The card sits in my coat pocket for three days like a coal I keep checking hasn't burned through the lining.

I don't take it out at night, when I'm alone with the radiator banging its code at me. I take it out at eleven in the morning, when the light's flat and ordinary and Cafe Bellini is empty except for Gennaro, who is polishing the green marble counter in slow circles he doesn't need to make, because pretending not to hear things is his actual profession, the one he's had for thirty-six years, longer than the coffee.

I walk past the second table from the window without sitting in it.

I go straight to the back, to the table with its back against the wall, where Dominic is reading something in a folder that isn't the ledger, and I put the card face-up on the table between us before I let myself think better of it.

Cream stock. Eagle seal. His name in a font built for authority instead of comfort.

Then I sit down across from him.

I have never once sat at this table. Four weeks of watching him from four tables away, of him crossing the room to me like weather moving toward a low-pressure system, and I have never sat here, in the seat that faces the door, the seat he's never offered anyone because — I understand this now, sitting in it — it's the seat where you see everything coming.

He looks at the card for a long time without touching it.

Long enough that I hear the grinder-that-isn't-there, the ghost of its fourth-pull shriek, long enough that Gennaro's polishing cloth goes still on the marble and then starts again, deliberately, a man giving us privacy by manufacturing noise.

"When," Dominic says finally. Not a question with a rising note. A word set down flat, like the first entry in a ledger.

"Monday. My steps." My voice comes out steadier than I expect, which surprises me enough that I hold onto it. "Three days ago."

"How long did he stand there."

"I don't know. Six minutes. Eight."

"What did he touch."

The question lands strange, too specific, and I feel my brow pull before I answer. "Nothing. He held two coffees. He put one down on the step when I didn't take it."

"What did he say about the cafe."

My stomach does the elevator drop, cable cut, because I hadn't clocked until this exact second that of course this is where he'd go, not to me, not to the four minutes of my own humiliation on my own stairs, but to the cafe, to this room, to the neutral ground he's spent seven months guarding like it's the only unclaimed thing in his life.

"He said he saw me. Coming out of the alley. Thursday night, around nine."

Something moves behind Dominic's eyes, small, contained, filed. "Did he use the word Russo."

"No." I make myself hold his gaze. "He didn't have to. He had a business card that did it for him."

Dominic reaches out one finger — the burn-scarred hand, the four inches of shiny tissue climbing to his wrist — and turns the card ninety degrees on the table without picking it up, the same gesture from the first day, when he turned my label comp toward himself and told me the lettering was a lie. I watch him read it again like the words might rearrange if he waits long enough.

"Special Agent," he says, to himself more than to me.

"Boston field office." I hear myself getting faster, the tell I hate, filling the silence before it can do to me what it did on the steps. "He's been feeding me a fraud-job cover story for seven years and I never once asked to see a badge, because you don't audit the man who—"

"Maya."

I stop.

"Where are your hours."

"What?"

"Since Monday. Where were you, when, for how long, who did you see."

The question hits somewhere just behind my sternum, and it takes me a full second to understand why it lands so wrong, why my jaw is already locking on the left side, the joint popping audibly enough that I have to work it loose with two fingers before I can speak.

"You're asking me to account for myself."

"I'm asking where you were."

"That's what he did." The words come up out of me before I've decided to say them, hot, and once they're out I can't call them back and don't want to. "That's exactly what he did, Dominic. For four years. Where were you, who were you with, why does that dress have a stain on it, why did that call last eleven minutes instead of six — he never touched me until the very end, you know that? Four years of just this. Just questions. Just a ledger with my name at the top of it." My hands are flat on the table now, and I can feel my nails have gone into my palms without my permission, four small crescents on each side, though I won't find them until later, in the bathroom, wondering when I made them. "You want my hours. That's what he did. Just with a spreadsheet instead of a gun."

I watch it land. I watch it actually land, which is somehow worse than if it hadn't — his hand goes flat on the table, slow, deliberate, the burn scar catching the window light, and for a second the whole room seems to hold its breath along with Gennaro's cloth going still again on the marble.

He doesn't apologize. I have been braced for either the apology or the anger and he gives me neither.

"He wanted to know so you'd be smaller," he says. Quiet. Not defensive. Worse than defensive — certain. "I want to know so you're breathing on Friday."

I open my mouth and nothing comes out for a second, because I don't have the sentence that beats that one, and I hate that I don't, and I hate more that some ugly, starved part of me wants to believe there's a difference, wants it so badly my throat goes tight around wanting it.

"How do I know that," I say finally. "How do I know that's not just a better sentence."

"You don't." He says it like a fact he's filed a long time ago and stopped being troubled by. "You'll have to decide."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

I press my tongue against the scar ridge inside my lower lip, the place I bit through years ago rather than say a true thing out loud, and for a second I consider doing it again, biting down until the old wound reopens and gives me something to focus on besides the ache building along my jaw from four weeks of clenching it in this exact chair — no, not this chair, I correct myself, I have never sat in this chair, and the wrongness of that fact is its own kind of vertigo.

"Fine," I say. "Then I get to ask something too."

