Four o'clock in November in Providence isn't four o'clock anywhere else. It's already dark, streetlights buzzing on early and yellow, Atwells Avenue gone that particular blue-black that makes every shopfront look like it's underwater. I've got a white bakery box balanced against my hip — cannoli and a dozen pignoli cookies for tomorrow, my mother's Thanksgiving contribution laundered through a store because she'll die before she admits she didn't make them herself — and my car keys are already jammed between my knuckles the way you learn to hold them when you've spent four years walking to a car alone in the dark and nobody ever taught you to stop.

I see him before I clock that it's him. Just a shape against my driver's door, leaning like he's been there a while, like the cold doesn't touch him the way it touches normal people. Gold catches the streetlight first — the chain, the same chain, swinging loose against a leather coat zipped over the tracksuit like he couldn't decide this morning which uniform to wear and settled on both.

"Maya Ferraro," Gianni says, and gets both names right, first pass, no hitch, the way you'd say a word you'd practiced saying casually in a mirror.

That's the first thing that scares me. Not the leaning. Not the leather coat. Just that my whole name comes out of his mouth pre-loaded, no stumble, like he's been carrying it around folded in his pocket for weeks waiting for a place to set it down.

"Gianni." I don't stop walking, which is its own small victory, box balanced, keys still knuckled, though I clock — old habit, my father's habit, uno, la macchina, due — that there's nobody else on this stretch of sidewalk. The bakery's closed grate is down two doors up. The dry cleaner's lit but empty. I lose count at two because there isn't a three.

"Cold night for a walk," he says, pleasant, like we're neighbors. "You should let somebody drive you places."

"I have a car."

"I see that." He doesn't move off it. Doesn't move at all, actually, just watches me get close enough that not stopping would mean walking into him, and I hate — I hate — that some four-years-trained part of my nervous system does the math on that before my brain does and decides stopping is the safer bet.

"That board." He nods past me, back down the block toward the Bellini, though we're too far now to see it. "The chalk one. Gennaro's. You did that?"

"May of last year." I don't know why I answer. I always answer. It's the thing Trevor trained into me before Trevor ever hit a picture frame near me — answer the question, keep the room calm, don't be the reason it gets loud.

"I like the lettering. The espresso line especially. You got a good hand." He tilts his head, considering, like a man in a gallery. "They pay you for that?"

"Traded it for coffee."

"Fifteen months, I heard." He smiles like this is a fun fact, like he's just complimented my thrift. "Free labor for a cafe that isn't even yours. That's a hell of a rate, Maya."

And here is where it happens — here is where his hand comes off the car door and finds my wrist, not fast, not grabbing exactly, more like a man steadying a glass on a table that's tilted. His thumb lands right on the tendon, the one that stands up when you make a fist, and he doesn't squeeze so much as hold, patient, proprietary, and my whole body does the thing it learned to do in an apartment I don't live in anymore, a lifetime I supposedly left three years ago: it goes soft. It goes agreeable. My shoulders drop half an inch, my chin tips, and I actually — God help me — I actually laugh, a small, stupid, appeasing laugh, like he's told a joke and the correct response is to make the room easy for him.

I hate my own body in that second more than I have ever hated it in my life, including every meal I sat through counting somebody else's chewing.

"There she is," Gianni says, soft, like he's coaxing a cat out from under a porch. "See, that's better."

The scar on my left forearm goes cold under my sleeve before the rest of me catches up to what's happening — it does that, has done that since a January five years ago, an early warning system that fires before I've consciously registered the threat, and by the time my brain says this is bad my arm already knows.

