The social club doesn't have a name over the door, just a buzzer and a window painted over from the inside, and inside it smells like burnt garlic and Aqua Net and, underneath that, something sweet and artificial coming off a spool of tinsel somebody has taped along the top of the espresso machine like it's a Christmas tree instead of a four-hundred-dollar piece of steel nobody bothered to unplug for the party.

The room is loud in the specific way rooms get loud when everyone in them has decided, in advance, to be loud. Forty men, easy, maybe eleven women counting me, folding chairs scraped against linoleum, a card table sagging under pignoli cookies and a foil tray of arancini and a bottle of Sambuca doing slow laps hand to hand. A boy of maybe fourteen sits at a keyboard in the corner working through "O Holy Night" like he's translating it from a language he doesn't speak, hitting the high note flat every single time and nobody telling him to stop.

Dominic's hand is at the small of my back, not pressing, just there, the way a man rests a hand on a door he already knows is going to open.

"Smile," he says, low, not unkind. "Not that much."

"I don't know what my face is doing."

"It's doing the thing where you look like you're pricing the room." His mouth doesn't move when he says it. "Stop."

I stop. Or I try to. This is the assignment, and I understood it in the car on the way over, watching Providence go by the window in the dark, understood it the way you understand a job you've never had before you've done it once: stand at his elbow. Be looked at. Let every person in this room see that Salvatore Russo gave an order in October and his son said no and nothing happened to him for it — that the man is still standing, still has a woman on his arm, still walks into a room like the room owes him rent.

It's a performance. I am the set dressing.

I've gotten good at set dressing. Four years with Trevor taught me how to hold a smile steady enough that nobody in a restaurant asks if everything's all right, and that muscle, it turns out, doesn't atrophy. It just waits.

Two men peel off from a knot near the coat rack, and I know before they reach us that they're Fall River — there's a specific gait to it, shoulders forward, chins tucked, men who spent years answering to somebody who is now, per the family's polished little story, buried somewhere Bruno drove him. The bigger one takes my right hand in both of his, warm, dry, too firm.

"Dom's girl," he says, like it's a title. "Heard about your hand."

I feel the new scar flare under his grip, the raised seam across my palm going hot with the pressure, and I keep the smile exactly where it was.

"Healing," I say.

"Good, good." He pumps it once more before letting go. "Merry Christmas."

The second one doesn't even bother with words, just nods at me over the first one's shoulder, drink already back at his mouth, and I think, not for the first time tonight, about whose hands helped carry a body into a car sixteen days ago and whether these are among them, and I keep smiling, and my stomach does the thing it does now — the elevator with the cable cut, straight down, no warning — and I reach behind me without looking and take a cannoli off the card table just to have something to do with my hands and something to chew that isn't a sentence.

Rocco Malandra taps a fork against a water glass, three times, the sound thin and bright under all that noise, and the room quiets in stages, back to front, like a wave rolling backward.

"To the boss," Rocco says, camel coat still on, cane hooked over his forearm even indoors, "down in Florida. God keep him healthy." He lifts his glass an inch. "Long may he rule us all."

Boss. Forty pairs of eyes flick, just for a second, to Dominic — not obviously, nobody stares, but I've spent four months learning to read a room the way my father taught me to read a bar, and I catch it, the collective half-inch turn of attention, checking his face for a flinch that doesn't come. Dominic lifts his own glass with the rest of them. Drinks. Doesn't blink.

Across the room, in cream, Teresa Malandra catches my eye over somebody's shoulder and taps two fingers against her coat pocket — quick, deliberate, a woman reminding another woman of something said over a folder eight days ago about accounts and names that aren't hers on any deed. I nod, small, so small it could be nothing, and she goes back to her conversation like she never looked at all.

"Maya."

Gennaro's voice, and I turn and there he is, seventy-four years old and stooped further than I remember, in his good waistcoat over a pressed shirt instead of the grey apron, looking like a man who got dressed for a funeral and arrived at a party by mistake. He takes my face in both his hands — dry palms, cold from outside — and holds it a second too long, the way you'd hold something you were worried might crack.

"I'm sorry," he says, quiet, under the noise, "about the mess. In my alley."

Nobody else tonight has said anything true. Not one true sentence in an hour of noise, and here's a seventy-four-year-old man with flour probably still under his fingernails apologizing to me for a thing that happened on his own property that he didn't do and can't undo, and something in my throat closes up so fast I have to swallow twice, loud enough I'm sure he hears it.

