trust my legs.
The cleaning stuff smell gets in my lungs, bright and harsh.
The mops’ strings tickle my arm and make me want to scratch.
I don’t move. My heartbeat slows enough to stop trying to punch out of my skin.
I let the door crack widen and look down the empty hall. No one.
I slip out.
The office door is still a little open, so I slip inside and sit behind the desk, thoughts rushing through my mind so fast I can’t catch one.
The steps creak again, and I stiffen, fear holding my breath.
Then I remember that he doesn’t make noise on the steps. I watch as my mother comes down the hall and into the office. She doesn’t notice me right away because I haven’t turned the light back on.
When she does, she gasps and smacks her hand to her heart, like it might fall out.
“Bianca!” she says breathlessly.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say, keeping my voice low. “I needed a minute.”
She flips the light on and blinks against it. Her eyes do a quick scan—ledger, phone, door—like she’s counting what could go wrong. “When did you come up here?” she says, eyes darting down at the ledger on the desk.
“Who was that?” I ask.
She flinches. Actually flinches. Her face smooths a second later, the way it always has, like she irons her expressions flat with will. “Don’t,” she says, more to the air than to me. “Tonight is not—”
“Who—”
“Bianca.” My name is a warning. She picks up the letter opener and sets it down like she needed something to do with her hand and thought better of it. “You shouldn’t be up here. Go downstairs.”
“Mama,” I warn.
She drags a palm down her neck, presses her pulse with two fingers. “We’re busy. Go help Zia at the bar.”
“I’m not working,” I remind her.
“Then go smile at people so they feel like they’re getting something for free,” she says, and the old joke falls out of her mouth on habit, dull around the edges. “Please.”
“Who was he?” I ask again, because I can’t let it go now. “The man.”
“Which man?” Her eyes cut to the door and back. The tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth betrays her.
“The one who just walked past me,” I say.
“You were listening at the door,” she says, attempting to accuse me in order to change the subject. “What are you, fifteen?”
“Stop trying to distract me, Mama,” I say quietly.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says, and the more she refuses to answer, the more worried I get.
“Too late,” I say.
She stares at me for a hard second. The lines around her mouth have been deeper since Nonna passed. Around her eyes, too. She looks at my face like she’s measuring how much I’ll push.
She holds my stare a beat longer, then exhales, reaches behind her, and pushes the door shut with the heel of her hand. The latch clicks. She twists the lock.
“Fine,” she says. “Sit.”
“I am sitting.”
She drops into the chair opposite, drags a palm across the blotter like she’d clear crumbs if there were any. For a second, she looks younger and older at the same time. Then she squares up.
“That was Giovanni Conti,” she says.
I blink once. “Conti,” I repeat, even though I heard her. The air in the room gets thinner. “As in—”
“As in,” she says. “Yes.”
My brain does a stupid little flip back to the hallway—the quiet steps, the controlled way he had of moving, the eyes that saw everything. Of course.