Chapter 10 #2
“What if I want something else?”
He looked up. The corner of his mouth moved.
“Order the rigatoni.”
I looked at my menu. Looked at him. The candle between us lit the angles of his face in amber—the crooked nose, the jaw, the eyes that watched me the way they always watched me. Dark. Steady. Warm.
I ordered the rigatoni.
It was, of course, extraordinary.
I ate the first bite and my face did the thing before my brain could intervene. The specific, involuntary expression of someone whose expectations have been exceeded against their will. My eyes closed for half a second. That was all it took.
“Good?” He wasn’t looking at his own plate. He was watching me.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Your eyes closed.”
“I was blinking.”
The corner of his mouth lifted again. Small. Devastating. He turned to his own food.
I ate the rigatoni. It was, objectively, the best pasta I’d ever had.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
I looked up.
“Not the job.” His eyes were steady. “Not who sent you. Just you. Before.”
I felt my pulse race.
“Foster care,” I said. The word landed flat. I’d had twenty years of practice making it land flat, draining it of the weight people attached to it—the pity, the discomfort, the careful recalibration of eye contact. “When I was young, my family kind of, uh, fell apart.” A pause. “I moved a lot.”
He nodded. No expression of sympathy. No careful reorientation. He just received it and waited.
“Chicago mostly. Some suburbs. There was a shelter on the South Side where I spent a winter when I was eleven.” I turned the wine glass by the stem.
“A group home in Logan Square. Another one in Humboldt Park. And then West Side—a place called Lakeview House, which was neither a lake nor a view but did have a very thorough lock on the supply closet.”
“How thorough?”
“Five-pin tumbler. Kwikset.” A beat. “I got through it in six minutes the second time.”
He was quiet for a moment. “The first time?”
“Eighteen.” I said. “Reena showed me. Girl in my unit. She’d grown up in a building where the heat got cut off every January, so she’d learned to get into the utility room to mess with the thermostat.
” I could see her still—quick hands, dark braids, the particular self-possession of a fourteen-year-old who had learned that the world didn’t give you access and so you took it.
“She taught me. Bobby pin and a piece of bent wire. The same tools.”
“That you used on my deadbolt.”
“The very same.”
He picked up his wine. Drank. Set it down. “How old were you?”
“Fourteen.” My turn to watch him. “Young enough to think it was cool. Old enough to know it was useful.”
The thing I didn’t say: the first time a lock opened under my hands it felt like the first time anything in my life had said yes.
Every door before that had been closed by someone else, locked by someone else, opened or not opened at someone else’s discretion.
The lock didn‘t care about that. The lock had a mechanism, and the mechanism responded to pressure applied correctly, and I had learned to apply it correctly, and after that I had access.
To rooms. To options. To the particular freedom of a person who understands that most barriers are just problems nobody bothered to solve.
“Your turn,” I said.
He leaned back against the booth. The leather creaked under his shoulders. “What do you want to know?”
“Your brothers.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not closing—the opposite.
A relaxing, like a word finally spelled right.
“Dante’s the don.” He said it with a specificity that contained thirty-four years of history.
“He runs everything. Knows everyone, forgets nothing, has never in his life raised his voice or lost his tie.”
“Do you like him?”
“He’s my brother.”
“That‘s not what I asked.”
A pause. He turned his glass by the stem, mirroring me.
“He’s the best man I know,” he said finally.
“He’s also the most exhausting person to have a conversation with because he thinks four moves ahead and by the time you’ve figured out what he’s already decided you were going to do, you’ve already done it. ”
I understood that. “And Marco?”
The expression that crossed his face was so specific—fond and exasperated and slightly helpless—that I almost laughed before the sentence even came out.
“Marco,” he said, “has never walked into a room and failed to own it in his life. Doesn’t matter the room. Doesn’t matter who‘s in it. He smiles at people and they give him things. Bank tellers. Cops. Once, memorably, a federal agent.” He paused. “The agent bought him coffee.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I watched it happen.”
“The agent—“
“Bought him coffee. And gave him his card. In case Marco ever needed anything.” Santo‘s jaw tightened with the particular suffering of an older brother who has witnessed this phenomenon too many times and has run out of frameworks to explain it.