"It's not your fault," I say.

"No," he agrees, and lets my face go, and pats my arm once, and moves off into the crowd like a man wading through water.

Nunzio works the room the way I imagine he's worked every room for twenty years — not loud, never loud, moving from cluster to cluster with a hand on an elbow, a word in an ear, the tinted glasses catching the club's fluorescent light in flat white discs so I can never quite see where he's actually looking. Brown suit, same as every other time I've seen him, like it's a uniform he was issued once and never replaced.

He doesn't raise his voice to make the announcement. He doesn't have to. He says it to three men near the coffee urn, conversationally, the way you'd mention the weather, and the sentence moves through the room in ripples faster than any toast could carry it — starting in January, Fall River collections and the two property vehicles route through the office — and I watch it land on face after face, watch men who were laughing a second ago go very still and very interested in their drinks.

"To keep the books clean," Nunzio says, to Dominic directly now, closing the distance, brown suit, tinted glasses angled up because he's a head shorter. "Simpler for everyone. Bookkeeping."

"Sure," Dominic says. "Bookkeeping."

He says it smiling. He says it the way you'd agree to hold a coat for somebody, easy, no weight to it at all, and the room reads the smile correctly — I watch them read it, the way conversations pick back up half a beat too fast, too bright, the specific relief of people who just watched something happen and don't want to be caught having watched it. Under the card table, out of anyone's sightline but mine because I am standing exactly where I'm meant to stand, at his elbow, Dominic's right hand goes flat against the tabletop. The burn scar catches the light for a second, four inches of shine, and the hand doesn't curl into anything. Doesn't make a fist. Just flattens, and stays flat, and I understand, watching it, that this is a man choosing — actively, with effort I can feel from a foot away — not to fight this tonight, in this room, in December, in front of forty people and a fourteen-year-old butchering "O Holy Night" for the third time.

He is letting himself be diminished. Quietly. On purpose. And nobody in the room says the word for it, and neither do I.

"Maya." Nunzio again, at my other side now, materialized the way he seems to always materialize, without the sound of footsteps. "Help me find a bottle in back. My eyes." He taps the tinted glasses. "Terrible under these lights."

It isn't a request. It's phrased like one, and it isn't one, and I understand that too, the same way I understood, months ago in his own house, that saying no to something asked of you in front of forty people is a door that doesn't open from this side.

Dominic doesn't stop me. Doesn't even look over, though I feel him clock it — a half turn of attention, gone as fast as it came. He's talking to Rocco about something, nodding, and I go.

The back office is smaller than I expect, and quieter the second the door clicks shut behind us — not silent, the keyboard and the noise bleed through the wall in a muffled, underwater version of themselves, the high flat note still landing wrong every time it comes around — but quieter, in the specific way a held breath is quieter than the room around it.

There's a metal desk, a filing cabinet with a coffee ring on top, a calendar from a plumbing supply company still on November. Nunzio doesn't look for any bottle. He gestures at a folding chair across from the desk like it's a good chair in a good office, and I sit because standing feels somehow worse, and he lowers himself into the desk chair slow, one hand on the armrest, the tinted glasses catching the single bare bulb overhead.

On the wall behind him, taped up crooked, is a laminated menu — Cafe Bellini's, the chalk-board layout I redrew a year and a half ago, photocopied and blown up and stuck to a corkboard like it's community art.

"You did that," Nunzio says, following my eyes. "Gennaro showed everyone. For weeks."

"It was just — the espresso line needed to not look like a ransom note."

"He was proud of it." His voice, when he's not performing warmth for a room, drops into something else entirely — dry, papery, each word separated slightly from the last, like he's peeling them off a roll one at a time. "You have a good hand for it. A steady one."

"Thank you."

"I identified her." He says it the way you'd mention the weather again, exactly the register he used for the Fall River announcement, and it takes me a full second to understand that the pronoun has changed subjects entirely, that we are no longer talking about a chalkboard. "Rosalba. In 1997. They asked family, and Sallie couldn't — wouldn't — so it was me. Twenty-seven years ago last month."

The keyboard through the wall hits the flat note again. Somewhere a glass breaks and a whole table laughs.

