Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Gemma
Nina's skin is pink from the hot water, her hair dripping onto the bathroom tile. I kneel in front of her with the towel wrapped around her shoulders, rubbing her arms through the rough fabric.
"Mama, it's scratchy."
"I know, baby. I'm sorry."
The motel towels feel like sandpaper. Nothing like the soft ones we have at home. Had. The ones I bought on clearance at Target two years ago, washed so many times they went soft as clouds.
I don't have clothes for her.
The thought lands now, stupid and late.
"Can I wear my dress again?"
"It's wet, sweetheart. From the puddle, remember?"
She nods, serious. "The game."
"The game."
I look around the bathroom like clothes might appear. They don't. All I have is what's on my body and what's on hers, and hers is soaked through.
"Okay." I stand up, thinking. "New game. You're going to wear Mama's shirt to sleep in. Like a nightgown. A princess nightgown."
Nina considers this. "Princesses wear pink."
"This princess wears gray. She's a special kind of princess." I pull my hoodie and my t-shirt over my head. The shirt is big enough on Nina that it hits her ankles. She looks down at herself and giggles.
"I'm swimming in it."
"You're beautiful. The most beautiful princess in the whole kingdom."
I wear my hoodie again and carry her to the bed. The sheets are stiff and smell like industrial bleach, but they're clean. Nina climbs in and I tuck the blanket around her chin, the way she likes.
"Mama, where are we?"
"A hotel."
"Why?"
"Because." I brush her damp hair back from her forehead. "Sometimes mamas and their girls go on adventures."
"Like Dora?"
"Exactly like Dora."
She accepts everything I tell her because she trusts me, and that trust sits in my chest like a stone I'm carrying uphill.
I lie down next to her on top of the covers, and she curls into my side. Her body is warm and small and smells like cheap motel soap.
The man at the diner.
I've been running from the thought since I saw him, but now, in the dark, with Nina's breathing starting to slow, it catches up.
He was parked at the back door. My door. The one I use every night at the same time.
But if he knew where I worked, he knew where I lived. The apartment is four blocks from the diner. He could have come there. Could have waited outside my building instead of outside my job.
Unless he didn't know where I lived.
Unless he only had the diner.
I stare at the ceiling and try to think. Dominik kept everything separate. His work, his debts, his lies—all in different boxes. I didn't know about any of it until after he died, until men started showing up at the apartment asking for money I didn't have.
Maybe whoever Dominik owed had the diner address but not the apartment. Maybe I'd been hiding in plain sight this whole time, four blocks away, and they never knew.
Which means I just ran from the one safe place I had.
Or it means nothing. It means I don't know anything, the same way I didn't know anything when Dominik was alive.
Nina's hand finds mine in the dark. Her fingers are so small. She holds on even in her sleep now. She didn't used to do that. Before.
I miss my apartment. The radiator that clanks at 3 a.m. The window that sticks. Nina's drawings taped to the refrigerator. The smell of the laundry detergent I buy because it's the cheapest one that doesn't make her skin itch.
I miss home.
Not this home. The real one. The one in Wisconsin, where my parents still live in the house I grew up in. Where my mom grows tomatoes in the backyard and my dad fixes things that don't need fixing just to have something to do with his hands.
I could call them.
The thought surfaces and I push it down, the way I've been pushing it down for eighteen months.
They don't know. They think I'm fine. They think I have a good job and a nice apartment and Nina is thriving in preschool.
They think I'm okay because that's what I told them.
I can't call now and say actually, I'm sleeping in a motel with forty-three dollars to my name and men are looking for me because of money my dead husband owed to people I've never met. I can't say I've been lying for eighteen months. I can't say I'm not okay. I was never okay.
It's not pride. It's not shame.
It's that my mom cried for three days when I told her Dominik died. She flew out for the funeral and held my hand and told me everything would be alright. I looked at her face and saw how much it hurt her to see me hurting.
I can't do that to her again.
I can't call and hear her voice break. Can't watch my dad try to fix something he can't fix. Can't see the way they'd look at Nina and know that I failed her. That I married a man who lied to me and now my daughter is paying for it.
They'd help. I know they would. They'd empty their savings, drive down, take us home and never say a single word about how stupid I was.
That's worse.
Nina shifts against me, her breath warm on my arm. I pull her closer and close my eyes.
Not yet.
I'm not ready to tell them yet.
Gemma
The footsteps stop outside the door.
Not passing by. Stopped.
I'm off the bed before I've decided to move, my body running calculations my brain hasn't caught up with yet. Nina's still asleep, small and warm under the thin blanket. The deadbolt is turned.
My sneakers are by the door. I grab one. It's not a weapon. It's barely anything. But it's what I have.
