The case of wine costs more than my mother's stove. I know this because I priced her stove once, years ago, when the burner element cracked and Simone helped me look up replacements online while Carmela stood in the doorway insisting she'd just use the back two burners forever, thanks. Twelve bottles, dark glass, no price sticker anywhere on them because men like Dominic don't buy wine that needs a sticker. He carries the case up the porch steps himself, in a suit that fits him the way a suit is supposed to fit and almost never does on a man his size, and I watch my mother's front window curtain twitch before we're even at the door.

I told him where we were going. I didn't ask. That's the part I keep turning over on the drive, the actual bravery of it, buried under twelve bottles of wine and a turkey that's been in the oven since seven this morning: I said Thanksgiving, my mother's, Cranston the way you'd announce a doctor's appointment, and he said okay the way he says okay to things that are already decided, and that was that. Four years with Trevor and I ran every plan past him first, checked his face for the version of it he'd approve of before I opened my mouth. I didn't check Dominic's face. I just told him.

It feels, for about four seconds on the porch, like the bravest thing I've done since I left that apartment.

Then my mother opens the door in her holiday velour — burgundy, not maroon, a distinction she'd insist on — with gold hoops the size of bangles, and looks up. And up. And her whole face does the thing where delight and terror occupy the same square inch of skin, and I think: right, this is the part where I find out if bravery was actually a good idea.

The house does not have a dining table that seats three comfortably, let alone four. It has a card table my mother sets up every year in the front room, folding legs that lock with a satisfying snap I've heard my whole life, covered in a plastic cloth printed with orange pumpkins that has survived at least a decade of holidays including the year I brought Trevor, who complained twice about the smell of plastic and once, quietly, to me in the car, about the seating arrangement.

Dominic's knees do not fit under this table.

He tries. He genuinely tries, folding himself down into the folding chair across from me while my mother fusses with a gravy boat in the kitchen, and his knees hit the underside of the tabletop hard enough that the pumpkins jump and a fork slides an inch toward the edge. He catches the fork without looking at it. He does not say anything about the table.

"No, no, no—" My mother comes in fast, waving both hands like she's directing a plane onto a runway, and physically redirects him toward the good armchair by the window, the one with doilies pinned to both arms that nobody in this house has sat in unsupervised since I was a teenager. "You sit here. You're a big man, you'll break my table, sit, sit—" and she's got a plate balanced and in his lap before he's fully settled, like she's dealt with large dangerous animals before and knows the first rule is to feed them immediately.

He sits with a plate on his lap, in an armchair with doilies, in a suit that costs more than the chair, the stove, and possibly the house.

I have wanted, for months, some version of a normal Thursday. I did not know it would look like this.

The turkey has been in since seven a.m. My mother does this every year — up before dawn, bird in by seven regardless of size, out sometime around one whether or not a thermometer agrees with her — and the result, every single year, is a bird cooked into a structural material rather than a food. This year is no exception. I watch Dominic cut into a slice of white meat with the good silverware, watch the knife meet actual resistance, watch him work at it for a second longer than a stranger would notice and I do, and he gets a piece free and eats it without any change in his face at all. It must be like eating a shingle. He asks for seconds twenty minutes later.

"You eat," my mother says, delighted, already reaching for the vermouth bottle she keeps for holidays only — sweet, amber, syrupy, the kind of thing you drink half a glass of and regret for an hour — and pours it into the juice glasses because the good stemware got put away somewhere she can't currently locate. "Trevor never ate. Sat there and moved it around the plate like a teenager."

I feel the name land in the room and skid, the way a name does when it's dropped somewhere it doesn't belong yet, and I watch for whether Dominic's face does anything. It doesn't. Not yet. He just says, "It's good, Mrs. Ferraro," which is objectively a lie about a bird cooked into shoe leather, and my mother beams like he's handed her an award.

"Call me Carmela." She says this and then, for the next hour, calls him Mr. Russo four separate times — pouring him more vermouth, Mr. Russo, you'll have a little more — before something in her finally relaxes enough to just say Dominic, once, quiet, almost to herself, testing the size of it in her mouth like a shoe. He doesn't correct her the first four times. I notice that. Trevor used to correct people's mispronunciation of his own middle name within a sentence of meeting them.

