Sunday morning and Dominic is already dressed before I've found my second sock, standing in the kitchen doorway with his coat over one arm like a man waiting for a bus he intends to make me catch too.

"Get dressed," he says. "Not for the house. For outside."

"It's Sunday. I have Rita's board to finish."

"Bring it."

I look at him a beat too long, because there's something in the flatness of it that isn't quite a request, and he catches me looking and doesn't explain, which is its own kind of tell — Dominic explains things when he thinks the explanation will land in his favor. When he goes quiet instead, it usually means the truth is one he doesn't want to hand over cheap.

Ten months and a day since he first sat down at that back table with his coffee going cold in front of him, waiting for a man who hadn't come. Thirty-six days since he last sat there at all, since the alley, since the hose water freezing at the puddle's edge. I do that arithmetic without meaning to now, the way I count exits, the way I press my tongue to the scar inside my lip. Numbers just arrive.

"Why," I say, not fighting him exactly, just wanting the word out loud between us before I put my coat on.

"Because I want you where I can see you today." He says it the way another man might say because I love you, which is to say: like an inventory line, like a fact he's checking off a ledger rather than a feeling he's confessing. Dominic accounts for things. People who are accounted for don't get taken.

I used to hear that and feel the walls come in. Today, for reasons I don't examine too hard while I'm lacing my boots, it feels less like being held down and more like being held, which — I recognize even as I let myself have it — might be the most dangerous confusion in the whole relationship. But I let myself have it anyway. It's cold outside and I am so tired of being the only one keeping score of my own safety.

---

He takes me to the study first, which surprises me, because the study is the room I broke into on my own eight days ago, the room where I found him on the floor across from me saying my father, on the kitchen floor, I was twelve in a voice with nothing left in it to protect.

He rolls back the rug himself this time. Doesn't wait for me to look away, doesn't close the door on two fingers the way he did with Nunzio in November. He kneels, turns the dial — I watch his burn-scarred hand do it, 04-14 skipped, 09-02 skipped, straight to 11-11 and the year that isn't mine or his — and the hinge gives its small oiled sigh and the safe is open in front of both of us, in daylight, on purpose.

"You already know what's in it," he says, like that settles something. Like showing me the thing I stole makes it stop being stolen.

He takes the folder out first — the glossy photographs, the police report, the notes with Nunzio's name worn into a groove — and doesn't hand it to me. He sets it in the desk drawer instead, closes the drawer, and something in my chest unclenches half an inch that I didn't know was clenched, because I have not wanted to look at those photographs again and I think he knows that without my saying it.

What he takes out next I haven't seen. A book, cloth-covered, green gone soft and pale at the corners the way green goes when it's been touched by hands for thirty years. The spine has been repaired with a strip of surgical tape, yellowed now, peeling a little at one edge, done so long ago it's practically part of the binding.

He holds it a second before he gives it to me. Not offering, not yet — weighing, the way you weigh a decision by the object that represents it.

Then he puts it in my hands.

"Open it," he says.

I do it slow, the way you'd open something you suspect might not survive being opened wrong. The cover creaks. The first page is blank except for a name in fountain pen, faded to the brown of strong tea: Rosalba. No last name. She didn't need one in her own book.

The second page has a leaf pressed flat under a stiff square of glassine gone cloudy with age, a maple leaf, five-pointed, the color drained out of it to a color that isn't a color anymore, just the ghost of autumn. Beneath it, in the same fountain-pen hand, two lines — Italian first, then English underneath in smaller letters, like she wasn't sure the second language would hold the thought as well and wanted a backup.

Acer saccharum. Ottobre 1994. Colore come il fuoco che non brucia.
Sugar maple. October 1994. Color like fire that doesn't burn.

My eye goes to the letterforms before it goes to the words — I can't help it, it's a professional tic, the same one that made me redraw a chalk menu board for free — and I notice the way her capital As have a little flourish at the crossbar, a habit, a signature almost, and I think: this is a woman who practiced her handwriting. Somebody taught her to write beautifully and she kept doing it even when nobody but a pressed leaf was going to read it.

Dominic doesn't say anything. He's standing close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him through my sweater, watching my hands on the pages the way he watched my hands the first time I sketched on a napkin in front of him — like the paper is doing the talking for both of us.