"Doyle Avenue," he says, like he's reading off a card. "Second floor. Front-left windows, the ones with all the plants in them — somebody said you got, what, forty of them in there? Forty houseplants in a one-bedroom, that's a lot of upkeep for a woman who can't pay her electric." He tips his head. "Your mother's on the Cranston side, off Reservoir. Velour tracksuit, I hear, maroon, she wears it to the store. Your friend prints T-shirts off Wickenden — Simone, right? Nice girl. Ink under her nails." His thumb moves once, slow, along the tendon under it, testing. "Your father's dead ten years. No brothers. No uncles that anybody's ever seen at a christening. There's nobody left in your family a man would have to answer to if something happened to you, Maya. You know that? That's not a threat. That's just — geography. I like to know the geography."

I don't say anything. I've learned that much from four years with Trevor and eleven weeks with Dominic both: silence costs less than words, mostly, except when it doesn't, except when silence itself becomes an answer somebody else gets to interpret.

"Here's the part that's actually interesting," he says, and drops his voice like we're sharing something, like this is a kindness, and the gold chain at his throat swings forward as he leans in, and it touches my cheek — just barely, just the very edge of it, a curved cold line against my jaw that is somehow worse than his hand on my wrist, worse than the cold sidewalk, worse than any of it, because it's incidental, because he doesn't even notice it happening, because I am so far down his list of things that require care that his jewelry gets to touch my face and he doesn't apologize.

"You've got more than one car on you," he says. "Not mine. Not his. I know his — I know every plate that man's ever put behind you, I could recite them back to you right now if you wanted the whole list. But there's another one. Older pattern. Somebody who was on you before any of this." He pulls back an inch, studies my face like he's checking a gauge. "Somebody was watching you before we ever knew your name, Maya. That's the part I find genuinely interesting. So who else is it. Who else you belong to, that I don't know about."

The bottom drops out of me the way it does in an elevator with a cut cable, fast, total, no floor under it at all, because I found the thing in my wheel well eleven weeks ago, black plastic, blue tape folded in a tab I'd know blind, and I told myself — I told myself — it was over, it was old, it was a relic of a man I left three years ago and not a live wire anymore. I threw it down a storm drain like that would be the end of the sentence.

I say nothing. I don't trust my mouth right now to say the right kind of nothing, so I just look at him, and I can feel my own face doing something wrong, some flicker I can't control, and Gianni watches it happen with the patient satisfaction of a man watching a fish take bait he didn't even have to bait very well.

"Okay," he says, softly, like I've confirmed something out loud instead of just standing here failing to lie with my face. "Okay. Noted."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you do." He pats my wrist once, almost fond, before he goes on, and it's the fondness that turns my stomach worse than the grip did. "Here's what I want, and it's not complicated. You tell me where Dominic goes on the days he's not at the cafe. Who he calls. Whether Florida comes up — not what's said, I don't need the whole transcript, just whether the word comes out of his mouth. That's it. That's all I'm asking."

"And if I don't."

"Then your mother's street stays interesting instead of boring." He says it like a weather report. "I'd rather it stayed boring. I like boring streets. Boring streets don't end up with anybody's name in a paper nobody wants to read."

He lets go of my wrist then, unhurried, the way you set down something you were never really worried about dropping, and steps back off my car door, and for one absurd second I think we're just done, like this was a transaction that's closed, like I can get in my car now and drive to Cranston with a box of cannoli and pretend the last ninety seconds happened to somebody else.

"Don't bother telling him," Gianni says, nodding at nothing, at the street, at the general direction of Atwells Avenue and everything on it. "Not because I'd know — I wouldn't, not right away — but because it won't do what you think it'll do. Dominic's provisional right now, sweetheart. You understand that word? Provisional. Man like that can't protect a coffee cup off a table, let alone you. His father hasn't decided what he is yet. Neither have I."

He walks off toward the Escalade parked two spots down, not hurrying, coat swinging, chain catching light, and I stand there with the bakery box going soft against my hip from the heat of my own hand and look down at my wrist.

Four marks. White, right now, pressed pale where his thumb and fingers sat, already going warm at the edges the way skin does right before it decides what color it's actually going to turn.

By the time I get to Cranston they've gone the color of a bad plum.

