The novocaine hasn't let go all the way by the time I walk back into the Federal Hill house, and I spend the whole four blocks testing my own face like a woman checking whether a bridge will hold her weight — tongue pressed to the numb quarter of my lower lip, feeling nothing, feeling the specific strangeness of feeling nothing, which nobody warns you is its own kind of sensation.
The receptionist at the dentist called out Anna Beaulieu twice before I understood she meant me. I'd practiced it in the waiting room like a line I was worried I'd flub — Anna, Anna, Anna — and then when it came time to answer I still hesitated half a second too long, and the receptionist looked up over her clipboard the way people do when they think you might be slow rather than terrified, and I said "sorry, yes, that's me," and went and sat in the chair and let a stranger numb the left side of my mouth and grind down what was left of the molar I split on Bruno's ziti fork, and fit a temporary crown over it, all under a name that isn't mine, that Dominic wrote on a Post-it in his own hand and folded into my coat pocket this morning like lunch money.
He's cooking when I come in. I can smell it from the hall — garlic gone one degree past golden into something with an edge to it, and under that the specific burnt-sugar smell of peppers left in a pan too long — and I find him at the stove in his shirtsleeves, sausage and peppers going grey-brown at the edges, a loaf of garlic bread on a cookie sheet that he pulls out just as I walk in, black along one whole side like a bad photograph.
"Bruno taught you this?"
"Two things." He sets the tray down hard enough that the bread bounces. "This is one of them."
"What's the other one?"
"Eggs." He doesn't look up. "I'm better at eggs."
I laugh — it comes out lopsided because of the numb side, air escaping where it shouldn't — and he glances at me sideways, something in his face that isn't quite a smile but is standing very close to where one would be.
The kitchen table has been four separate pieces of wood leaning against the pantry wall since the ninth, since the morning he put his fist through the cabinet glass and a chair through the plaster and I sat on broken crockery with my bare foot bleeding, and neither of us has said a word about replacing it, so we eat on the floor, plates on our knees, backs against the cabinets that still don't have doors on two of the shelves. The burnt garlic bread is, somehow, the best thing either of us has eaten all week, and I tell him so, and he says, "Low bar," and for a second it's almost normal, two people on a kitchen floor eating bad food they made themselves.
"Teresa's coming Saturday — the fifteenth," he says, into the plate, not to me exactly. "Bringing everything. Deeds, the ledgers, the shell paper."
"Okay."
"It's going to take a while. What happens after."
Neither of us says the word burn. It sits in the room with us anyway, patient, unbothered, like a third person at dinner who hasn't been asked to leave and isn't going to be.
---
Upstairs the lights are off and the window's gone that particular blue-white it gets when it's about to snow again, the whole room lit from outside instead of in, snow-light, flat and even, no shadows anywhere. We lie down without either of us saying we're doing anything more than lying down.
I take his right hand first. I don't plan it — my fingers just find it in the dark the way they've found it a hundred times, tracing the raised shine of scar from his knuckles up over the wrist, skin gone smooth and strange where the nerves gave up on reporting anything at all — and I press it flat against my own mouth, my numb mouth, so that for a second neither of us can feel exactly what's happening at that particular point of contact.
"This one," I say. "Say it."
He's quiet long enough that I think he's not going to. Then: "The car. Seventeen. That's true. What I told you." His voice has gone very level, the voice he uses when he's handing me something he's already decided he can survive handing me. "That's not where it started."
I don't say anything. I've learned, these last five months, that the fastest way to close him is to reach for him too soon.
"Nine," he says. "There was a window. I broke it — a ball, nothing, an accident — and I told him I didn't. Lied straight to his face, the way a kid does, thinking a lie that small can't cost anything." A pause, his thumb moving once against my jaw, an old habit doing something for him that words aren't. "He had oil going for something. Held the back of my neck and put my hand down near it. Not in it. Near it. Four seconds. He counted them out loud so I'd know he wasn't losing his temper. So I'd know it was a decision."
I don't move. My whole body has gone very still, the specific stillness that used to mean danger and now just means listen.
"He never told anyone. I never told anyone." His voice doesn't shake, which is somehow worse than if it did. "You're the first."
---
My turn. I find the scar on my own forearm in the dark before he does, the two-inch line gone silver with age, and it goes cold under my fingers the way it always does a half-second before the rest of me catches up to being afraid — a small system in my body that clocks danger before my brain gets the memo, and I resent it, and I've never once managed to override it.
"Trevor," I say, and it costs less than it used to, saying his name in this bed. "You know this part. The frame."
"I know the part you told me." His hand comes to rest over mine, over the scar, warm where mine's gone cold. "Tell me the part I don't."
"He threw it at the wall." My voice stays steady; I've practiced this one too, just never out loud, never to anyone. "Not at me. He was always careful about that — the wall, the door, never me, so he could say later he never once put his hands on me. And then he stood there while I picked the glass up off the floor myself, arm already open, and explained — while I was bleeding, while I was on my knees — exactly what I'd said that made him need to do that."
Six years, I think. Six years and I'm still doing his math for him.
"He never hit me." I say it plain, no softening, the sentence I have genuinely never said out loud to a living person, not even Simone, not even the ER nurse who stitched me. "And I still can't sleep with the light off."
He doesn't say anything for a while. Then he reaches past me, without asking, and turns the bedside lamp on — low, amber, enough to see the shape of him by — and leaves it.
---
"Your nose," I say, some minutes later, my head against his chest, listening to it do the slow work of a heartbeat instead of a confession. "I already know this one too."
"Tell it back to me."