He waits. Doesn't nod, doesn't invite it, just waits, which is somehow an invitation anyway.

"Seven months," I say. "You've sat in this cafe every single day since the fourth of March, back to the wall, waiting for someone you won't name. I've heard it from you, I've heard it from Nunzio, I've heard it from Gianni at that dinner table like it's a fact the whole family already knows and I'm the last one being told. So tell me. Who are you waiting for. And while you're at it — am I the reason your family's started asking questions about a woman in a coffee shop, or am I the answer you give them when they ask what you're actually doing here?"

Something changes in his face. Not softening — recalibrating, the way a man recalculates a number he thought he'd already closed the books on.

"You're not cover," he says.

"That's not an answer either."

"It's the only part I can give you."

"That's not good enough, Dominic." My voice cracks slightly on his name, which I hate, and I push through it. "I have a federal agent standing on my steps with my best friend's business address in his mouth. I have your family asking my mother about hydrangeas. I have a grinder that's been broken since the exact month you started sitting in this chair, and everyone in this cafe treats that fact like it means something, and nobody will tell me what. I am not asking you to hand me your whole life. I am asking you not to let me walk into the rest of mine blind."

He's quiet long enough that I think he isn't going to answer at all, and then he reaches into his jacket — not the folder, not the ledger — and sets something else on the table between us. A phone. Cheap, black, the kind you buy off a rack for forty dollars without ever going online with it, still faintly filmed with the plastic smell of new electronics.

"One number in it," he says. "Mine. You answer it. Every time. First ring."

I look at it sitting there on the white tablecloth next to Trevor's card, the two objects almost touching, and something in me goes cold and still, the exact temperature of the scar on my forearm going tight before the rest of me catches up to being afraid.

"No," I say.

He doesn't argue. He doesn't repeat himself. He just waits, the same waiting he did a second ago, patient as a debt collector who already knows the interest is doing his arguing for him, and the silence stretches out long enough that I hear the espresso machine hiss somewhere behind the counter, and Gennaro's cloth going in slow circles, and my own pulse in my ears, and somewhere under all of it the specific, humiliating truth that I want the phone. I want it the way you want a hand on the small of your back going down icy stairs, not because you can't manage the stairs, but because falling alone and falling with someone are different kinds of falling.

I pick it up.

I hate the relief that comes with it, immediate and total, my shoulders dropping half an inch before I've told them to, and I hate that he watches me feel it and doesn't say anything, doesn't gloat, just watches with the same flat attention he gave the label comp on the first day, like he's confirming something he already wrote down in a notebook a long time ago.

"If you tell me nothing," I say, because I'm not done, because taking the phone doesn't mean I've stopped needing the other thing, "I am going to find out from someone who wants to hurt me. Gianni already knows where my mother lives. Somebody already knows what I look like in a green coat in February. If you won't tell me what this cafe is for, somebody else will, and I don't think I'll like their version."

He looks at me for a long moment — grey-green eyes, sallow skin gone paler than usual in the window light, and something moves behind them that I can't read, that might be warning and might be grief and might, for all I know, be both wearing the same coat.

"Then don't find out," he says.

And it isn't comfort. I understand that immediately, the way you understand a slap before the sting arrives — it's the same sentence Nunzio handed me in Dominic's own front hall two weeks ago, ask him what he's waiting for before somebody else does, except now it's coming from the other direction, from the man himself, and it means the same thing both times: that there is a door in this whole arrangement I am not supposed to open, and everyone around me already knows exactly where it is.

I open my mouth to say something else — I don't know what, something about doors, about how you can't protect someone from a fire by refusing to tell them the house is burning — and that's when Gennaro comes around the counter.

He's carrying the cafe's landline. The beige one, the one bolted somewhere behind the register that I have never once seen leave the back office in four weeks of watching this room like it was the only interesting thing in Providence, its cord stretched taut and trailing behind him across the floor, looped twice around his forearm to keep it from dragging.

He sets the receiver down on the white tablecloth, next to the cheap phone, next to the cream card with its grey eagle seal, three objects now arranged like evidence nobody asked for, and he says one word.

"Florida."

Dominic's hand goes still over the table for exactly one second, the burn scar catching light again, and then he picks up the receiver and puts it to his ear, and I watch his face do nothing at all, which is somehow the loudest thing it's done since I sat down.

"Pop," he says.

I'm three feet away. Close enough, in a room this quiet, with a grinder that's been dead since March and a landline that carries sound the way old copper always does, tinny and bright and closer than it should be — close enough to hear the voice on the other end laugh, warm and easy, an old man's laugh with something wet underneath it, the kind of laugh that costs nothing and means everything.

And under the laugh, clear enough that I know I'm not inventing it, clear enough that I'll be hearing it in my own kitchen at three in the morning for weeks:

"Gianni says there's a girl."

Dominic's eyes come up from the tablecloth and find mine, and they hold there — steady, unreadable, the exact stillness of a man doing math he already finished a long time ago and is only now being asked to show his work — and neither of us says a single word while, three feet away and a thousand miles distant, his father waits for an answer.