Three days now.

Three days of the house running like a good hotel — coffee that appears, dishes that get done, a coat hung on the hook by whoever gets home first — and not one word about the folder on the study floor, not one hand reaching for the other in a bed we still share like two people who agreed, without agreeing, that touching would mean something neither of us can afford to mean right now.

I read the file again yesterday. He'd left it out on the desk instead of putting it back in the safe, squared at the corners the way Teresa squares her folders, and I understood that the leaving-out was a sentence in a language he doesn't otherwise speak. Look again if you want to. I'm not going to stop you and I'm not going to explain it twice.

So I looked again. All of it. The satellite printout with its circled 7am, mornings only. The Commission page, which I now understand on the second read the way you understand a diagnosis on the second read — slower, worse.

Then I sat at the card table with one of Rita's packaging comps face-down beside me and wrote, on the back of it, in pencil, everything I now knew, like an inventory: Salvatore killed her. Nunzio watched. Dominic was twelve. There is no plan for after. I looked at that list for a long time. Then I carried it downstairs and burned it over the kitchen sink with his steel lighter, the same economical motion I'd watched him use on a letter that smelled like menthol and stale liquor, and I hated, watching the pencil marks curl and blacken, that I have apparently become a woman who burns her own handwriting rather than leave it lying around to be found.

Tonight I make dinner badly on purpose. Not enough salt, pasta a full two minutes past where it should come off the heat, sauce that separates into an oily orange skin on top because I don't stir it enough — I do all of it deliberately, the way you'd needle a person who won't fight with you, hoping bad food is the thing that finally gets a reaction out of him that isn't fine or okay or the terrible new gentleness he's been rationing out since Saturday.

He eats it. All of it. No comment, no face, forkful after forkful like a man doing a job he's been assigned.

Which is somehow worse than if he'd said something.

"You could tell me it's bad," I say.

"It's not bad."

"It is. I made it bad. I did it on purpose."

He looks up from the plate. Something moves behind his eyes, not quite a smile, closer to the ghost of the version of him that used to sit at a cafe table and let me watch him for six months without saying a word. "Why."

"Because you've been agreeing with everything I say for three days and I can't tell if that's kindness or if you've already left."

He sets the fork down. Doesn't answer that yet. Reaches instead for the water glass, turns it a quarter turn on the table the way he squares things when he's deciding how much of the truth to hand over.

"Friday," he says. "I'll drive you to Doyle Ave. Check the plants, check the radiators."

"I don't need a driver."

"I know you don't need one."

"I need an answer, Dominic. I sat on your study floor with your mother's autopsy photographs face-down against my knees to get one, and you gave me twelve seconds of it and then closed a door."

"I gave you everything in that folder."

"You gave me paper. I'm asking you to say it out loud, across a table, to my face, without the door between us this time."

He is quiet long enough that I hear the radiator in the front room tick once, twice, and stop.

"Say what," he says. "You want me to walk you through it like an itinerary."

"I want you to defend it. Out loud. Like it's a decision and not a — " I look for the word and land somewhere close enough. "Like it's not weather. Like you chose it and you'd choose it again if I asked you tonight."

He leans back. The chair creaks under him, an old sound this house makes for anyone heavy enough to test it. "There's no sanction," he says, flat, the coin-voice, the one he uses on Nunzio and men who owe him money. "No permission I could ask for that anyone would give. My father's sixty-eight. He's run this whole family out of a lawn chair in Florida for five and a half years and he will die in that lawn chair of old age before he sets foot back in Rhode Island unless something makes him come home."

"So make him come."

"That's the only lever there is." His scarred hand lies flat on the table, still, the way it goes when he's making himself hold something steady. "I'm not going down there. I thought about it. Boca Raton, a plane ticket, a rental car in a parking lot with palm trees — I have the flight pages, you saw them. I decided against it a long time ago."

"Why."

"Because then I'm a man who hunted his father." He says it simply, the way you'd state a fact about weather or plumbing. "I've spent twenty-seven years being the man who waited. I'm not going to spend the last part of it as something else."

I sit with that. I notice, the way you notice a splinter only once your hand is already moving, that I haven't said the word wrong. Not once. Not tonight, not on the study floor three days ago, not in any of the four months since a loading bay and a hose and gravel freezing white at the edges of a puddle. I search myself for the sentence — you can't kill your own father, Dominic, that's insane, that's a sin, that's a life sentence — and it isn't there. What's there instead is colder and more practical, and it scares me more than the photographs did.

"Why don't you just take the money and go," I say instead. "Forty million. That's the number I've heard said in that house when nobody thought I was listening. Take it, take me, go somewhere with a beach and a different name and let your father die in his lawn chair without you in the room."

Something flickers across his face — not anger. Something closer to the look of a man being asked to explain arithmetic he did years ago and has stopped needing to check.

