My mother is sitting at my table when I walk in.
Not near it. At it. Second table from the window, the one that's been mine since March, and she's got both elbows on the wood like she pays rent on it too, gold hoops the size of bangles swinging when she turns her head to find me in the doorway.
"There she is," Carmela says, to the room, like she's announcing me at a wedding.
Gennaro, behind the counter, gives me a look over his readers that says I didn't do this, don't blame me, and goes back to wiping the same six inches of marble he's been wiping since I walked in.
"Ma." I don't move from the door. "What are you doing in Providence."
"I'm allowed to drive fourteen minutes to see my own daughter." She pats the chair across from her, the chair I don't sit in, the chair that isn't mine, and I sit in it anyway because the alternative is having this conversation standing up in front of witnesses. "You look tired. Are you eating?"
"I'm eating."
"You don't look like you're eating." She's already flagged Gennaro down, already ordered me a coffee without asking what I want in it, which is how I know this is going to be bad, because my mother has only ever oversugared my coffee when she's about to say something she thinks I need cushioning for. "I got a call yesterday," she says, and there it is, the whole morning arriving in one sentence. "Trevor called me."
I don't say anything. I bite the inside of my cheek instead, an old reflex, the exact spot where the scar tissue lives from 2019, and I feel it give under my teeth before I've decided to let it.
"He was so sweet, Maya. Asking how you're doing. First time in — what has it been, three years?" She says three years like it's a scandal, like the silence is the crime and not the four that came before it. "He sounded good. Sounds like he's doing well at the Bureau. Asked if you were seeing anyone."
"What did you tell him."
"I told him the truth, that I don't know, that you don't tell me anything." Gennaro sets the coffee down in front of me, too sweet already, I can smell it before I taste it, and my mother doesn't even look at him doing it, just keeps her eyes on me like I'm a door she's trying to get open with the wrong key. "He never hit you, Maya."
"I know he never hit you." My voice comes out flatter than I mean it to. "I was there."
"I'm just saying. Whatever happened — and you never told me what happened, not really, not once in three years — he never put a hand on you. He had good insurance. He had a badge. A federal badge, Maya. Do you know what that means for a family? Security?" She's building it the way she always builds it, brick by reasonable brick, and I recognize the architecture because it's the same one Trevor used to build with, calm stacked on calm until you're standing in a room with no door. "I'm not saying go back to him. I'm saying I don't understand what was so terrible that you'd rather have —" she gestures at the cafe, at the whole width of my current life, "— this."
I drink the coffee to keep my mouth from doing something worse than what it's already done, and the sugar hits first, thick and wrong on my tongue, and underneath it, faint, copper, the cheek I've bitten through just enough to bleed a little. Sugar and blood. It's not a bad description of most of my childhood dinners, actually, my mother's version of comfort always a little too much of one thing to cover a little too much of another.
"How'd he get your number," I ask, because it's the only piece of this I actually want an answer to. "You changed it last year."
"I don't know. He's an FBI agent, Maya, they find people, that's the whole job." She says it like it's a point in his favor. Like the fact that a man who spent four years cataloguing my moods for a living can also locate my mother's cell number unprompted is a charming professional skill and not something that makes the two-inch scar on my arm go cold before the rest of me catches up.
I file it anyway. Somewhere down low, under the noise of the morning, in the part of my brain that used to count exits for my father and now counts something else. He found her number. He didn't need to ask me for it. He just went and got it.
It's the first cold thing all week that doesn't have Dominic's name on it, and I don't know yet that it's the more important one.
---
Dominic comes in at 8:15, same as every day, tie already gone, and my mother — who does not know who he is, who has never once in her life sat in this cafe before eleven minutes ago — lights up like he's a maître d' she's about to compliment.
"Excuse me," she says, waving, actually waving, two fingers up like he's a waiter, "is this your place?"
"No," Dominic says. Stops. Doesn't walk past. This alone should tell me something — that he stops for her, for a stranger in velour with gold hoops, when he's spent four days making it clear he doesn't do small talk with strangers who aren't me.
"My daughter did that." She points at the chalk board, at my own handwriting, the one thing in this cafe I actually made with my hands instead of just occupying with my body. "Isn't it lovely? She's very talented. She just doesn't use it enough, if you ask me."
"Nobody asked you," I say, low, but she's not listening, she's watching Dominic's face, waiting for the validation she's decided is coming.
And he gives it to her.
