The house doesn't look like a house anymore. It looks like the diagram of one — walls, doorways, the ghost-outlines on the wood floor where a couch used to sit, pale rectangles in a room that used to be warmer than this. Bruno's men took the furniture Thursday afternoon while I was at the clinic getting my mouth looked at for a crack that turned out to be nothing, and by the time I got back there was a truck outside with my houseplants strapped down in milk crates, bound for Simone's studio, and the only thing left standing in the front room was a lamp nobody remembered to sell.

The floor safe in the study sits open. Empty, dial spun loose, lid propped at an angle like a mouth caught mid-word. I walked past it twice today already and both times some old, stupid part of me expected it to still have something in it. It doesn't. Everything that was ever going to matter got taken out of that hole in the floor weeks ago — the folder, the gun, the money, his mother's notebook, which is currently folded inside a canvas tote in my closet, wrapped in a T-shirt like it's something that could bruise.

My hand is the loudest thing in the house.

I've had it wrapped since Thursday — dish towel first, then a bag of frozen peas gone soft and warm an hour after Bruno bought a second bag, then a third, so now there are three bags of peas in various states of collapse in the freezer and my hand still looks like something that happened to somebody else. Black through the knuckle. Purple past that, going yellow-green at the edges where the swelling's oldest. The ring finger sits crooked in a way that makes my stomach drop the way an elevator drops when someone's cut the cable — I've eaten four saltines today just to keep that feeling from becoming something worse.

"We're not going to a hospital," Dominic says, for the third time, like repetition is a kind of splint too.

"I heard you the first two times."

"An X-ray's a record. A record's a subpoena away from Boston." He says it flat, an accountant reading a balance, but his jaw's doing the thing where a muscle stands up along the hinge and doesn't sit back down. "Trevor reads records for a living."

"I know."

"So."

"So," I say, "you're going to fix my hand yourself, in the kitchen, with what — a Boy Scout badge you never mention?"

He doesn't answer that. He just goes and gets the first-aid box.

---

He kneels.

That's the first thing that gets me, before the tape, before any of it — a man his size, six-foot-two of him, folding himself down onto the kitchen tile in front of the chair he's put me in, knees on cold ceramic, and he doesn't do it like a task. He does it like something closer to church, and I think of Father Piras's frail hands shaking around a chalice at St. Bartholomew's and wonder if that's where he learned the posture, twenty-seven years of confession teaching a boy how a body goes down when it means something.

The first-aid box is white plastic with a faded red cross, older than either of us probably, and inside it: a roll of white cloth tape, gauze folded in cellophane, two flat wooden sticks — paint stirrers, I realize, the free kind from a hardware store, snapped in half with his own hands sometime in the last hour — and a pair of blunt scissors.

"May I," he says.

Two words. Not a full sentence. I've had this man's hands on every part of me there is, in a storeroom, in a bed, over a burn barrel in a backyard, and he has never once, not one single time in five months, asked permission first. He's asked forgiveness. He's asked for things sideways, in acts instead of words. He has never asked may I.

"Yeah," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Yeah, go ahead."

He takes my wrist in his left hand — the good one, no scarring — and holds my forearm steady against the table edge, and with his right hand, the burned one, the one with no feeling through the center of it, he takes hold of my ring finger.

"On three," he says.

"You said that last time about the—"

"On three," he says again, and I understand this isn't negotiation, this is warning, the same courtesy Gennaro gives when he tells you the espresso's about to taste like something happened to it.

"One," he says, and pulls on two.

The sound is small. A wet click, close to the bone, closer than any sound has business being. The pain that follows isn't a color, it's a temperature — white-hot for exactly as long as it takes my whole body to understand what's happened, and then it settles into something duller, something that just sits there like a stone dropped into a pond after the splash is done. My tears come up fast, right to the back of my throat, right behind my eyes, and they do not fall. I don't let them. I stare at the kitchen tile instead — small hexagons, cream with a rust fleck pattern, grout gone grey with age — and I start counting them, one hexagon, two, three, because counting something that isn't my hand is the only trick I have left that still works.

"Middle one next," he says, quieter now, like the volume itself is an apology.

"Just do it."

He does it on two this time, no warning at all, and I understand why — the waiting is worse than the doing, and he's decided to spare me the waiting even though it costs him the decency of counting fairly. My jaw locks so hard the old click on the left side pops loud enough that I hear it over my own pulse, and I have to work it loose after, two fingers pressed under my ear, while he holds my hand flat on the table and doesn't look away from what he's doing.

Neither of us says the word hurts. It would be redundant. It would also, somehow, be the wrong kind of honest — the kind that asks for something back.