"It's not mine to take," he says. "It never was. It lives in paper Teresa Malandra keeps, deeds and shells and pension accounts with my name attached the way a signature's attached to a form, not the way ownership's attached to a thing. Since Gianni, two more capos call Rocco before they call me. Nunzio's got discretionary access, which means he can turn a tap off before I know it's been turned. I'm being walled off a brick at a time and it hasn't cost the plan one single hour, because the plan never needed the money to begin with. It needed a table, and a chair with my back to the wall, and time. I've had all three since March."

"You wrote down what the Commission does," I say, "to a man who kills a sitting boss without sanction. In your own hand. On the last page. Like a — " My voice catches on the word before I can get it out clean. "Like a line item. You've been planning your own death the same way you plan a route renewal."

He doesn't flinch. That's the part that undoes me a little, that he takes it the way you'd take a true fact stated plainly, no defense mounted because none is owed.

Outside, the first firework goes up over the river — a soft concussion, felt more than heard through the window glass, and then another, closer together, the sky over the water going up gold and then green in a stutter I can only half-track because my left ear still carries that cotton-deaf note it picked up in an alley a month ago, the world arriving to that side of my head a half-beat late and thinner than it should be. I hear the fireworks unevenly, gold before green, boom before glow, and the asymmetry of it — the sense that even the sky isn't reaching me in one whole piece anymore — is what finally gets behind my eyes where three days of silence and a folder of glossy photographs couldn't.

I don't cry. I feel my throat close around the shape of it instead, a fist behind my sternum, my jaw locking so hard the old click on the left side pops audible in the quiet kitchen, and I have to reach up and work it loose with two fingers while more color goes up over the water, indifferent, some other family's celebration happening four blocks away from a man telling me, calmly, across a table, the exact mechanics of how he intends to end.

"Maya."

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I know I'm not, I said I'm fine, those aren't the same sentence." My voice comes out thick and furious at itself for being thick. I press the heel of my hand hard against my sternum, an old trick, checking a locked door twice, and it doesn't work, the ache just sits there behind my ribs refusing either to pass or to break open into something I could actually cry through.

He gets up. Crosses the kitchen slow, the way he crossed the study floor three days ago, like distance itself is the last thing he still has any control over, and he doesn't touch me. Stands close enough that I can smell gun oil and burnt espresso under the cold he's carried in off the porch earlier, close enough that the heat coming off him reaches my arm through my sleeve, and he keeps his hands at his sides.

"I didn't change anything," he says. "After Gianni. After the alley. I want you to know that — I didn't move the date, I didn't move the plan, none of it shifted an inch for what happened there." His jaw works once, the only tell he allows himself. "The only thing that's different is I stopped sleeping."

It isn't I love you. It isn't even close to that sentence, and I understand, hearing it, that it's the nearest thing to it he has ever handed me without being asked twice — a fact instead of a feeling, offered the way he offers everything that matters, folded small enough to survive the carrying.

Another firework goes up, close enough this time that I feel the low thud of it in the floorboards under my bare feet, gold light sliding across the ceiling and gone.

I ask him the question I have been holding since Saturday, since the study floor, since I first understood what I was looking at.

"When you do it," I say, "and they come for you — what happens to me?"

He doesn't answer right away. I watch him decide to. I watch the coin-voice drop away entirely, watch something underneath it surface the way it surfaced on the study floor three days ago, twelve years old and unguarded, and his mouth opens on the first real word of it —

"You go —"

His phone lights up on the counter behind him. Not the burner. The other one, the one that only rings for men who don't call at midnight for nothing.

He stops. Doesn't finish the sentence. Turns his head toward the counter the way a man turns toward a sound in a house he thought was empty, and the screen glows white against the dark kitchen — NUNZIO — and the little digital clock beside the name reads 12:04, the fireworks over the river still going, some other year having just started somewhere out there without either of us noticing the exact second it happened.

He crosses to it. Picks it up. I watch his shoulders, the particular set of them, the burn-scarred hand closing around the phone the same deliberate way it closes around anything he needs steady.

"Yeah," he says.

I can't hear Nunzio's voice, only the tinny shape of it, quick, low, and I count — uno, due — the old habit, my father's habit, losing the number almost as soon as I start it because I'm watching Dominic's face instead of counting anything at all.

Eleven seconds. I know because I count those too, and don't lose the number, because there's nothing else in the room to distract me from doing it right.

Something happens in his face at second eleven that I have never once seen there — not in a storeroom in September, not over an alley in November, not on a study floor three days ago with his mother's face turned down against the rug. Not anger. Something closer to a man discovering, too late, that he'd been playing a game whose rules had already changed without anyone telling him — cheated, is the word that comes to me, watching it land — cheated out of something he thought he still had time for.

He lowers the phone. Doesn't set it down. Just holds it, loose, at his side, and looks at me across the kitchen with the fireworks still climbing gold and green over the water behind the glass, and for a second neither of us says anything at all.

"Dominic."

He says one word.

"Florida."