"Nineteen. A fight in Fall River, amateur, something you weren't supposed to be in." I feel him almost-laugh under my ear. "And ten. Someone your father knew, in your own kitchen, and you went four days before anyone did anything about it."
"Nobody ever asked who did it," he says, quiet. "That's the part I never said. Four days before anybody took me anywhere, and by then I'd already pushed it straight myself in the mirror of somebody's parked car on Atwells Avenue, because I didn't know what else you were supposed to do with a thing like that."
I press my mouth — numb, useless, mine — against the crooked bridge of it, and don't say anything, because there isn't anything to say to a boy who fixed his own face in a stranger's car mirror because nobody was coming.
---
"My hand," I say, holding up my right palm so the lamp catches the pale seam across it. "November. The loading bay. I grabbed the torn flashing on the door frame when my legs went and it cut me open, and I didn't even feel it happen, I just looked down and there was blood and I thought, stupidly, that's going to stain the sleeve."
"I know," he says.
"And this—" I touch the shell of my own left ear, the one that's rung, low and continuous, every hour of every day for seventy-five days now, a sound like a phone left off the hook two rooms away, "—this doesn't stop. It's not going to stop. I looked it up. It might be forever."
He goes very still. Then he turns his head and puts his mouth against that same ear, breath warm where the ringing lives, and says, "I'm sorry," flat, unadorned, the whole sentence, nothing added to soften it or explain it away.
It's the only time in five months I've heard him apologize for anything.
---
There's one more. I find it by accident, my fingers moving up through his hair the way you'd smooth a child's, and they catch on it — a thin ridge under the hairline at the back of his skull, old, barely there, the kind of scar you'd only ever find if you were already looking with your hands instead of your eyes.
He goes quiet in a different way this time. Not deciding whether to tell me. Deciding whether he can survive telling anyone at all.
"Eleven, eleven," he says finally, so low I feel it more than hear it. "Twenty-seven years and three months ago." My father's counting habit rises in me unbidden, uno, due, and I let it go, because this isn't my count to keep. "I went down on my knees. On the tile. In it." A long breath. "I was twelve years and two months old and I didn't scream. Because he was still in the room."
I don't ask what it is. I already know, from a floor safe and a manila folder and photographs I put face-down on a rug seven weeks ago. I put my hand flat against the back of his skull, over the scar, and hold it there the way you'd hold a wound closed, and neither of us says anything else about it, because there isn't anything else, there's only the fact of it, finally spoken, sitting in the room with the lamp on.
---
What happens next isn't fast and it isn't rough, for the first time since a storeroom in September, and I notice the difference the way you notice a room's gone quiet — all at once, and then completely.
He moves like he's relearning where things are allowed to go. My numb mouth makes a mess of the first kiss, my lip catching wrong against his, and I laugh — really laugh, breaking the whole solemn architecture of the last hour — and he laughs too, low, surprised out of himself, and then neither of us is laughing, we're just here, slow, face to face, his weight settled over me like something finally allowed to rest.
The gooseflesh comes up along the inside of my left elbow first, always the left first, and I feel him notice it, his thumb tracing the goosebumps like he's reading braille. My toes curl hard enough to ache against the sheet. Heat climbs the back of my neck under my hair before it ever reaches my face, and by the time he sees it there I've already felt myself flushing for a full thirty seconds, an early warning system with nothing left to warn me about.
"Say it," I tell him, my hands in his hair, at the scar, at the place he let me touch. "Say it in whatever language it comes in."
"Ti amo," he says, rough, into my collarbone, like it costs him something physical to produce, like a bone being set.
"In English," I say. "Make yourself say it in English."
He lifts his head and looks at me, grey-green eyes gone dark in the lamp's low light, and says it — I love you — plain, unadorned, no Italian to hide behind, and I say it back first this time even though I already said it once before on a study rug a month ago, because saying it once was true and saying it twice is a decision, and I want him to know I've made it twice now, on purpose, wide awake.
---
Afterward we lie with the lamp still on, my head on his chest, his burn-scarred hand resting loose against my hip.
"How long," I say. Not a question I need to dress up. "The doctors. How long does he have."
"Weeks." His voice has gone back to level, the administrative register, the one he uses to survive telling me things. "Maybe six."
I do the math without meaning to — twenty-seven years, three months, and six weeks left to make good on all of it, or not.
"And if the cancer gets there first," I say. "Before you do."
"Then twenty-seven years means nothing." He says it without self-pity, a fact filed alongside the others. "I was a boy waiting for a man to walk back through a door, and the door just — doesn't open. That's it. That's the whole ending."
"Then we go before it does."
He turns his head. I feel him look at me in the dark, weighing whether I mean what I've said the way a person means a thing they've thought through, or the way a person means a thing in the heat of a night like this one.
I say the rest before he can decide for me.
"I want to be in the room." I keep my voice even, deliberately, the same flat register he uses for facts he can survive. "Not to stop you. I'm past that. I just — you were twelve, and alone in a kitchen, and nobody was there to see it happen to you. I'm not letting that be true twice."
He doesn't answer in words. He gets up, unhurried, crosses to the other room, and I hear him moving something, and he comes back holding the green cloth notebook — his mother's, his since he was twelve, mine since a rug and a lamp seven weeks ago — and sets it down on the pillow between us, careful, like something that might still bruise.
Neither of us picks it up. It just sits there, spine held together with old surgical tape, thirty years of pressed leaves inside it, while the snow keeps coming down outside the window and the lamp stays on, deliberately, because of what I said about the dark, and we fall asleep like that, on our sides, facing each other, the notebook between us like something we've both agreed to keep.
