16. Chapter Sixteen Grace
Chapter Sixteen: Grace
The first morning I wake up truly feeling like Graziella Ferrara, I make coffee.
Not because I want coffee because it's habit. No, I want to make my own coffee and start a new routine. As Graziella. Grace wakes up, takes her pill, makes coffee, walks to the bodega, walks to work. But now, I have the chance to make a new routine that feels good. That feels like me.
Whichever me I am that day, anyway.
I stand at the counter and watch the water drip through the filter, and I try to figure out which parts of me are real.
The restaurant is real. Four years of tables and plates and tips and Marco screaming about the sear.
That's mine. I built that. Nobody placed me there.
I applied for the job and earned the shifts and learned the menu and became good at it.
That skillset came from somewhere dark, but the job is mine.
Javi is real. He chose me. I chose him. Nobody assigned him to me, nobody paid him to be my friend, nobody wrote a monthly report about our conversations.
He showed up and stayed, walked me home every night and made me laugh.
He never pushed past the wall, and he's the most real thing in my life because he exists entirely outside the lie.
Rosa is real. The bodega. The sidewalk cracks. The apartment. The cracked window at the restaurant. My life in Philadelphia is real. It was built on a false foundation, but the building is real.
My name is Graziella Ferrara. I was born into an Italian family.
I was taken at eight, trafficked until thirteen, drugged and placed and monitored for eleven years.
My body kept everything my mind was told to forget.
The tapping, the triggers, the flinch at Italian, the fragments that leaked through the pharmaceutical wall like water through concrete.
All of it was my history trying to reach me.
It reached me… and I'm still standing. I'm standing in my kitchen making coffee, and the coffee is dripping and my finger is tapping the counter and I'm alive and I know who I am for the first time in sixteen years.
The tapping is different now. I notice it. I feel it. I know where it started, and I don't stop it. I let my body do what it needs to do. It's the oldest thing I own.
I pour the coffee and drink it standing up, looking out the window, wondering if Carmelo is watching me before pulling on a sweater and heading to the bodega.
Rosa looks at me over the counter. "You look different today."
"Different how?"
"I don't know. Awake. You look awake for the first time since I've known you." She hands me the cup. "Still too thin, though. And your hair..."
"Is fine, Rosa. Actually, can I have a scone instead of a coffee today, please?"
"Did you hit your head? Should I call the ambulance?” Rosa grumbles, eyeing me up and down before getting me a scone and putting it in a bag with a small tub of butter. She passes it to me with a frown. “You are strange today, my girl. I hope this is a good change.”
Rolling my eyes, I leave five bucks and walk to work.
Three blocks. Every crack. But the walk feels different today because I'm walking it as someone new, or someone old, someone who existed before Grace and is now standing inside Grace and looking out through Grace's eyes at a world that is the same and completely different.
The familiar bell greets me as I walk into the restaurant.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
He looks at me. The long look, the one he does when he's reading me. "Something's different."
"You sound like Rosa."
"Rosa's a wise woman. Something is different. You're standing up straighter."
I am. I hadn't noticed. My shoulders are down, my spine is straight, my chin is level. For four years I've walked through this restaurant with my shoulders hunched and my body folded in on itself, taking up as little space as possible. Today I'm taking up all of my space. All five-three of it.
"Good night's sleep," I say.
"Bullshit. You haven't slept in a week. I can see the circles under your eyes from across the room." He polishes a glass. "Does The Rhino have anything to do with this?"
"His name is Carmelo."
Javi puts the glass down. "You learned his name."
"I learned a lot of things."
"Grace… you did NOT fuck The Rhino."
I giggle. "You’re so nosy, my God.”
"Talk to me. For real. Whatever is happening with you, whatever has been happening for the past week, the not sleeping, the shaking, the throwing up in the bathroom, the pills running out. And now you waltz in here like you had a Goddamn lobotomy. Talk to me."
His brown eyes are filled with warmth and worry. The only person who has ever cared about me without an agenda. My chest aches because I want to tell him everything and I can't. Not when I'm still trying to hold the pieces of Graziella and Grace together inside one body.
"Soon," I say. "I promise. I'll tell you everything. Just not today."
He holds my gaze for three seconds. Then he nods. "Okay. But soon means soon. Not Grace-soon, where soon means never."