---

He splints them the way you'd splint a bird's wing, if you'd never splinted a bird's wing and were working entirely off some memory of a stick and a piece of string. Gauze first, wrapped once around each finger for padding. Then the paint-stirrer halves, laid flush against the underside from first knuckle to second, and the tape — white cloth tape, the kind that tears with your teeth instead of scissors — wound around in tight overlapping bands, his burned hand steady as a table saw the whole time even though I can see, up close, the shine of the scar tissue where feeling stops and starts.

Then he tapes the ring finger to the middle finger beside it, and the middle finger to the ring finger back, buddy-strapped, because two weak things held together are stronger than either one alone — something I could have told him, something I have, in fact, been trying to tell him in one form or another since September.

When it's done he doesn't let go right away.

He holds my wrist a beat longer than the job needs, thumb resting light against the pulse point, and I feel it there — steady, too steady, the kind of steady a man builds on purpose — and I know, the way you know weather is about to turn even before the sky commits to it, that he's doing the thing he does instead of saying anything. Acts, never words. I've learned to read the acts like a second language, and this one, this extra three seconds with his thumb against my wrist, reads as clear as anything he's ever said to me in English or Italian both.

I look at his face to see if he knows I noticed.

He does. His jaw does the thing again, the muscle standing up and refusing to sit, and he lets go of my wrist like it burned him worse than the car did in 2002, and gets up off the tile too fast, knees cracking, already turning for the stove like cooking is the thing that will make the last four minutes not have happened.

"I hate that you see that," he says, to the stove, not to me.

"I know you do," I say. "Do it anyway."

---

He makes scrambled eggs.

He oversalts them criminally — I mean that in the most literal sense available to either of us these days — and undercooks the middle so there's a wet seam running through the center of the pan like a fault line, and when he sets the plate in front of me with my splinted hand propped on a dish towel like a resting hostage, I look at the eggs and I look at him and something in my chest that has been locked shut since a windowless room on the fourth of February finally, finally gives.

"Jesus," I say. "You could kill Salvatore with these eggs and call it mercy."

It's a terrible joke. It's the worst possible joke, under the actual literal circumstances, and I know it the second it's out of my mouth, but Dominic's face does something I haven't seen it do since Christmas Eve — his mouth twitches, fights it, loses, and an actual sound comes out of him, short and rough and unpracticed, like a laugh that's been sitting in storage too long and has to be talked back into working order.

"Bruno's better at this," he says.

"Bruno's better at everything domestic. You should let him raise us."

"He tried to teach me the eggs for years."

"He should've kept trying."

I eat them anyway, one-handed, fork awkward in my right, and they're bad, genuinely bad, and it is the best meal I've had since I don't know when, because it is the only meal in three weeks that hasn't tasted like fear going down.

---

We plan Florida at the kitchen table, which is four pieces of wood leaning against the pantry wall since the ninth, so we plan it on the counter instead, standing, papers spread between us like a chessboard nobody's pretending is anything else.

"Bruno has the name," Dominic says. "Villa Serena. Boca Raton. He was admitted the sixth of January."

Seven weeks ago. I do the math without meaning to — Salvatore's been dying in a pink stucco building for almost two months while his son sat in a cafe on Atwells Avenue with his back to the wall, waiting for a door that was never going to open on its own.

"Tickets," Dominic says, sliding a printed itinerary across the counter with two fingers. "Tuesday, out of Green. One-way. Legal names — we're not the Bouchards yet, not for this, that's for after." He taps the second sheet. "Rental car in Fort Lauderdale, under Bruno's cousin's license. Cash for both."

"And after."

"After isn't Tuesday's problem."

"It's going to be somebody's problem," I say, and he doesn't argue that, because there's nothing in him left that can argue with true things anymore, not after Dean Street stripped every other kind of argument out of his hands.

He looks at me for a long moment, and then he says the part I know is coming, the part he's clearly rehearsed the way Nunzio rehearses things for other men's mouths.

"You stand in the doorway," he says. "You don't come further in than that. You don't touch anything in that room — not a chart, not a rail, not him. And when it's done, you leave first. Before me. I need to know you're already out of the building before—"

"No."

"Maya."

"I'll stand in the doorway. Fine. I won't touch anything, fine. But I'm not waiting in a car like a getaway driver's girlfriend in a movie I'd hate. If I'm going to be there, I'm going to be there for all of it, not just the part that's convenient to explain later."

He studies me the way he studied the reduction on my finger, calculating angle and give, deciding how much force it'll take and whether it's worth the sound it'll make.