“Marco kept the card. He sends the man a Christmas card. Every year.”
I laughed.
It came out before I could stop it—genuine, unguarded, the kind of laugh that lives in the chest rather than the throat and arrives without permission.
I felt myself do it and couldn’t stop. The image of Marco Caruso receiving a business card from a federal agent while his brother watched in suppressed agony was somehow the funniest thing I’d heard in six days of my life being completely dismantled.
Santo looked at me. His eyes were warm. Warmer than I’d seen them—the humor reaching his face and changing it, softening the jaw and the set of the brow, making him look younger. Making him look like himself, I thought, and then wondered what I meant by that.
“He’s the baby,” Santo said. “They always let him get away with everything.”
“You’re the middle.”
“I’m aware.”
“The loud one.”
He pointed at me across the candle. “That‘s their word for it.”
“What’s yours?”
The pause was short. “The persuasive one,” he said.
I looked at him across the small table with the wine and the candle and the remnants of the rigatoni between us, and I thought: I didn’t expect you to be funny. I didn’t expect you to be kind.
I hadn’t expected any of it.
The restaurant had emptied around us. The silver-haired woman was at the bar, folding napkins, not watching us and watching us. The candle had burned lower. A second glass of wine had appeared at some point without either of us asking.
Neither of us mentioned the time.
Afterward, without asking id I wanted to, he drove toward the lake.
I recognized where we were headed by the third turn—the grid of streets rearranging itself into the familiar approach, the city angling toward water. Everything in Chicago pointed east eventually. You could lose your bearings a dozen different ways but the lake was always there to find them.
He parked north of the harbor. We got out.
The wind came off the water and hit like a hand—cold, flat, the specific chill of Lake Michigan in November, which took everything summer had built and dismantled it without apology.
I pulled the wool coat tighter. The collar turned up.
It smelled faintly of cedar and something else underneath, something I’d been cataloging without meaning to.
His closet.
We walked. The path ran parallel to the water—grey and choppy, white-capped further out, the surface moving with the restless energy of something that didn’t know how to be still.
The skyline sat behind us, the towers going pale in the afternoon cloud.
Ahead, the harbor, the boat launches empty, the summer infrastructure folded up and stored.
A few people moved along the path at a distance, bundled and purposeful. Nobody looked at us.
Nobody except Sal, watching from a distance.
The silence between us was comfortable now.
Six days ago his silences had felt like walls—strategic, fortified, the deliberate absence of speech deployed as pressure.
Now it felt like the restaurant had felt, like the booth and the wine and the candle: just two people who didn’t always need to fill the space.
“I used to run here,” I said.
The words came out without planning. My feet knew this pavement. The body held routes the mind had let go of—a specific acceleration at the bend near the bird sanctuary, the way the wind shifted at the harbor mouth. Some reflex of familiarity speaking before I could think about whether to let it.
“I know,” he said.
I looked at him.
“I saw, at your apartment,” he said. Same flat delivery he used for everything that mattered. No apology in it, no embarrassment—the matter-of-fact acknowledgment of a man who had done a thing for a reason and was not going to perform guilt about it. “When I went for Midge. I walked through.”
“You walked through.”
“I looked around.” He paused. “Briefly.”
I turned back to the water. The waves pushed at the concrete lip of the path and retreated, pushed and retreated, the rhythm patient and indifferent. I thought about my apartment.
“How did you work that out from my apartment?”
“The map,” he said, quietly.
Of course. It was on the wall beside the window—a city map, paper, pinned flat. I’d traced my routes on it in red pen. Montrose Harbor at dawn. The path along the river. The long loop through Humboldt Park when I needed more than five miles.
“You saw my routes.”
“Didn’t know for sure they were to run, but there were other clues.
He was quiet for a moment. We kept walking—his stride longer than mine, adjusted to match without being asked.
“Other clues?”
“Running shoes by the door,” he said. “Worn through on the right heel more than the left.”
“Jesus, you’re a regular Sherlock Homes.”
He grinned. “It’s not all I noticed.”
“Please, tell me more.”
“Books—a lot. Stacked sideways on top of the ones shelved upright. The dog bowls lined up by the sink. Three of them, which seemed like a lot for one four-pound dog.”
“She has preferences.”