"You eat," she says again, and starts loading more onto his plate without asking, stuffing, then the dry side of the bird, then a spoonful of cranberry sauce still shaped like the can, and I watch my mother feed a man capable of things I have personally witnessed the aftermath of, and something in my chest does a slow, sick roll, because she has no idea, and because he is letting her not know, sitting there in the good armchair being fed like something she intends to domesticate.

"How old are you," she asks him, not unkindly, over the second glass of vermouth, the question landing exactly the way it always does from my mother — no lead-in, no softening, just there.

"Thirty-nine." He says it easily. "September second."

"September." She does the math out loud, the way she does math on everyone, dead or alive, comparing them to some fixed point in her own calendar. "My Danilo was a January baby himself, but he always had a theory about September ones." She says this with real satisfaction, like she's found a matching button in a drawer. "He always said September babies run hot. Impatient to get out before the summer ended."

"Is that right," Dominic says, and something in his face — not much, a fraction, the kind of shift only I would clock after three months of learning what stillness on him actually means — softens at the mention of my father, at being compared to him at all, and I file that away too, the way I file everything now, the way this whole house has apparently trained me to.

"Church?" she asks next, vermouth glass halfway to her mouth.

"St. Bartholomew's."

She actually nods, approving, like he's passed something. "That's a good parish. Father Piras. He married my sister's girl." She doesn't ask what he does — not directly, not the way you'd think a mother would, straight out — she circles it instead, the way she circles everything, and when she finally gets there it's phrased soft: "And for work, you're in — what, is it trucks? Someone said trucks."

"Sanitation contracts," he says, the same three words I've now heard him say to strangers, to Teresa's clients, to a man at a gas station in Fall River once, delivered with the exact same flat unbothered calm every time, like a passport he hands over without checking the photo matches anymore. "Waste management. Boring stuff."

"Boring's good," my mother says, like she means it, like boring is the highest compliment available in her vocabulary, and pours him a third vermouth.

I sit there in a folding chair that fits me fine, watching my mother be charmed by a man I have personally seen break someone's hand over a wooden crate, and the vertigo of it is specific and total — a kind of watching-two-movies-at-once feeling, her version of this afternoon playing in one frame and mine in the other, and no way to splice them together without one of us finding out something the other can't survive knowing.

My aunt's neighbor Ida drops by around two, the way she does every year, ostensibly to borrow a roasting pan she never actually needs, really to see who's at the table, and she stays for exactly nine minutes — long enough to accept a small plate she picks at without eating, long enough to ask my mother something about the church raffle — and then she catches Dominic's eyes across the room, just once, just a beat too long held, and something crosses her face I can't name before she's up, pan forgotten, coat already half on, saying she's got her own bird to check on. She doesn't say why. She doesn't have to. I watch her go down the porch steps a little too fast for a seventy-year-old woman on ice, and I think: some people just know. Some people have a sensor for it that I apparently didn't come with standard.

It's the third vermouth that does it. My mother, loose now, generous, leaning back in her chair with the glass tipped at an angle that would worry me if I weren't three vermouths behind her myself, says, warm, confiding, like she's paying me a compliment by way of him:

"You know, at least this one doesn't count her food."

I go still.

"Trevor used to do that," she goes on, oblivious, refilling her own glass, "count what she ate at the table. I never understood it till Maya told me, years after — used to sit there with her fork going, matching him bite for bite, like a — like a metronome, some kind of metronome game, and I thought, that boy's very disciplined, I thought that was a good thing back then, God forgive me, I thought discipline was—"

"Ma." I say it too fast, too flat, and she blinks at me, glass still tipped, not understanding yet what she's stepped in.

"What? I'm only saying." She waves the hand not holding the glass. "He still calls, you know. Even now. Asking how you're doing." She says this like it's a point in his favor, like ongoing concern from an ex-boyfriend is a species of good manners. "Very polite about it. Very — official-sounding, even. Says it's for his work, if you can believe that, like checking up on you is part of his job—"

The room does something. I feel it before I understand it — a change in air pressure, the kind that comes before a storm you can smell but not yet see — and it's coming off Dominic, who has gone very quiet in the good armchair, plate balanced, fork stopped an inch above dry stuffing.

"What work," he says. Not loud. Quieter, if anything, than anything he's said all afternoon, and I have never heard this particular register in him at a table before, this specific low even patience that I now understand, three months in, is the most dangerous voice he owns.