I keep my coat on in my mother's kitchen for the first ten minutes, which she doesn't question because the kitchen genuinely is cold, her radiator worse than mine, and when I finally take it off I do it with my left hand doing all the work, sleeve staying down over the right one, cuff gripped in my fist the way you'd hold a hem in a wind. She's got three burners going — sauce, potatoes, something in the oven that smells like it's already burned a little on top — and she doesn't stop moving the whole hour I'm there, wooden spoon going around and around a pot that doesn't need it anymore, gold hoops swinging.

"You eating?" she says, not looking at me, the way she always asks it, like the question is really about something else.

"I'm eating." Lie number one. I haven't managed more than crackers since three o'clock and my stomach's been a fist since Atwells Avenue.

"You look tired."

"I've been busy. Work's good." Lie number two, and this one comes out smoother than the first because I've had more practice with it — work has not been good, work has been Rita's cannoli board sitting half-finished on a tablet propped against a fruit bowl in a house that isn't mine, but work's good is a sentence my mother has heard from me so many times it doesn't even register as information anymore, just as noise that means don't ask further.

She sets a plate down in front of me anyway, cannoli filling in a bowl she's decided needs testing before tomorrow, and I eat two bites because eating two bites is easier than explaining why I can't, and the whole time my right sleeve stays exactly where I put it, cuff gripped, wrist under it going from plum to something closer to a bruise you could actually name a color for.

"You happy?" she asks, out of nowhere, spoon still going, not looking at me, and it's such a strange thing for my mother to ask directly — usually it comes sideways, wrapped in a question about somebody's cousin's wedding or whether I'm eating enough — that I almost tell her the truth by accident, almost say I don't know anymore, I genuinely don't know, there was a man's thumb on my wrist an hour ago and I laughed at him, Ma, I laughed, my body laughed before I told it to, and instead what comes out is:

"I'm happy." Lie number three, though I stopped counting an hour ago.

She nods like she believes it, or like she's decided to, and pours herself a small glass of something sweet and amber-colored she keeps for holidays only, and doesn't offer me one, and I sit in her kitchen for the rest of the hour with my sleeve down and my wrist throbbing under it in time with my own pulse, a small ugly clock I can feel but nobody else can see.

The house on Federal Hill is warm when I get back — really warm, the kind of warm Dominic keeps it since the radiator project, since he fixed my radiator months ago and apparently decided every radiator in his own house should follow suit, eighty degrees easy, the kind of heat that makes you peel down to nothing the second you're through the door.

I don't peel down.

I keep the sweater on — long-sleeved, grey, the one I wear when I want to disappear into a room rather than be looked at in it — and I stand in the kitchen doorway with my thumb hooked through the cuff, holding it closed over my knuckles the same way I held it in my mother's kitchen, and I tell myself it's just cold from the car, just cold from standing outside Gianni's Escalade for whatever length of time that actually was, though I know it wasn't cold, my whole arm's on fire under there in a bruised, low, insistent way that has nothing to do with November.

Dominic's at the table. Papers in front of him — sanitation bid pages, the reading glasses folded shut beside them, not on — and he doesn't look up right away, which is its own kind of mercy, gives me another few seconds standing in a doorway with my heart going too fast for a house this warm and this quiet.

Then he does look up.

He doesn't look at my face first. He looks at my hand — at the fist my thumb's made around the cuff, at the way I'm holding the sleeve shut like a woman holding a door against wind — and something in his own face goes very still, the way it does right before he decides whether a thing needs to be broken or just watched.

"Take that off," he says.

Quiet. Not a question. Not loud. Just the two of us and a table full of union paperwork and eighty degrees of heat I'm sweating under anyway, and my wrist throbbing under wool, and three seconds — I count them, I actually count them, uno, due, tre, and lose the number exactly where I always lose it — to decide whether tonight is the night I hand him Gianni Trafficante, or whether I keep it, the way I've kept everything else, folded small enough to carry alone.