Nadia
He is gone when I wake up.
The bed beside me is cold. The covers are pulled up the way a man pulls them up when he has decided not to wake the woman he is leaving. The pillow has the dent of his head and the smell of him, and nothing else.
I do not move for a minute.
My throat does the thing it does when I am not going to cry, and my body has not yet received the message.
Then I move.
I get out of bed. I put on the t-shirt that was on the floor. I walk barefoot through my own apartment in the hard noon light of a Saturday and look at every place he was.
Kitchen island. Granite cleaned. The stool pushed back to the counter at the angle a man pushes a stool when he has decided to leave no trace.
Coffee cup. Washed. Drying upside down on a towel beside the sink.
His shirt. Gone.
I cross to the closet.
The panel is back in place. The hanging organizer is in the position I left it in. The closet floor has been swept of the small flakes of paint that panel housing leaves when it has been worked loose and put back.
He swept the floor.
Cazzo — fuck.
I open the panel. I open the safe. Empty except for the family tree, folded the way I folded it.
He folded it back the way he found it.
I take it out. I unfold it. I look at the page.
It is the page I drafted six weeks ago for the legal addendum on Maria's estate. The estate has been settled for a long time. I keep the chart anyway because it is the thing I look at when I need to remember what I am protecting and what I am not.
Vittorio Antonio Moretti. Maria Isabella Moretti. Three sons. Alessandro. Matteo. Luca.
Matteo Moretti. Born February 12, 1988.
Sean Donovan was born on February 12, 1988.
Sean Donovan saw this page sometime between 9:37 a.m. and whatever time he left. He read it. He folded it. He put it back. He swept the floor, locked the safe, and did not wake me up.
He saw it. He did not ask me about it. He left.
He left because he is a cop, and a cop does not ask the woman in the bed beside him a question whose answer he cannot afford to hear.
He left because he now has a question, and he is going to find the answer himself.
He left because asking me would have made me lie to his face, and we have already done enough of that in this apartment in the last however many hours.
He left to give us both the courtesy of not lying.
Stronzo — asshole.
Sean Donovan is the man who is going to ruin my career. He is also the man who, when he found the answer to the question we have not been asking each other, did me the courtesy of not asking.
I do not know what to do with that.
I go to my desk.
The Internal Affairs complaint has been two weeks in the making. I finished it before Sean arrived. I sent it before he knocked on my door.
Sean Donovan is going to die if I do not stop him.
He is going to keep coming for the Morettis, and he is going to keep coming for the Greek, and at some point in the next two weeks, one of those things is going to kill him before I can stop it.
I cannot stop him by asking. I tried that in the alley.
I cannot stop him by loving him. This morning proved that.
The complaint pulls him off the field for a week or two. A week is what I need.
I drafted the memo. I routed it through three intermediaries. I sent it. I closed the laptop. I would rather be hated by a man who is alive than mourned by one who is not.
The second problem is Alessandro.
He has given me until Monday at 8 a.m. to bring him the Stavros file. Two years of work. The only private operational asset I have that Alessandro does not know about.
I am not going to hand him the Stavros file. I need to give him something so large that he stops looking at the small thing.
The lost heir is the something.
The IA complaint buys Sean a week. The Morettis buy him the rest of his life.
He is not going to see it that way. I need him to be alive on Tuesday morning when Alessandro looks across a table at his fourth brother for the first time.
I go to the bedroom. I open the safe.
The envelope is there. Maria Isabella Moretti's handwriting on a form she filled out in a hospital bed thirty-eight years ago, with two babies in the room and a husband who did not yet know what she was writing.
I take it out.
I hold it.
I have held documents my entire career. Contracts. Depositions. Warrants. Financial instruments that moved money through structures so clean that no federal eye would ever catch them.
I have never held a document that felt like this one.
This one feels like a letter.
This one feels like a woman in a hospital bed writing to a son she was about to lose and did not yet know she was about to lose. Writing his name down in her own hand because the name was hers to give, and she was going to give it before anyone could take it.
Emilio Vittorio Moretti.
She gave him a name.
Kostas Stavros took the name away and gave him another one.
The man the city knows as Sean Donovan has been walking around this city for thirty-eight years with a name that was never supposed to be his.
Investigating a family that has been lighting a candle for him every February 12 of his life.
I put the document back in the envelope. I put the envelope in the portfolio. I close the safe.
I put on the charcoal suit.
The same charcoal as the one I wore into the Long Island City warehouse on a Tuesday night. Black blouse. Hair pulled back. The boots that mean business.
