Chapter 23 Lila
LILA
Iblink at the dark ceiling, find the lock screen glow on my phone, and squint at the time.
It’s too early for bakers, which means it’s early for everyone else.
It isn’t a noise that wakes me, but a voice, low and deliberate, the kind that carries a secret.
It draws me down the stairs toward the kitchen.
“…no gaps on Mill,” Matteo tells someone, voice steady. “You rotate on the diner corner. Eight-minute check-ins. If it goes quiet, you shrink the circle, not stretch it.”
I sit on the stairs and pull my sweater tighter.
The room holds the kind of silence that houses do when they are thinking.
The light over the kitchen counter glows.
Matteo stands there with his phone to his ear, a county map spread open, a pencil poised in his hand.
He listens more than he talks. The pencil circles the map while he listens.
He rubs a thumb along his temple, then writes a single word on a scrap of paper and underlines it.
“Petro, status at the hall,” he says and falls quiet before picking up the beats. “Inside sweep only. Kitchen corridor, boiler room, florist alley, rear of the pharmacy. Start at the church. Eight minutes between marks. If you lose sound, you tighten.”
He glances toward the landing as if he feels me there.
I step back, then decide against hiding and pad down the last three steps.
He moves away from the open room and goes up to his room so the voices do not rise through the house.
I follow and stop at the doorway. He paces once, movement economical, then plants his hand on the dresser on his pad.
He tilts his head, absorbing whatever comes through the line. The pencil taps, then stops. “Nico’s last check was twenty-nine minutes ago. You retrace his loop. Do not enter blind. You call first. Two rings, then text. If his phone rings near you, you freeze and wait on my word.”
A pause stretches. He nods, jaw set. “Yes. The Lantern stairs. You hold that alley. No lights.”
I step into the room and lean against the wall. The lamplight splits him, one side pale, the other shadowed. My mouth shapes a question without sound. He meets my eyes, sees I won’t move, and cups a hand around the phone.
“Hold,” he tells the caller, then lowers his voice. “You should sleep.”
“I tried,” I say. “You’re in my house. And something happened to your men.”
“One of my men is missing.” He exhales through his nose. Not a sigh, just a slow collapse of air. His brown eyes have lost their shine.
“Who’s missing?” The words leave me before I plan them.
He doesn’t turn right away. One hand stays on the phone while the thumb of the other drags across a name written and underlined twice. When he finally looks up, his eyes are darker than the room.
“Nico,” he says.
I wait. He straightens a corner of the map that doesn’t need straightening.
“He was on the inside check,” he murmurs. “Twenty-nine minutes out. No call, no signal, no trace.” He goes back to the phone.
“Which car? Plate.” A beat.
“Silver Honda Accord. Albany paper tag. Rear passenger dent. Last four eight seven Q. Good.” He writes cleanly, quickly.
Back to Petro. “If the Accord shows, you shadow at half a block. You do not close. Send me sixty-second updates. If you see anything move, you mark the hand. If the sheriff rolls past, you nod and let him go. No stories.”
My palms are damp. I hate that I’m listening and not moving. I head for the kettle and a plate just to have something to carry.
Matteo’s voice stays level behind me. “You check sheds, basements, the old boiler room behind the hall. Nico would not sit in a car. He knows better. You do not open anything alone. I am coming down.”
He hangs there between the door and me, like he could split in two and be useful in both places.
He shrugs into a dark field coat, smooth and fast, pats the holster under his arm, then checks the magazine with a quick, practiced click.
When he turns, there’s pain around his mouth he won’t name.
He hates leaving this house. He carries the apology in his eyes.
I’m ready to argue, a dozen points crowding my tongue, but his phone buzzes again.
Petro. Matteo answers on the first vibration.
“Report.”
Petro’s reply scrapes through the line, “Nothing. Lantern Alley’s clean. The motel wing’s quiet. The loop’s dead. I can’t guard the hall and chase.”
Matteo’s eyes flick to me, then drop to the map. “You return to the hall now. Set control before first light. Listen.” He toggles the speaker volume low so he can mark the hall map.
“I’m listening.”
“Lock the sightlines. Pull the coat racks into a shallow S from the kitchen entrance to the stage so no one can run straight through. Lock the casters on both racks. Leave a two-foot channel down the middle. We will post people three paces off it. Anyone who refuses the turn will be intercepted.”
“Got it.”
“Kill the mood lights. Full overheads over the wings.” He taps the map on a corner.
“No shadows behind the nativity flats. I want the whole stage clean. Tie back both curtains to the last ring so no one can stand inside them. Check behind the shepherd cutout and the snow castle. You keep those spaces empty.”
“Copy.”
“You use what is there.” Matteo shifts his weight, one hand hooked on his belt, voice calm but edged with command.
