Epilogue Caterina
Six months in and the bank manager still has the same tie clip.
Different shirt, same clip. I clock it before I clock his face, which is the kind of thing I notice now because I am allowed to notice small things instead of cataloguing them against a deadline.
I sign the access log with my own pen, the one I keep in the inside pocket of the coat.
My name, in the hand that is mine, not Gemma's, not anyone's.
"Row fourteen," he says, like he knows me. He does. I have been in twice. This is the second time.
The basement smells the same. Carpet glue. Old printer. The fluorescent buzz that lives in every safe-deposit vault in the five boroughs by what I assume is contractual obligation. He turns his key. I turn mine. The drawer comes out on its runner. I lift the lid.
The folded page is exactly where I left it.
I do not look at the name written above the closed column. I do not need to. I have not opened the page in six months and the page has not opened itself.
I take an envelope out of my coat pocket, the heavy cream kind Ottavia keeps in a drawer in the upstate kitchen because Ottavia does not believe in printer paper for things that matter, and I slide the folded page inside.
I have the address already written. A lawyer in Palermo whose name Ottavia gave me over coffee in September with the same expression she uses for anchovy specifications.
I write the instruction on the inside flap with my own pen, in plain Italian, in a hand that is steady. Record the closed name as cleared. Record Gemma Fioretti's as the debt it cancels.
I say the name out loud at the counter while I seal the envelope. Quiet, but out loud. Gemma Fioretti.
The weight that I have carried since the canal photograph shifts by exactly the measure of one name spoken correctly. Not gone. Different. I know the gap between the two now and that is enough.
The manager does not ask what I am mailing.
The manager has, in six months, learned the shape of me.
He hands me the receipt for the box access.
I hand him the envelope for the courier.
The mechanical click of the drawer going back is the same as the one in November.
Same period at the end of the same sentence, said now in a different mouth.
Upstairs, Ditmars at ten in the morning is doing what Ditmars does. A bus exhales at the curb. Somebody's grandmother is hauling a tartan cart of groceries. The sky has the flat April light of a city that has given up on winter without formally announcing it.
Massimo
Caterina is on the stoop with Chiara. She has her hair off her face. She is gesturing with a coffee cup at me in the specific way she gestures when she is winning an argument she is pretending is casual.
"Salted cod is not catering, it is identity, and if you can't see the difference between identity and a cheese board, you should not be on this email chain."
"I'm not on the email chain."
"You are, I added you on Thursday."
"Take me off."
"No."
She sees me before she turns her head. She just turns her head because she has already seen me. I have learned this about her too. She does not need eyes for everything.
I hand her the bank receipt. She folds it once, lengthwise, flat, and slides it into the inside pocket of her jacket.
No ceremony. The pocket where she keeps the things she intends to find later.
I have watched her fold a deed of sale, a wedding date, a license plate, and now this, all into the same flat crease.
"Done?"
"Done."
She presses her lips together, the way she does when she has decided something but is waiting to see if I will say it first.
"Florists," Chiara says to me, because she has decided I am the swing vote. "Tell him."
"What am I telling him?"
"That ranunculus are not a flower for a March fundraiser."
"It's April."
"Late March in spirit. The donors are the kind who think it's still Lent."
"Use peonies."
"Peonies are out of season."
"Then lie."
She points the coffee cup at me. "This. This is why I made her sign the operating agreement."
She is talking about the estate, which she converted into a legal events venue in January with Ottavia as silent financial authority and herself as the loudest operational one, and which she now refers to in possessive pronouns as if she gestated it.
She did, in a sense. She and Ottavia gestated it together over three months and a series of arguments about lighting fixtures that I refused to mediate.
"I'm not signing anything else," I say.
"You signed a prenup last week."
"That was different."
"That was a Tuesday."
She watches us, both hands in her pockets, the way she watches most things now, which is from a half step back with her attention completely on. The ring on her left hand catches the morning light when she lifts it to push her hair off her face.
I put it on her six weeks ago in the kitchen on Mulberry, mid-argument about oregano, slid it onto her finger without breaking eye contact, and she said yes before she fully registered the question.
Ottavia produced a Barolo she had apparently been holding for the occasion.
Pino shook my hand for so long I had to take it back.
We had both been waiting for a Tuesday small enough to hold it.
"Subway," she says.
"Subway."
Chiara waves us off with her coffee cup, already on her phone, already arguing with someone else about citrus.
We walk to the N.
She does not put a hand on my back. She has not done that, in public, since November.
She learned, the way she learns things that matter, that the hand on the back was a gesture from a previous life.
The hand she uses now is the one she is already holding out, palm up, at the top of the subway stairs.
I lace my fingers through hers.
The city is loud and ordinary around us. A man two steps down is arguing with his earpiece about a delivery. A woman behind us is telling her daughter, in Greek, to stop scuffing her shoes. The R rumbles below the grate.
The list in my head is shorter by one name. The woman wearing the rest of it is entirely her own.
Caterina
The apartment on Mulberry is on the fourth floor of a building that has spent a hundred years deciding how it wants to lean.
My key. My lock. The deadbolt Pino changed in March and pretended not to enjoy changing.
I go in first, because I go in first, and he follows, and the door shuts the city down to a hum two panes thick.
"You let her add me to the email chain," he says, behind me.
"I did not let her. Chiara does not require letting."
"Salted cod is identity." He drops his keys in the bowl. "She made me repeat it back."
"Did you mean it."
"I meant the part where she stopped talking after."
I laugh. He does not move toward me yet. Six months ago he would have. He stands there and lets the laugh finish, watching my mouth do it, and that is new, and I let it be new.
I hang up the coat. The good one. Mine.
"Come here," I say.
"You come here. You're closer to the wine."
"That is the laziest line you have ever run on me."
