23. In the Dark #2
Francesca is sobbing in the far seat, deep and broken, having just learned the precise market value of her own life.
I look at her across the dark interior, the woman who found me, made me, named me, and sold me, and I discover that I have nothing to say.
Some betrayals don't take words. I survive this one and keep my hand where it's needed.
She tries anyway, between the sobs, like confession is a thing that still buys something.
"You have to understand," Francesca chokes out.
"It was never a choice, Emilia. I didn't find you ten years ago.
They found you, and they sent me." Her voice collapses in on itself.
"Your whole career. The mentorship, the contract, the version of me you loved.
" A wet, ruined breath. "It was the assignment.
I was the assignment, from the first lunch to the last phone call.
And I have been sorry every single day of it. "
The last lie in my life dies quietly, and I find I'm too tired to even bleed for it.
I don't answer her. I just turn from the woman sent to me to look at the man who came for me. That's when I see it: black against the black of his sleeve, a slow gleam in the passing streetlight. His left arm.
"Leo. You're hit."
He's already answering. "Graze." He doesn't turn from the windshield. "It can wait."
"It cannot." I'm already across the seat, finding the tear in the fabric, the hot, wet of it, the furrow a bullet plowed through him in a dark room while he was busy rescuing me. My palm goes flat against it. I bear down, and he draws in a breath through his teeth, says nothing else.
A few blocks east, where the warehouses go quiet and the streetlights thin, Leo signals Petey into an alley and tells him to kill the engine.
"Need a minute," he says.
Petey nods without looking at him. The kid was raised by women who knew when to look the other way.
Leo gets out, doesn't take off his earpiece, doesn't say a word to me. He walks ten feet to the brick wall opposite the car, stops, and stands there with his back to us long enough that I almost get out after him. Then his right fist goes up.
The first hit makes a small sound inside the car.
So does the second. On the third, the brick takes a piece of him and gives nothing back.
After that, his hand stays against the wall, blood there or already on its way.
He keeps it where it landed for a moment, head down, the way he steadies himself when the next sentence of his life has to be a lie or a goodbye, and he hasn't picked which.
I understand, with a clarity I will not be able to fold back into later.
Twenty years ago, a boy came to a woman's kitchen at dawn and cried into the front of her dress for an hour.
The woman who held him is also the one who killed his brother.
Tonight, he has just lost the man who has stood in a kitchen for him.
Tommy was his Dario. Twenty years apart, and the same family did both. There is no kitchen left for him to cry in. The woman who would have fed him is in the ground. I am her daughter, and I do not have the right.
I cry then, finally. Not gracefully, not the controlled wet I let out for the cellar letter. The real thing, with sound in it, the kind that comes up the throat in pieces, didn't ask permission to leave the body.
Tommy. I never properly thanked him. Two nights ago, he sat across from us at the kitchen table and made instant coffee that should have been a crime. That's the last thing I'll have of him: the coffee and the joke he never made about it, because the joke was the coffee.
He told us. He sat at our counter with a jar of coffee and told us, but we couldn’t hear him.
Tell him. That one's mine.
He named where he was going and made it sound like a joke about a sandwich. I am crying into the dark of a car with my hand on the man who is left.
Francesca, beside me, has the grace to go very quiet.
Leo comes back, gets in, and closes the door with the bloodied hand because the other arm is the one I am holding shut.
He doesn't look at me yet, just rests the injured hand against his thigh and stares at the windshield like he's already pulled away from something he won't open again until he is alone.
"Drive a long way," he tells Petey. "Anywhere but where we've been."
Petey drives.
I keep my palm pressed against the furrow in Leo's arm, and I do not let go.
After a long while, his good left hand lifts from his thigh, finds mine, and stays there.
The thumb strokes once across my knuckles, the same way it did across a kitchen table the night we read the journals.
He does it once, then settles his hand back where it was. That's what I'm allowed.
Petey takes us through the bleeding city, steady and unhurried, Leo's profile lit, gone, lit again beside me.
Behind us, a woman sent to me weeps for her stolen years.
Beside me, a man sent to me by a dead woman with a longer memory, watches the road run out under us at exactly the speed limit, so no one thinks to stop us.
Two people were sent into my life on purpose. My palm has not moved. With my whole body, I have just chosen between them, and I didn't need a single word to do it.
Somewhere behind us, on a street I will never go back to without smelling him, a third man stayed, and that one I will never get to thank.