"You don't wait in the car," he says finally. It isn't a concession exactly. It's closer to an accounting entry, a number moved from one column to another because the math changed. "You're in the building. Not the car."

"I can live with that," I say, and neither of us laughs at the word live, though we both hear it.

---

We sleep on the bare mattress, no frame, same as it's been since he first put a key on a pillow for me months ago in this same house, except tonight there's no sheet and no lamp left on for me because the lamp's in Simone's studio too, and we're both still dressed — him in the shirt he cooked in, me in the sweatshirt I've had my splinted hand threaded through the sleeve of like a kid with a cast.

I hold the hand up off the mattress, propped against his chest, because lying flat makes the blood pool and the pooling makes it throb in time with my pulse, a metronome I did not ask for. He lies still under it, breathing slow and deliberate the way he breathes when he's counting himself down from something, and after a while I say it into the dark, plain, no qualifier hung off the end of it like a life raft.

"I love you."

He doesn't say it back. He tightens his arm instead — the one wrapped loose around my shoulders, not the burned one, the good one — pulls me in that half an inch closer that costs him nothing and means, in whatever grammar he's fluent in, everything. I've learned to read that tightening the way I once learned to read eleven words spread across four days. It says the same sentence every time. I stopped needing him to translate it out loud around the second week of January.

My feet, under the blanket, curl into themselves, arches cramping the way they do when something in me wants and isn't getting, though tonight the want isn't for anything that could happen with a hand like this — it's the plainer kind, the kind that just wants to keep being held exactly like this until whatever's coming decides to come.

---

Later — much later, past midnight, him finally asleep or doing a very good impression of it — I sit at the counter with a legal pad and write two letters with my splinted hand curled useless against my chest, my printing crooked and slow, like the six-year-old version of me who first learned to hold a crayon.

The one to my mother I write and read twice and then don't send. Dear Ma. I want to tell you I'm okay and have that be true. I fold it into a drawer that used to hold a phone book and now holds nothing else, because some things you write only so you'll have written them, not so anyone reads them.

The one to Simone I seal. Take care of the plants. Don't look for me, and don't let her look either — meaning my mother, meaning don't let Carmela go digging, meaning I am asking my best friend to lie to my own mother for the rest of both their lives if that's what it takes. I write the date I want it mailed on the back flap — the 27th — one day past whatever's waiting for us in Florida, and I leave it on top of the tote bag with the notebook in it, where I know Bruno will find it and know exactly what to do, because Bruno always knows exactly what to do with the things nobody else can carry.

Dominic gets up around one and burns the last of it in the kitchen sink — crew ledgers gone soft with water first so they don't flare too fast, a photograph I catch half a glimpse of before the flame takes it, him at twenty-three or -four standing next to a younger, thicker Salvatore, some hall I don't recognize, January 2009 written faint in ballpoint on the white border. He watches it curl and blacken with the same stillness he had on the kitchen tile, the same water-about-to-break stillness from Dean Street, and when it's ash he runs the tap and washes it down the drain like it was never anything more than dinner.

What's left, after: a Montreal receipt folded small in his coat pocket, and his mother's notebook, already packed, already mine to carry.

---

The next three days go by like a held breath I don't remember choosing to hold.

A motel outside Warwick, off the highway, ice machine rattling all night in the hall. The television in the corner running low with the sound half up, a headline scrolling under a woman's face I don't know — a federal case closed without charges, the anchor says, no further comment from the U.S. Attorney's office — and I watch it register on Dominic's face like weather passing over water, there and then gone, and neither of us says the word HILLSIDE out loud in that room, like saying it might undo whatever's just been done to it. Nunzio calls four times. Dominic doesn't answer any of them, and doesn't listen to the voicemails either, just watches the phone light up and go dark, light up and go dark, like a lighthouse signaling a ship that already knows better than to come in.

My hand stops looking like something that happened to somebody else and starts, slowly, looking like mine again — still black at the knuckle, still crooked past where a finger goes, but mine.

I don't remember most of Sunday. I remember Monday only as a color, grey-brown, motel-carpet grey. I fall asleep on Tuesday night with the taped hand tucked against my own chest this time, not his, because at some point in those three days he stopped sleeping altogether and started, instead, just sitting up in the room's one chair with his eyes open, watching the door the way he used to watch a cafe door for eleven months straight.

I wake at five in the morning to the sound of him lacing his shoes.

Not talking. Not explaining. Just the small, ordinary sound of laces being pulled tight in a dark room, the kind of sound that means a day has already started somewhere without asking me first, and for one long second before I say his name I lie there with my splinted hand against my sternum and let the sound be the only thing that's happened yet.