"It worked."
It works. I bring the wine and I bring myself and he takes the bottle out of my hand and sets it on the counter without looking, because he is looking at me, and he backs me to the kitchen table, the one we fought about, too big for the room until it wasn't, and lifts me onto the edge of it with both hands at my waist.
"This table," I say.
"I know what it's for now."
"Do you."
"I've had six weeks of theories."
He kisses me. Not slow. He did slow the whole way here; he is done with it. He kisses me like a man who already knows what I sound like and intends to hear it.
I get his shirt open and shove it off his shoulders. He lets the cuffs catch at his wrists a beat too long, to see if I will wait. I do not. I drag it off and put my hands flat on his chest and push, and he goes back against the table edge and lets me.
"Tell me," he says, against my throat.
"Tell you what."
"What you came up four flights for. You've been deciding since the subway."
I put my mouth to his ear.
"I want your mouth on me first. On the table. In the light." His hands go still at my waist. "Then I want you to take your time. Slow enough that I lose track of the day." I pull back far enough to look at him. "And when I tell you to stop, you don't. That's the part I need you to hear."
"When you tell me to stop."
"When I tell you to stop is when I don't mean it."
"Say the middle part again."
"Slow enough that I lose the day."
"After," he says, and strips the rest off me on the table, both of us helping, no ceremony. He steps back half a step. Looks. I hold still in the April light and let him, and the muscle in his jaw works once, and his eyes come back up to mine before they are done with the rest of me.
He puts me where I told him to. He spreads me with his thumbs and puts his mouth on me, flat and slow, no careful learning in it, his tongue working the rhythm he found months ago and two fingers curling up into me to meet it.
My hand fists in his hair. The other drags flat across the table behind me with nothing to grip.
The first sound out of me comes back off the ceiling and the second is louder and I do not catch a single one of them.
"There." My heel hooks his shoulder. "Right there. Don't you dare stop."
He does not. He hums against my clit, low, and the buzz of it goes straight up into me, and it builds in my thighs first and then climbs, tightening, my heels pressing into his back and my spine lifting off the wood, and when it goes I tighten around his fingers and shake through it with his name at full voice, the real one, in my own apartment, with no one in five boroughs to keep it from.
He is up off his knees before I am finished, dragging me to the edge by the hips.
"Tell me the rest," he says.
"You know the rest."
"I want it out loud."
"Fuck me on this table, Massimo."
His eyes go black. He pushes in and neither of us pretends to be slow about it.
I lock my heels at the small of his back.
He drops his forehead to mine and swears, low, in Sicilian, the consonants coming apart in his mouth, and I do not file it for later.
I am not filing things for later anymore. I am here for it.
He gets a fist in my hair and tips my head back and puts his mouth at my ear.
"Every night," he says. "Walked past your door. Stood there." His hand tightens. "Counted the boards back to my own room so I wouldn't knock."
"You should have knocked."
"I know."
"Knock now."
He laughs against my throat, rough, and stops being careful with the last of it. I get a hand around the back of his neck.
"Mine," I tell him. "I picked you in a chapel with a gun in my hand. I'm still picking you."
His rhythm breaks on the word. Just once, a stutter, and then he catches it and slows, because slow is what I asked for.
So he gives it to me slow. The drag of his cock through me, all the way in and then almost out, his palm spread flat at my hip to hold me on the table edge, his forehead down on mine so his breath is in my mouth.
My heels lock behind him. My nails set into his shoulders and hold.
He keeps the pace I asked for even when I push up against him for more, and the not-getting-more winds it tighter, low in my belly, until I am the one coming apart and he is the one steady.
The English goes first. Then the rest, until the only words left in my mouth are the ones my mother cursed in, and he answers those, low, in his.
"Here," he says against my mouth, and he shifts his hips a half-inch and finds the spot dead-on and stays there, and I am shaking under him.
"Don't stop." Plain English, the last of it I have. "Don't you dare stop."
"Wasn't going to."
"Massimo."
"I've got you. Come with me."
And we do, together, not a half-beat apart the way it has been every other time but at the same moment: his cock pushed deep and going still and then pulsing into me, my body tightening around him on the same breath, the heat snapping loose low in me and going out through all of me, his name loud in my mouth and my own name breaking out of him against my throat, both of us shaking, the table taking all our weight because neither of us is holding any of it up.
After, he stays. Forehead to my collarbone, breath wrecked, his thumb moving on my hip like it has somewhere to be and that somewhere is exactly there.
"The ring's digging into my back," he says, into my skin. Not moving.
"Whose ring."
"Yours. Your hand's on my neck."
"Then it's your problem."
"It's my favorite problem."
I laugh, and he feels it go through both of us, and he lifts his head and looks at me with all of his face. No part of it held back. I look back the same. A year ago I did not have a face that did this. I have it now, on a table we fought about, in the good light.
"Anchovies tomorrow," he says.
"You're thinking about anchovies. Now."
"I'm thinking about Wednesday. She said Wednesday. It's Tuesday. We go early, which means on time, which is the only on time she accepts."
"Send Pino."
"Pino did one run. He is not doing a second. We go ourselves."
"We."
"We."
I put my head against his chest. His heart goes under my ear, steady, unhurried, a thing I get to keep.
Below us a truck idles and a man yells a number and another yells it back, and the city rearranges itself around a power that shifted in November the way cities do, before anyone checks the price of anything.
The list in my head is shorter by a name and will get shorter. The work on it is mine. Beside him. Behind no one.
The protection contracts ended in December. Chiara has the estate. We have the names still on the page.
The Valenti name still moves the way Valenti names have always moved in this city. The men who answer to it answer to me too now.
I do not count the exits.
I gave that up the day I stopped needing a way out of my own life.
THE END