I look in the mirror.
The woman in the mirror is the consigliera. She is not the woman who said I am yours with her eyes open four hours ago. She is not the woman who let a cop sweep her closet floor so she could keep pretending he had not seen the family tree.
I am going to need to be the woman in the mirror for the next forty-five minutes.
I leave.
Alessandro is at his desk when I walk in.
Manhattan behind him. The man and the city. Both his.
He is in a suit on a Saturday afternoon because Alessandro Moretti is always in a suit. He looks up when I set the portfolio on the desk. He does not ask why I am two days early. He waits.
I open the portfolio. I take out the application document. I put it on the desk between us.
He picks it up. He reads it.
I have known Alessandro Moretti for ten years. I have watched his face do a great many things and not do a great many things. I have not watched it do what it is doing now.
He reads for a full minute. He does not move. He does not shift in his chair. He does not put the document down. He reads it the way a man reads something he has been waiting his whole life to read and is not going to rush.
He sets the document down. He does not look at me. He looks at the wall behind me.
"Where did you get this?"
His voice is not the office voice. It is the voice of a man whose mother lit a candle every February 12 for a baby she was told had heart complications.
"A nurse in Yonkers. Margaret Voss. Maternity ward at St. Catherine’s, the night the twins were born.
She was paid by Kostas Stavros to file a falsified application after this one.
She kept the original. She placed it in a safety deposit box the night Frank Donovan died and gave the key to the man whose name was supposed to be on it. "
He is quiet. He is quiet, as Alessandro is when he is not processing information. He has already processed it. He is deciding what to do with it.
He still does not look at me.
"He is alive."
"Yes."
"He is in this city."
"Yes."
He turns. He looks at me for the first time since I walked in.
"Do you know who this is?”
"Sean Donovan. NYPD. Organized Crime Bureau."
"Donovan." He says the name the way a man says a name he has just learned, he has been searching for his whole life without knowing it. "The man on the security feed from the cabin."
"Yes."
"The cop who was in a warehouse, he should not have been in on a Tuesday night."
"Yes."
"Nadia."
"Yes."
"How long have you known?”
"Since 8:42 a.m. this morning."
He looks at me for a long second. He does not ask why I came two days early. He does not ask what made me decide. He reads it on my face and chooses not to make me say it out loud.
That is mercy. I do not deserve it. I take it anyway.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Bring him in. Alive. We do this on our terms, not his. I want him in this office, in this building, on this side of every line my brother has been on alone for thirty-eight years."
"He is NYPD."
"I do not care that he is NYPD."
"He has a complaint with Internal Affairs as of this morning, routed through Moretti Legal."
He looks at me.
"Good. That is the kind of work I pay you for, Nadia. Bring him in by Tuesday."
"Yes, sir."
"And the Stavros file."
"Monday at 8 a.m."
"Tomorrow at 8 a.m."
I have just lost a day.
Of course, he read me.
I have been his consigliera for ten years. I know every tell he has. He knows every tell I have. We have been reading each other across this desk for a decade, and I walked in here thinking I could outmaneuver him with a document.
He turned the document into a leash.
He turns it face down on his desk. He is going to look at it for the rest of his life, but not for another second in this office with me in it.
"You can go."
I go.
The hallway is empty. The elevator is empty. The parking level is empty.
I get in my car. I do not start the engine.
I came in to buy two weeks. I bought it one day.
I traded Sean's freedom for one day on the Stavros file.
I traded the man who told me he chose me. Who put his hand on my throat and let me say I am yours in the morning light. Who folded a family tree back the way he found it and swept the floor of my closet because he wanted me to be able to keep pretending he had not seen it.
I traded him to the only people in this city who can keep him alive.
That is the sentence I am going to say to myself every time the consigliera’s face slips and the woman who said, "I am yours," tries to get back into the car.
The Morettis can keep him alive. I cannot.
I have lost one person to a Greek already. I am not losing another.
I am not allowed to feel sick about it.
I feel sick about it.
I open the glovebox.
I take out the second phone. The phone that is not on any of the Moretti registries. The phone that has been in this glovebox for two years and has not yet rung.
It rings.
In my hand.
Unknown number.
I press accept.
I do not speak.
A breath on the other end. Older. The breath of a man who has been smoking for fifty years.
"Ms. Ferraro."
The voice is Greek.
"You have something I have waited thirty-eight years to recover."
I do not breathe.
"We should talk."