I don't say anything. My tongue finds the scar tissue inside my lower lip and presses there, an old habit that predates all of this, predates Dominic, predates even Trevor if I'm honest with myself, something my body learned to do instead of speaking a long time ago.

"Did he tell you," Nunzio says, "about the intruder."

Not a question, not really, the way none of his sentences tonight have been questions, but I answer it like one anyway. "Yes."

Nunzio is quiet long enough that I hear my own heartbeat pick up in the ear that still rings, a soft insistent thud under the muffled carols, and when he finally speaks again his voice has changed shape entirely — gone from dry to something worse, something with an edge to it, the sound of two sheets of paper being pulled slowly apart, a tearing that doesn't quite finish, that keeps threatening to finish and doesn't.

"There was no intruder."

The room tilts. Not literally — nothing in this cramped little office with its plumbing-supply calendar moves at all — but something behind my sternum does, a lurch, gravity reasserting itself at the wrong angle.

"I've known that for twenty-seven years," Nunzio says. "I say it to Piras once a year, on the day, every year, and every year he tells me the same thing he tells you and me both if we ask him for anything in advance — that God doesn't do advances, and neither does he. I am not absolved. I have never once been absolved. I don't expect to be." He folds his hands on the desk, liver-spotted, very still. "That is the sin I carry. Not what happened in that kitchen. What I did after. Which was nothing. For twenty-seven years, nothing."

I want to ask him who. The name is right there, sitting behind my teeth, three syllables I could say out loud right now and watch his face for confirmation, and I don't say it, because some coward's instinct — the same one that stopped my hand on the dial this afternoon — tells me that hearing it said out loud in this room, under this bulb, will make it permanent in a way it currently isn't.

"He wouldn't want me telling you this," Nunzio says. "He'd be right not to want it. It isn't mine to give you. But you're sitting in his house now, and you were in that alley three weeks ago, and I think a woman who's been in that alley has earned one true thing, even from a man who's spent twenty-seven years failing to give anyone a true thing at all."

"Then tell me who," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.

He doesn't. He looks at me instead, tinted glasses giving nothing back, and says: "Ask him. Not me. Ask him who he's waiting for in that cafe. He'll tell you eventually, or he won't, and either way it isn't for me to be the one." A pause, the paper-tear register dropping even lower. "But ask him something else too, while you're asking. Ask him what the Commission does — what men like Rocco, like men above Rocco, do — to somebody who puts his hands on a sitting boss without sanction. Ask him that, and watch his face when he answers it, because I promise you he already knows, and he has known it longer than he has known you."

The keyboard through the wall stumbles into "Silent Night" now, worse than the last one, half the notes a half-step flat, some drunk man's voice rising over it in Italian, off-key, joyful.

"He's not waiting to win something," Nunzio says. "You should understand that before you understand anything else about him. There's no version of this where he walks away from that table. He worked that out a long time before you ever walked into Gennaro's, and he sat down anyway, every day, for nine months, because some men would rather die finishing a thing than live having never started it." He spreads his hands, an old gesture, resigned. "I have spent my whole share of a life not saying that sentence to anyone. Merry Christmas, Maya."

I stand up because my legs decide to before the rest of me agrees to it. The chair scrapes against the floor, too loud, and Nunzio doesn't move to stop me leaving or to say anything further, just watches me go with his hands still folded on the desk like a man who has finished a confession of his own and is waiting, patiently, uselessly, for an absolution that isn't coming tonight either.

*

The noise hits me first when I open the door — a wall of it, warm and bright and stupid with tinsel and bad carols, forty people who have no idea what room I've just walked out of, and my left ear does the thing it does now under stress, the ringing rising up under everything else like a held note nobody asked for.

I find him without meaning to look. He's already found me — across the room, half a head above everyone near him, a glass in his hand he isn't drinking from, and the second our eyes meet I understand that he clocked exactly how long I was gone, the way he clocks everything, the way he's clocked every hour of my life since March without me knowing it.

I hold his gaze longer than I mean to. Long enough that somebody near him says his name twice before he answers.

And the whole shape of him rearranges itself in front of me, standing there in a folding-chair social club under a strip of dollar-store tinsel — not a man patiently waiting nine months at a back table for the day he gets to finish something.

A man who has already decided he isn't walking away from it either way, and has known that the whole time, and let me stand next to him anyway.