"Soon means soon."
"Okay." He picks up the glass. "Table two is reserved for noon. Helen called in saying she’s sick. Arthur is coming alone, which means he's going to argue about the eggs Benedict with himself and we're going to have to referee."
I almost laugh, but my eyes sting and I turn away before Javi sees because if I start crying in the middle of the restaurant over a joke about Arthur's eggs Benedict, I'm going to have to explain why, and the explanation is: you're my best friend and you don't know you're in danger and I can't tell you because the man who loves me killed my foster parents and there are people coming who might hurt you to get to me and I don't know how to carry all of this at once.
So I just tie my apron and get on with it. We’re both working a double today with a two-hour break, so there’s lots of time to chit-chat and hear all about how he ‘knows I fucked The Rhino.’
Javi doesn't show up for the dinner shift.
At first it's just late. Javi is never late, so five minutes past his start time, Danny calls his phone. Voicemail. Danny calls again at ten minutes. Voicemail. At fifteen minutes, Danny puts me on the bar and calls in the backup bartender, the woman with the short hair who filled in before.
"Probably his sister again," Danny says. "Family stuff."
I nod and mix drinks. I pour wine. I run the floor and the bar simultaneously because I can, because I've always been able to carry more than one person should.
The muscle memory keeps me moving while my brain repeats Javi's number on a loop.
I call during a bathroom break. Voicemail.
I text: Hey where are you? Danny's freaking out.
Nothing. No bubbles. No read receipt.
The dinner rush comes and goes. I work through it.
My tapping is fast, against every surface I touch, and the speed hasn't dropped below frantic since I noticed Javi wasn't here.
Something is wrong. Javi doesn't miss shifts.
Javi doesn't go dark on his phone. Javi is the most reliable person I've ever known, and reliable people don't just stop responding.
At nine thirty, I call again. Straight to voicemail. Not ringing. Straight to dead. The same thing Paul and Linda's phones did.
My stomach turns over. The same dead line. The same void.
Carmelo hasn't come to the restaurant tonight. He texted this morning: Brothers arriving today. Stay at the restaurant. Don't walk home alone. I texted back: Okay. I didn't ask what brothers or why. I trusted him because I told him I would.
At ten fifteen, the door opens and Carmelo walks in. Not to table four. Straight to the bar. Straight to me. His face tells me everything before his mouth opens.
"Where's Javi?" I ask.
"Grace, we need to go."
"Where is he?" My voice is getting louder with each word, ending on a shriek.
"Come with me. Now."
"No… no no. NO. Where is JAVI?"
"Grace. Now."
His face is hard and his eyes dark. He’s not fucking around and this pit in my stomach tells me something terrible happened, so I take off my apron. I fold it and put it on the bar, and I follow Carmelo out the door into the cold.
He walks fast. Not toward my apartment. Toward the alley behind the restaurant, the one between the kitchen entrance and the dumpsters. I've walked past this alley a thousand times. Javi walks past it every night when he takes out the trash.
Carmelo stops at the mouth of the alley. He turns to me and his hands are on my shoulders, and his face is close to mine, and his gray eyes are flat in a way I've never seen.
"The people who placed you," he says. "The network. They sent men to find you. Two men. They came to the restaurant looking for information while you two were on break."
"Okay."
"They got Javi on his walk home."
That hits me in the center of my chest.
"Where is he?"
Carmelo's hands tighten on my shoulders. "I found his phone behind the restaurant. Blood on the ground. Not a lot. Enough."
"Where IS he, Carmelo?"
"I don't know yet. My brother Claudio is tracking them. They took him. They took him to get to you."
My legs give. Not dramatically, not a collapse. My knees just stop working and I go down. Carmelo catches me before I hit the concrete and I'm on my knees on the sidewalk outside my restaurant. The cold is on my face and my hands are on the ground. My chest burns and I can’t breathe.
"We'll find him," Carmelo says. He's on his knees next to me, his arms around me, his voice in my ear. "Claudio is tracking their vehicle. Leone and Matteo are here. We'll find him."
I have no idea who those people are, but I don’t ask because I don’t care. All I care about is getting Javi back. "They took him because of me."
"They took him because of the people who put you here. Not because of you."