I turn the pages. Slow. A pressed clover, four-leafed, dated the spring after the maple leaf, with a note that just says lucky, apparently — found three more the same week. An oleander sprig, small, dried nearly to lace, the entry longer than the others: Nerium oleander. Tutte le parti sono velenose. La bellezza non promette niente. Beneath it, in English: All parts poisonous. Beauty promises nothing.

I know that plant. I watched him lay a sprig of it on a marble altar step in November and I didn't know, then, that his mother had written herself a warning about it years before she died in her own kitchen.

I keep going, and somewhere around the eighth or ninth pressing — a fern frond, unidentified, dated 1996 — I start doing the math the way I do all math now, quietly, in the part of my head that never stops running numbers even when the rest of me is trying to just look at something.

Thirty-one specimens. I count them without meaning to, flipping with my thumb the way you'd riffle a deck to check it's whole, and the number arrives before I can stop it: thirty-one, spanning March of 1994 to a date near the end that I don't reach because his hand gets there first.

"She turned thirty-one the year she started this," I say, out loud, before I've decided to say it. "The first entry. She'd have been — " and then the rest of the sentence just stops in my throat, because I am thirty-one, right now, this month, and she was thirty-one making a record of leaves in a city she never left, and four years later she was dead on a kitchen floor with her son twelve years old in the house.

The room goes very quiet. Even the radiator, which has been ticking all morning, seems to hold its breath.

"Don't," Dominic says. Not sharp. Just low, and close, right at my ear almost, and I realize I've started to speak again — some reflex to fill silence, an old habit from Trevor's kitchen where silence used to mean something was about to get worse — and I stop myself before the sentence finishes.

I turn one more page. A specimen I don't recognize, something small and star-shaped, dated in a hand that's shakier than the others, later, close to the end of the book, and I feel his palm come down over the back of my hand before I can turn past it — warm, the burn scar riding along my knuckles, no give in it at all.

He doesn't explain. He doesn't say not that page or not yet or there's something on the last page you're not ready for. He just holds my hand still on the paper, the whole weight of his arm behind it, until I stop trying to move it, and something in the gesture tells me more than any sentence could: whatever's on the page after this one, it isn't for today. Maybe it isn't for any day. Maybe it's the one thing in that safe he's kept even from himself.

I let him close the book. I let him put it back, wedge it beside the folder, spin the dial, roll the rug back over the seam in the floorboards with his shoe.

Neither of us says anything on the way down the stairs. My hand still has the ghost-warmth of his palm on it, the way a burn keeps radiating heat long after the pan's been moved.

---

The Bellini is dark when we get there, the CLOSED sign turned out, but Gennaro is behind the counter anyway, apron on, like he knew before either of us called ahead. He doesn't say anything about the thirty-six days. He doesn't say anything about the alley, or the loading bay, or the six inches of door he opened and closed without a word on the last night I was here in the dark.

He just unlocks the front door, lets us in out of the cold, and goes to the machine.

"Two," Dominic says, though Gennaro is already pulling the second cup down, already reaching for the portafilter, and I watch the whole choreography of it — the grinder throwing its burr on the fourth pull like it always does, the same broken machine it's been since March, since before any of this — and I think, absurdly, that some things in this city just refuse to be fixed on anyone's schedule but their own.

Gennaro sets both cups down in front of us without a word. On his way back to the counter he puts one hand, briefly, on Dominic's shoulder — not a pat, not a squeeze, just a hand resting there for a second and a half, the kind of touch a man gives another man when he doesn't trust his voice not to crack if he opens his mouth. It's the most I've ever seen Gennaro do. In four months of watching him move through this room like weather he's decided not to comment on, I have never once seen him touch a customer.

I sit at my table. Second from the window. The chair still fits the shape of me the way an old coat does, all the months of watching Dominic from four tables away folded into the wood somehow.

Dominic sits where he's sat since March. Back to the wall.

And it's only now, cup in hand, that I actually see the geometry of it the way he must have seen it every single day for ten months: from that chair he has the whole width of Atwells Avenue laid out through the front glass, the door, the sidewalk, the parked cars, every person who could conceivably walk in off that street framed and delivered to him before they've even touched the handle. I always thought he came here to conduct business quietly, the way men like him conduct everything quietly. I understand now, watching the angle of his shoulders, the specific stillness of a man not reading a menu, that he has never once been working in this room.

