Chapter 11 Angelina
eleven
Angelina
The pasta water boils over with a hiss that makes me lunge for the burner, twisting it down with fingers that have been shaking on and off since this morning.
I've gotten skilled at hiding it, by gripping things, pressing my palms flat against surfaces, or folding my hands in my lap during hearings as if composure were something I could hold in place by force of posture alone.
"Mom, what's 847 divided by 7?"
Chesca's worksheets fan across the counter in a disaster of eraser smudges and crooked columns.
Her ponytail lists to the left again. I reach over and fix the elastic while stirring with my other hand, and the smell of butter and garlic rises from the pan the way it used to rise from Nonna Rosa's kitchen on Sunday afternoons.
Instead of giving her the answer, I ask, "What's 7 times 100?"
"700." Her pencil is between her teeth, tongue poking out. "So that leaves 147. Then 7 times 20 is 140, and... 121?"
"Good girl. Write it down."
The routine should be soothing, homework and dinner and the ordinary rhythm of a Tuesday evening.
But I'm watching Chesca's head bent over her math while my mind replays evidence markers on my desk, yellow placards with numbers on them, my workspace transformed into a crime scene while I stood with my arms crossed and couldn't make them uncross.
Stop. She's right there. Focus on her.
I drain the orecchiette. Steam hits my face and the heat is wrong, too close, too sudden, and for one bad second the steam is the flash of Damian's camera in my chambers this morning—
Stop it. Get it together, Angelina.
I shake the colander harder than necessary. Water hisses against stainless steel sink. Ordinary sounds. Safe sounds.
Patricia Brown drank whiskey neat at conference receptions. She told me I was good at this job and I laughed, a real laugh, not a performance, and now she's the sixth victim. Twenty-three pages of autopsy reports, and that's the conclusion.
Her voice in my head, dry and warm. You're doing fine, honey. Better than fine.
She's in a medical examiner's office and I'm making orecchiette and I cannot think about that right now because my daughter is four feet away asking about long division.
My eyes burn. I blink hard, twice, and dish up the pasta.
"121 is right, tesoro."
"Why is everyone being weird tonight?"
Those eyes. Adrian's eyes in my daughter's face, dark and sharp and missing nothing. I hate that I see him in her sometimes. I hate more that I can't stop looking for him.
"Busy day at work." I set the bowl on the table and my voice sounds almost normal, which is its own kind of verdict on how much practice I've had at this. "Nothing to worry about."
"You always say that." She narrows her eyes at me.
"Because it's always true."
She doesn't buy it. She studies the rigid line of Cole's shoulders where he stands by the window, then looks back at me with an expression that says she's observing details she doesn't have words for yet.
But she's eight, and she knows when I won't budge, so she turns back to her worksheet with a small sigh that sounds far too old for her age.
The quiet holds. Barely.
Cole hasn't moved from his position by the living room window in twenty minutes. I can see the new deadbolts from where I'm standing. And the new window sensors, tiny and white and meant to blend in. My home transformed into a perimeter while I was at work.
I used to think I was vigilant. I used to think my habit of counting exits and tracking men's hands in rooms constituted awareness.
I didn't know what awareness looked like until I watched Cole turn my house into a fortress without asking permission.
My phone buzzes on the counter. Uncle Sal's name on the screen.
"Keep working, bambina. I'll be right back."
The hallway gives me ten feet of privacy and a wall to lean against. I keep my voice low.
"I heard about the flowers."
No preamble. Sal has never in his life opened with a greeting. Small talk is for people who don't already know everything worth knowing.
"I'm handling it."
"Your bodyguard handling it, or you handling it?"
Through the kitchen doorway, Cole's silhouette fills the window frame. He hasn't turned around, but I know he's aware of exactly where I am, where Chesca is, where Xander is finishing his perimeter check, where every entrance and exit leads. I used to find that suffocating.
I don't know what it is now.
"Both."
"Castellano women." The warmth in his voice never quite softens the authority underneath. "Always fighting what's good for them." A pause — Sal's pauses are never empty; they're the part of the sentence he wants you to fill in yourself. "This man. He's good?"
"Yes."