He looks at the board — really looks, the same two fingers of attention he gave my olive-oil labels four days ago, the ones he called a lie — and he says, "The serif on the espresso line. Somebody who actually drinks the coffee wrote that." He looks at my mother, not at me. "You should be proud."
"I am proud," Carmela says, delighted, utterly disarmed, a woman who drove fourteen minutes to interrogate her daughter now beaming at a man she has no idea has put a hand through someone's ribs, probably, statistically, at some point in the last fifteen years. "See, Maya? This is what I mean. Somebody with manners."
Four minutes. That's all it takes — four minutes of him being unhurried and correct and gentle with a woman who means nothing to him, who could be a stranger off the street because that's exactly what she is, and it does something to me that four days of danger hasn't managed. My throat goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with fear. I watch him be kind, actually kind, careful in a small unnecessary way toward my mother's ego, and I think: that's worse. That's so much worse than anything he could've said to scare me.
Because Trevor was polite to my mother too. Trevor was polite to everyone. That was always the whole architecture of him — reasonable in every room he stood in except the one where it was just us.
I don't know yet whether Dominic's kindness is the same kind of lie. I only know it lands the same way, right in the same soft place, and that terrifies me more than the notebook, more than Florida, more than the black Escalade idling across the street yesterday for six unclocked minutes.
My mother leaves at 8:40, kisses my cheek, tells me to eat something, and is gone in a waft of drugstore perfume that isn't mine and never will be, back to Cranston, back to a version of me she's decided is true.
Dominic sits back down. Doesn't say anything for a minute. Then, without looking up from his cup: "Someone taught you to drink it that sweet."
"What?"
"The coffee. She oversugars it every time, doesn't she. And you drink it anyway." He turns his own cup a quarter turn, the same precise gesture, tidying a world that won't hold still. "Somebody taught you that. To take what's given wrong rather than say something."
I don't answer him. I get up instead, and I go to the bathroom in the back — not the storeroom, the actual bathroom, cracked tile and a mirror with black spots eating the corners — and I run the cold tap over both wrists until the burn behind my eyes gives up and goes back down where it came from.
He's right. That's the whole problem. He's right and he didn't even have to guess hard.
---
Simone's studio smells like it always does — ink and heat and the particular burnt-plastic smell of the dryer running too hot — and she doesn't even look up from the screen she's cleaning when I walk in at noon.
"You look like hell," she says.
"Thank you."
"I mean it. Sit before you fall down." She wipes her hands on her coveralls, leaves two grey streaks, and finally turns to actually look at me, box braids swinging over one shoulder. "Okay. Talk. Whose table is it."
I could lie. I've been lying to her by omission since Monday, the exact half-second delay she clocked on the phone yesterday, and I could keep doing it, I could talk about the Henderson proof and let this be a work day. Instead I hear myself say it, flat, plain, no cushioning: "His name's Dominic Russo."
Simone goes very still. Not shocked-still — worse, recognizing-still, the look of someone assembling a name against something she already half-knew and didn't want confirmed. "The Russo. Atwells Avenue Russo."
"I don't know which Russo you mean."
"You know exactly which Russo I mean." She sets the screen down, wipes her hands again though they're already clean, buying herself a second. "Maya. Jesus. How long."
"Six months I've been going there. Him talking to me — four days."
"Four days." She says it like she's tasting it, checking it for rot. Then she does the thing I came here dreading and needing in equal measure — she doesn't yell, doesn't lecture, just looks at me steady and says the true thing, quiet, like she's laying it on the table between us instead of throwing it. "You don't want him, Maya. You want to be near something so big that Trevor stops being the biggest thing that ever happened to you."
I open my mouth to argue and nothing comes out, because there isn't an argument, there's just the fact of it sitting there true and ugly on her cutting table between the ink jars.
"I'm not saying that to be cruel," she says. "I'm saying it because somebody has to, and I've watched you for eleven years, and I watched what four years with Trevor did to how small you learned to make yourself, and now you've found a man who takes up an entire room without trying, and some starved part of you thinks that's the same thing as being safe."
"It's not the same thing."
"I know it's not. Does the starved part of you know that?"
I don't answer. She lets the silence sit there a while, then reaches over and squeezes my forearm, right over the old scar, gentle, like she knows exactly where it is without me ever having told her the real story of it.
"Text me a pin every night," she says. "Location. Just a dot on a map. I don't need words. If I don't get one, I come to your door, and I don't care whose door it actually is."