He has been keeping watch. Ten months of watch. And I sat four tables away for six of those months without understanding I was sitting in a blind he'd chosen for its clear sightline to a door his father might someday walk through.

"Tell me what you think happens," I say. Not gently. Not a challenge either. Just — I want it in words, flat and specific, instead of living in my chest as a shape I keep almost seeing and flinching from.

He turns his cup a quarter turn on the saucer before he answers, the same tell I've watched him do at his own kitchen table when he's deciding how much truth to spend.

"A boss doesn't hide forever," he says. "Not really hide. He runs things by phone because it's convenient, because Florida's warm and nobody can touch him there. But a man like my father, he wants to be seen eventually. A funeral. A wedding. Somebody's christening. Sooner or later there's an occasion he can't miss without it looking like weakness, and he comes home for it." He says it the way you'd describe weather that always arrives on schedule. "He walks in that door." A small tilt of his chin toward the glass. "I stand up."

"Here." My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. "You've been waiting for him to walk in here."

"Nobody draws on neutral ground. Thirty-six years, nobody's broken that. He knows it. I know it. It's the one place in this city he could come and believe, for about four seconds, that he's safe." Dominic's mouth does something that isn't a smile. "That's the whole plan. Ten months of coffee. Waiting for him to believe a rule that I've already decided doesn't apply to me."

I don't say anything for a while. Under the small table, his knee finds mine — not a deliberate move, I don't think, just the accident of two people sitting close in a twelve-table room built for smaller distances than this conversation needs — and neither of us shifts away. I can feel the warmth of him through two layers of fabric, steady, unbroken, the whole hour ticking by with Gennaro washing glasses behind the counter and neither of us moving that half inch that would put air back between us.

It should feel wrong. Sitting this close to a man laying out, in a flat conversational register, the exact mechanics of how he intends to murder his own father, in this exact room, at this exact table, and my body registering only the fact of his knee against mine, the small greedy comfort of contact, gooseflesh climbing the inside of my left elbow first the way it always does. I don't know what that says about me. I've stopped trying to make it say something tidy.

"Why today," I ask, when the coffee's gone cold enough that Gennaro would normally have come to take it, except he hasn't, except he's leaving us alone in here with a closed sign in the window like this is its own kind of neutral ground. "Why did you need me out of the house today specifically."

Dominic looks at me for a second like he's deciding whether the honest answer costs him anything.

"Five weeks," he says. "Since you moved in. You have not been out of my sight, or somebody's sight I trust, for one full day. Not once." A beat. "Friday I didn't like."

"Friday I went to my own apartment. Alone. For two hours."

"That's what I didn't like."

I want to argue with that — some old reflex, some leftover Trevor-shaped nerve that flinches at a man accounting for my hours like I'm a number on his ledger — but I think of the shut laptop, the squared cabinet, the eucalyptus in a drawer that isn't mine, and the argument dies somewhere between my chest and my mouth. Maybe he's not wrong to not like it. Maybe I don't like it either, and haven't said so.

"Okay," is all I say.

He nods once, like that's the whole negotiation, and reaches for his cup, and it's in that small ordinary motion — his hand around cold porcelain, not looking at me — that he says the rest of it, quiet, like it costs him something to get the words out in order.

"Nunzio's call. New Year's."

I go still. I remember the phone glowing white on the kitchen counter at midnight, eleven seconds, and then just one word out of him after: Florida.

"He didn't call about a number," Dominic says. "There's no route problem. No renewal." He turns the cup another quarter turn, and this time his hand isn't quite steady doing it. "My father's been sick since February. Pancreatic. He never told anyone — not Nunzio, not his doctor's office directly, some private thing through a lawyer in Boca so it wouldn't get back here. Nunzio only found out because the lawyer's a cousin of somebody's cousin, and even then it took him weeks to be sure." He sets the cup down without drinking from it. "Tomorrow they move him into a hospice. Boca Raton. It's — " He stops, and for the first time since I've known him, in ten months of watching this man hold every terrible thing in his hands without his face ever once losing its footing, I watch something in him actually falter, the corner of his jaw working like he's biting down on the shape of the sentence before it can get all the way out.

"He's dying of something else," Dominic says finally, flat, disbelieving, like a man reading his own pocket picked in front of him. "Twenty-seven years. I sat in this room for ten months waiting for the one thing I was owed, and he's going to die of cancer in a hospice bed in Florida before I ever get to stand up."