“Lay two folding tables on their sides to form an L-shaped funnel from the side corridor toward the kitchen door. It will force anyone running the aisle to turn into the kitchen, not out into the lobby. Tape a big DETOUR arrow so it reads like church business. If anything moves through the gap, you see it.”
“Understood.”
He nods once, jaw tight. “Hang a jingle garland chest-high from the coat tree to the piano at stage left.” His fingers sketch the line through the air. “If someone brushes it, it sings. You will hear it from the kitchen.”
“Smart.”
Matteo rolls his shoulders, the motion quiet and heavy. “Dust a thin line of flour at the kitchen threshold and across the back exit. Light hand. You will see prints on the return. Mark the shoes.”
My stomach flips at flour. If they’re using my bakery to catch ghosts, I’ll choose the powder. I keep silent.
He drags a thumb along the faint scar at his knuckle, thinking.
“The AV cabinet stays locked. If it’s open, you pull the projector plug and coil the cable twice around your wrist and clip the plug to your belt so no one can light the screen as a distraction.
Roll the spare riser in front of the fire door to make any push loud.
You do not block. You force noise. Capisce? ”
“Capo.”
“And keep your phone on vibrate in your front pocket. Sixty-second updates. If you see anything move, you mark the hand. If that Accord parks, you do not go to it. You call me.”
“Understood.”
He lowers the phone but doesn’t pocket it. He paces once, twice, a short track that burns off nothing. I feel the pressure in his choice. Go after Nico. Stay with us. There’s no right answer, just the one that hurts less if he’s wrong.
“Let me help,” I say, and my voice shakes more than I want. “Put me at the hall. I know those rooms better than anyone. I can—”
“No.” Not harsh, just final. “I will not put you there.”
“It’s my town,” I push. “My people. You want flour lines? I know where every draft lives. You want to make noise? I know what squeaks. You can’t keep me out of my own life.”
His throat works. For a second, the fight slips, and I see what sits under it, the fear that if he turns his back, something will take us.
“Lila,” he says quietly. “I am split already.”
“I’m not porcelain,” I fire back. “I’m a person standing in her kitchen while you plan around her.”
The phone jumps again. Petro. Matteo lifts it, eyes still on mine.
“Stage right’s secure,” Petro reports. “Kitchen corridor funneled. Lights are up. I can cover the alley and the wings, not both at once.”
“You position the upright piano at forty-five degrees between you and that door,” Matteo orders.
“The bench turned sideways. It forces a step around and gives you cover. Keep the broom in your hand and look like you’re working overtime.
For the pageant. If anyone asks, you are fixing a squeak. You call me every minute.”
“You’re coming?”
“I will.” The trouble in his voice isn’t for the hall. It’s for me. He ends the call and faces me fully, coat open, shoulders squared like he’s bracing.
“I may be gone twenty minutes,” he says. “Maybe less. You stay here with your mother and the boy. Chain on. If anything shifts outside, you pull the cord. I will hear it.”
I want to tell him I’m not a cord to be pulled. I can stack tables and tie curtains and make jingles sing. He’s watching me the way men watch the horizon, not because they doubt it’s there, but because they want to see it safe first.
“What are you risking?” I ask the question that’s been clawing to get out. “Right now. By being here.”
He doesn’t answer right away. His jaw locks. He stares at the pencil he has flattened with his thumb, then at the map like the paper might volunteer to speak for him. The silence stretches so long, I almost fill it. I do not. I wait him out.
When he looks up, something in his face has slipped. Not off, not entirely, just enough that the man under the code shows.
“If I lose you,” he says, every word precise, “and the boy, I do not recover. I do not know how to build again.”
The floor tilts a little. I grip the doorframe, the paint cool, real. I know what it costs him to put those sentences in the room. He doesn’t dramatize. He doesn’t barter with promises he can’t keep. He tells the truth like a book he’s got to balance, the only way he can make himself true.
A small sound cracks the quiet. Glass, brittle and mean, the kind when a hard object meets a pane that has known better days.
We both look up. The ceiling vibrates in that tiny way wood does when it takes a hit it can’t roll with. Another sound follows, a thud that lands on the upstairs floorboards and vibrates down the walls.
“Marco,” Maria calls from her room, alarm tight. “What’s happening?” Her silhouette breaks the hall light, and in the next breath she’s beside him, sleep gone from her eyes.
I’m already running. Matteo’s behind me, silent and fast. The light in the hall is too bright now, as if the building flinched and turned on its skin.
Shards glitter on the rug outside Marco’s door, small triangles that catch the bulb. A rock sits at the far wall where it bounced, ugly and sure of itself. Paper clings to it, a strip of twine looped twice around.
I grab the twine and yank. The paper unfurls. Black marker, thick and patient, the kind a person uses when he wants the message to be read from fifty feet.
One More Night.