The word falls out whole and unqualified, no caveat, no hedge. The kind of answer I would never allow in my courtroom because it hasn't been subjected to cross-examination. Three letters that I meant completely, and I don't know when that happened.
"Then stop fighting it."
The line goes dead. Sal gives advice the way he gives orders. Without waiting for a response, without leaving room for argument.
Does he know more about Cole than he's letting on?
I stand in the hallway with the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to nothing.
Stop fighting it.
Fighting what, exactly? The surveillance? The obsession? The fact that I let him inside me twelve hours after finding out he's been watching me for seven years?
Or the fact that I want to do it again?
Cole is in the doorway when I turn around.
The hallway is narrow enough that I would have to press past him to get back to the kitchen, close enough that I feel his body heat, see changes the day wrought in his eyes.The flower.
His hands cradling my face in chambers. The almost-kiss I've spent twelve hours prosecuting and defending in alternating arguments, neither side winning.
"Uncle Sal?" he asks.
I nod. My voice has apparently filed a motion to remain silent.
His gaze holds mine for a beat too long, and I watch him decide not to push.
"Mom! I got it! 7 times 17 is 119!"
He steps aside to let me pass, and I do, and our shoulders don't touch, and I'm aware of that absence the whole way back to the kitchen.
Back to the kitchen. Back to the pasta going cold on the table. Back to the daughter who needs me to be the mother and not the woman and I can do that, I have always been able to do that, this is what I do.
Chesca's bedtime takes forty-seven minutes tonight.
Three stories instead of two. Extra time brushing teeth.
A glass of water, then another glass of water, then a trip to the bathroom that was definitely necessary and not at all a stalling tactic.
I recognize the anxiety underneath the delay.
She feels the tension in the house even if she can't name it, picks up on frequencies I'm trying so hard to keep quiet.
"Mamma?" Her voice is small in the purple glow of her nightlight. "Is the man going to stay?"
"Cole?"
She nods against her pillow, Aaron Bear tucked under her chin.
"For a little while, tesoro. He's helping keep us safe."
"From what?"
From a serial killer who left flowers on my desk. From a countdown that ends in twenty-four days. From the fact that Mamma might not be here for your ninth birthday.
"From people who don't like judges very much," I say, which is technically true and completely inadequate. "Nothing you need to worry about."
"You always say that."
"Because it's always true."
She studies me with those dark eyes that see too much. "He watches you different than Xander does."
My breath catches. "What do you mean?"
"Xander watches the doors and windows. Cole watches you." She yawns, already losing the thread of observation to exhaustion. "Like you're the most important thing in the room."
I don't have an answer for that. I kiss her forehead and smooth the hair back from her face and tell her I love her to the moon and back, the same words I've said every night since she was old enough to understand them.
"Love you to the moon and back and around again," she mumbles, already half-asleep.
I stand in her doorway for longer than I should, counting the rise and fall of her chest.
Uno, due, tre, quattro...
Twenty breaths before I make myself leave. I pull the door to the angle she prefers.
The house goes quiet the way it always does, in stages, like a courtroom emptying after a ruling.
Xander leaves with a nod and the soft click of the front door.
Cole checks the perimeter and the locks and whatever else he checks while I stand at the kitchen sink pretending to wash a glass that's already clean.
The sounds narrow down to the tick of the old radiator in the hallway and the rush of ocean waves from Chesca's sound machine behind her cracked door.
I go to bed.
Not to the monitoring room, not to find Cole, not to do any of the reckless things my body suggested last night. I brush my teeth. Wash my face.
Lie down in my cold bed like a responsible adult with twenty-four days left to live, and look up at the ceiling.
The ceiling stares back.
Twenty-four days.
I've been saying it all day, to Cole, to Kade through the speaker, to myself in the mirror when I caught my reflection in the courthouse bathroom. The number should feel abstract. Theoretical. A data point in someone else's threat assessment.
It doesn't.
Patricia Brown had grandchildren. Three of them, and the youngest had just learned to walk. She showed me photographs at a reception six months ago, her face lit up with that particular grandmother pride, and she told me she was going to retire next year.
Thirty years on the bench, she said. Thirty years of service, and then she'd spend the rest of her life spoiling those babies.
She never got to retire.
Someone put a flower on her desk and now her grandchildren are going to grow up without her.