The lock clicks.
Something metal sliding against metal, the sound of a tool doing what keys are supposed to do.
I position myself between the door and the bed. My hand is shaking.
The door swings open.
I throw the sneaker before I see anything but shadow. It connects with a dull thud—head height, solid impact—and the shape in the doorway goes still.
"Nina, come here." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Too steady. "Come to Mommy right now."
Nina makes a sound behind me, confused and scared, woken up wrong. I reach back without looking, find her arm, pull her off the bed and behind me in one motion.
"The fuck—" The voice is low, rough, annoyed rather than hurt. A man's voice. He steps into the light from the parking lot and I see him clearly for the first time.
He's tall. Not huge, but tall enough that he fills the doorway.
Dark hair cut short. His face is all angles.
Sharp jaw, sharper cheekbones, a mouth set in a hard line.
But it's his eyes that make my stomach drop.
Pale green, almost gray in this light, and completely still.
The kind that comes from knowing exactly what you're capable of.
He's holding my sneaker in one hand.
"You stole my fucking car."
The words land somewhere far away. I'm cataloguing everything else. The way he's standing with his weight slightly off his right leg. The way his free hand hasn't moved toward anything but stays loose at his side, ready.
He looks exactly like the men Dominik used to meet in parking lots. The ones who came to the house when I wasn't supposed to be home. The ones who stopped talking when I walked into a room.
"Stay back." I pull Nina tighter against my legs. She's crying now, quiet little hiccups that break something in my chest. "I'll scream."
"Scream all you want. Nobody in this shithole is calling the cops." He tosses the sneaker onto the floor. It lands with a soft thump. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here for my goddamn car."
Of course it had a tracker. Of course I didn't think to check. Of course I'm an idiot who stole a car from someone who could afford to track it.
"Mommy?" Nina's voice is tiny. Terrified.
I don't answer her. I can't look away from him. Can't give him an opening.
Luca
The kid's face freezes.
Not the startled kind of freeze, the way a child might look if a stranger walked in during a game. This is pure terror. I recognize because I've seen it on grown men in the seconds before they understand they're going to die.
She doesn't cry anymore. Doesn't make a sound. Just goes absolutely still behind her mother's legs, eyes too big for her face, fingers twisted in the fabric of an oversized t-shirt.
Fuck.
I didn't think. The tracker pinged, I drove, I picked the lock. Thirty seconds, maybe less. I've done it a thousand times. Walked into rooms I wasn't invited to, dealt with whatever was inside.
But this isn't a warehouse. It's not a back office or a shipping container.
It's a motel room, and there's a kid in it who's looking at me like I'm the monster under her bed.
My chest does something I don't let it do. A pull, low and tight, in a place I thought I'd burned out years ago. The girl is—
Four. Maybe five.
Dark hair. Damp from a bath.
The same age she would have been.
I look away. Force my eyes to the woman instead.
She's barefoot, wearing jeans and a hoodie that's seen too many washes.
Brown hair pulled back, strands escaping around a face that's all sharp angles and exhaustion.
Pretty, in the way people are pretty when they're too tired to hide anything.
No makeup, no armor, just skin and whatever's keeping her standing between me and her daughter.
Her eyes are the color of ocean. They don't leave my face.
She's terrified. I can see it in the rapid pulse at her throat, the way her breathing has gone shallow and fast. But she hasn't moved. Hasn't stepped back. Her body is a wall, and she's not going to let me past without going through her first.
I've seen that look before. On mothers in Naples, in Calabria, in a dozen places where men like me walked through doors uninvited. The ones who would die before they'd move.
"Why'd you steal my fucking car?"
My voice comes out rougher than needed. The girl flinches behind her mother's legs, and I hate myself a little more.
"I thought—" The woman's voice catches. She swallows, tries again. "I thought someone was following me. From work. I saw your car and the keys were there and I just—I panicked."
"So you took it."
"Yes." She doesn't look away. Doesn't make excuses. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. I was scared and I wasn't thinking and my daughter was with me and I just—"
She stops. Takes a breath.
"I can't pay you back. Not right now. I don't have—" Her jaw tightens. "I don't have anything. But I will. Somehow. I'll figure it out and I'll repay you for whatever damage I caused, whatever inconvenience, I'll—"
"I don't want your money."
The words come out flat. Final.
She blinks. Something shifts in her expression—confusion, maybe, or a new kind of fear.
I could tell her that money means nothing to me. That I have enough to bury three generations and still leave plenty for whoever's left. That there's nothing she could give me that would matter, nothing anyone could give me, because the only thing I ever wanted got lost once and for all—
Cold metal presses against the back of my skull.
The click of a safety disengaging.
"Don't fucking move," a voice says behind me.