"Okay."
"I mean it, Maya."
"I said okay." And I mean it when I say it, which is the worst part, because I already know, sitting there with ink under my nails from hers, that tonight I'm not going to send it.
---
By four o'clock I'm home, sitting on the fire escape with a brush in my hand and no real plan for the canvas, forty-one houseplants crowding the sill behind me like an audience I never auditioned for. I do the thing I do when I can't paint anything real — I catalogue instead. What would I lose, if this went the way the very worst part of my brain keeps suggesting it might go.
No savings past a hundred dollars from a stranger in Pawtucket.
No lease I couldn't break, forty-three months in and Mr. Pariseau would just tape a different note to a different door.
No father, not for ten years now, no one who taught me to count exits who's still around to notice I've stopped doing it right.
My mother would notice eventually. Simone would notice fast, faster than anyone, if I stopped sending pins.
But nobody would notice today. Nobody would notice for a while.
It's not a comforting thought and it's not a devastating one either. It's just accurate, the way Dominic's inventories are accurate, line items instead of feelings, and I sit with it on the fire escape until the light goes long and orange across the plants and I still haven't touched the canvas.
---
I shower at 5:20 and catch myself, hand on the drawer, choosing underwear like it matters, like anyone but me is going to know or care what I'm wearing under a buttoned shirt at a cafe that closes at six. I stop with my hand still in the drawer. Look at what I'm doing. Do it anyway, which tells me something about myself I don't especially want to know at 5:20 on a Thursday.
Then I sit on the edge of the mattress on the floor, no bed frame, hasn't been one in three years, and I put my face in both hands and just breathe for a minute, in through the nose, out slow, the way you're supposed to when your heart's doing something it shouldn't be doing over a man who told you flatly, four days ago, that he might be worse than the last one.
Tomorrow. Before I have to give someone your name — I find out for myself what you are.
He didn't say what time tomorrow started counting from. I don't think he meant to leave that open. I think he assumed I'd wait for him to come find me, the way everyone in that cafe seems to assume things about which direction the danger's supposed to travel.
I get up off the mattress at 6:40 with wet hair drying crooked and I walk the eleven minutes to Atwells Avenue faster than I've ever walked it, and I don't let myself think about why, because thinking about why is exactly the kind of thing that stops a person halfway there.
---
Through the front glass I can see Gennaro at the register, counting the drawer down, the till drawer open and the bills fanned in his hand, and the chairs are already up on two of the tables, and it's six-forty and the sign in the door says CLOSED and every single rule of this place says I should turn around and go home and wait to be summoned like everyone else waits.
I knock on the glass instead.
Gennaro's head comes up. He sees me through the glass and for one full second he doesn't move at all, coins still fanned in his hand, and I watch something pass behind his face that isn't surprise — it's closer to the look he gave the grinder yesterday, a man clocking that a thing he's managed for thirty-six years is about to break in a new direction.
He comes to the door. Unlocks it. Opens it four inches, no more, his bulk filling the gap.
"Go home, Maya."
"I need to talk to him."
"Go home." Softer this time, and there's something almost kind in it, the same register Dominic used on my mother this morning, and it lands just as badly. "Whatever this is. Go home tonight."
"Gennaro—"
"Go home." Third time, and his hand comes up onto my forearm, not rough, just final, the grip of a man closing a door gently because he'd rather do it himself than watch someone else do it hard. Behind him, past his shoulder, the storeroom light is already on, throwing a yellow rectangle across the floor, and under the coffee smell of the whole room there's something else now, something scorched, milk left too long on a hot surface, thin and bitter in the back of my throat.
I don't move. I don't say anything either. I just look at him, and something in my face must finally answer whatever question he's been asking me since March, because his hand drops off my arm and he steps back instead of forward.
He takes off his apron. Unties it slow, folds it once, hangs it on the hook by the register like he's ending a shift that started thirty-six years ago instead of eleven hours ago.
"Alley door locks from inside," he says, not looking at me now, looking somewhere past me, at the street, at nothing. "You want to leave, you leave that way."
And then he's gone, out past me into the last of the evening light, and the door swings shut on its own weight behind him with a small definite click, and I'm standing alone in a closed cafe with the chairs half up and the grinder in pieces on a dish towel and Dominic's chair pushed back from his table like he only just stood up from it, and nobody in the whole world sent me here.
I came on my own.