"Oh — some government thing." My mother waves the vermouth glass again, entirely unbothered, entirely unaware she's handing anything over. "FBI, I think, Boston. He always did have that job, even when they were together, though he never talked about it much, very hush-hush—"

"When did he start calling," Dominic says.

My mother actually has to think about it, genuinely think, tilting her head, tapping one gold hoop with a finger while she does math on it the way she does math on everyone's birthdays. "Oh — a while now. Maybe the spring? Springtime, I want to say. Before you two—" she gestures vaguely between us, between me and Dominic, entirely pleased with herself for having assembled a timeline nobody asked her to assemble "—before all this. He called and asked how she was, and I said fine, seeing anybody, and he said—"

She keeps talking. I stop hearing the individual words for a second, the sentence dissolving into pure sound, because spring lands in me like something cold poured straight down the back of my collar. Spring is before March fourth. Spring is before Dominic ever sat down at that back table at all. Spring is a whole season before I knew there was anything in my life worth a federal agent's attention, and Trevor was already calling my mother's house asking how I was doing, for his work, months before I ever noticed a man watching me from the back wall of a cafe.

My hands have gone cold around the little juice glass, cold in the specific way that has nothing to do with November, and under my sweater sleeve — long-sleeved, the same grey one, five days now since Gianni's thumb sat on the tendon of my wrist and asked me, patient, almost fond, who else do you belong to — the bruise pulses once, hard, like it heard its own question answered out loud in a kitchen it has no business being in.

Somebody was watching you before we ever knew your name. That's what Gianni said. I thought he meant Trevor's tracker, dead and thrown down a storm drain, an old relic. I did not think he meant a live line still running into my mother's kitchen, current, ongoing, professional, filed under work.

My mother, still entirely unaware she has just detonated something, gets up to fetch the photographs — she always does this, every year, regardless of who's at the table, drags out the accordion folder of loose prints from the hall closet — and comes back with a stack she starts laying out on the pumpkin cloth like a hand of cards. My father in paint-flecked white overalls on a ladder somewhere on Reservoir Ave, squinting into sun. Me at nine, gap-toothed, holding a paintbrush too big for my hand, standing next to him on a drop cloth.

Dominic picks up the one of my father. Just holds it, a beat, two beats, longer than a polite guest holds a stranger's photograph, his thumb resting at the white border without touching the image itself, and something moves behind his eyes that I recognize now — I've seen it once before, at an altar, laying something pale and dried on marble — and then he sets it down, careful, square with the edge of the others, and says nothing about it at all.

The gravel of my mother's driveway is loud under the tires in a way it never used to bother me, and Dominic doesn't start the car right away. He sits with both hands on the wheel, engine off, streetlight coming through the windshield in a long yellow bar across his knees.

"Full name," he says. "The FBI one."

"Trevor Lang." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Special Agent Trevor Lang. Boston field office."

He nods once, like he's filing it, though something in the set of his jaw tells me this isn't new information so much as a formal reading of it, a thing he already had and is now hearing said out loud in my own voice for the first time, which is somehow worse than telling him anything new at all.

"There's a tracker I found," I say, before I can talk myself out of it, "in my wheel well. September eighth. I told you where it was, but I never told you everything — not with my own mouth, not once, in eleven weeks."

He doesn't look surprised. That's the part that lands hardest — not anger, not the flare of temper I've braced for on some level since the first bite of vermouth-soured stuffing, but a stillness, a patience so total it's its own kind of verdict.

"I know," he says.

"I know you know." My hands are still cold. "I'm telling you anyway."

He starts the car. The heat comes on low, ticking through the vents, and for a long moment neither of us says anything, gravel popping under the tires as he pulls out onto the street, my mother's porch light shrinking in the side mirror, a case of wine nobody opened sitting just inside her back door.

"From tonight," he says finally, eyes on the road, voice level, almost gentle, which is somehow the worst way he could have said it, "you assume every room you stand in gets recorded somewhere. Every kitchen. Every table. Hers included."

I came to Cranston today to prove I still have an ordinary life — a mother, a folding table, a bird cooked wrong on purpose every year since before I was born, a version of Thursday that belongs to nobody but us.

I sit in the passenger seat and watch Cranston go dark behind us and understand, all at once, cold to the wrist, that I don't have that anymore. I don't think I've had it in months. I think it's been gone since spring, and I'm only just now being told.