The garage smells like it's been cold since before either of us was born — concrete and motor oil and a rust smell that gets into the back of my throat and stays there. Seven in the morning, first of March, and my breath comes out in a plume thick enough to write in.

Two duffels on the card table. A rubber thimble, the orange kind bank tellers wear, that Dominic produced from somewhere I didn't ask about. A cardboard box of rubber bands, the wide flat kind, a thousand to a box, half of them already gone into somebody else's counting a long time ago.

"We do it by hand," he says, not for the first time. He said it in the car on the way over too, like a man rehearsing a line he needs to believe before he can say it to anyone else. "I'm not walking into a country I can't come back from on a number I guessed."

"You didn't guess the forty million."

"Teresa told me the forty million." He sets the thimble on his thumb, rolls his shoulders once like a man getting ready to lift something heavy. "Nobody's telling me this number. I count it myself or it doesn't exist."

So we count it ourselves.

---

Here's what nobody tells you about two million dollars: it takes longer to count than you'd think, and it is, up close, an extremely boring amount of paper. Bundles of hundreds, banker's straps gone soft and furred at the fold from however many hands touched them before mine. I can only use my right hand — the left sits useless in its splint against my chest, ring finger still crooked under the tape, middle finger throbbing on a schedule all its own — so the work falls into an assembly line without either of us deciding it should: I count, flick, count, hand him the stack; he snaps a band around it and stacks it in the duffel, squared, corners lined up like he can't help himself even now.

The paper is drier than money should feel. Old bills go soft, worn thin as fabric; new ones have an edge that finds skin. Twenty minutes in, I get my first paper cut, a thin red line across the pad of my index finger that doesn't hurt until I see it, and then it hurts plenty. Twenty minutes after that, another, this one crossing straight over the old scar on my palm — the one from the flashing in the loading bay, the one stitched shut at a walk-in clinic in December — and it opens the tenderest ring of it just enough to sting, a fine red thread welling up along a white line already there.

"Let me see." Dominic reaches for my hand before I've said anything.

"It's nothing."

"Let me see it anyway."

I let him. He turns my palm to the bulb light, presses his thumb either side of the cut to check the depth, decides it's shallow enough to ignore, and goes back to banding bills without another word about it. That's the whole exchange. Ten seconds, no comment on the scar underneath, and somehow it's the most tender thing that's happened to me all week, which tells you something about the week.

We count.

By eight thirty my fingers have gone from stinging to numb, a specific graduated numbness that starts at the tips and climbs, and I flex them every so often just to remind myself they're still attached to something. Dominic's breath fogs steady and even beside me. He counts under his own breath in Italian sometimes without seeming to notice he's doing it, a habit I've never heard from him anywhere but here, in the cold, with his hands full of somebody's laundered money.

"You're doing that thing," I say.

"What thing."

"The counting. Under your breath. In Italian."

He stops. Looks at his own hands like they belong to someone else. "My mother used to count stitches like that. Sewing." A pause, the kind he takes when he's deciding how much of a sentence to give away. "I didn't know I still had it."

I don't say anything. I just count faster, because it's the only thing I know how to give back to him that isn't a question.

---

By noon we have a number.

I write it on the back of a napkin from the diner up the road, because neither of us trusts a phone with a calculator in it anymore, not even a burner, not even one we're about to snap in half. Two million, one hundred thousand dollars. Exactly. I check the math twice, out loud, and Dominic checks it a third time silently, lips moving, before he sets the pen down.

"Forty-one bundles short of what I thought," he says.

"Of the two million you thought, or the forty you used to have?"

"Both." He says it flat, and then something moves at the corner of his mouth that isn't quite a smile, more like the ghost of one passing through on its way somewhere else. "Eleven properties. Four shells. Three routes. Forty million dollars, five years, and it comes down to this — a card table and a rubber thimble and a number that fits on a napkin."

"You want to know the funny part," I say, and my voice comes out thinner than I mean it to, "is that I used to not be able to afford my own coffee. Forty dollars in my checking account. And now I'm sitting across a table from two point one million dollars and I still can't feel my hands."

He laughs. It isn't really laughing — it's the sound a man makes instead of something worse, air pushed out through the nose, shoulders dropping half an inch — and I laugh too, and neither of us means it, and both of us need it anyway. It's the first time either of us has laughed since the eggs in the kitchen, since before Dean Street, since the world still had a shape we understood.

The laugh runs out fast. The cold comes back into the room like it had only stepped out.

---

Under the card table our knees are touching. Have been for an hour, maybe two, close enough that I've stopped registering it as anything but weather. His leg is warmer than the rest of the garage by a significant margin, warm enough that I've angled my whole body a few degrees toward it without deciding to, an old animal math running under the conscious kind: heat source, move closer.

My hands go from numb to something worse, a deep stiff ache, twice over the course of the morning, and both times he stops what he's doing without a word and takes them — the good one, careful of the splinted one — and folds them inside his own, presses them flat between his palms like he's trying to start a fire the old way. He doesn't call it anything. Neither do I. We just sit there, breath fogging, his thumbs moving slow over my knuckles until the ache backs off enough for me to hold the bills again, and then he lets go and we go back to counting like it didn't happen, like his hands weren't just doing something so far past business it doesn't have a name in either of our mouths.

The third time it happens I don't let go right away. I hold on maybe four seconds too long, and he doesn't pull back either, and for those four seconds the garage is not cold at all.

---

At one o'clock he unrolls a road atlas across the emptied end of the table — a Rand McNally, the spine cracked white, pages soft as cloth, the kind of object I haven't seen since my father kept one in his truck for houses he'd never find on a phone map. Dominic runs his finger along 90 west out of Providence, up through the top corner of the state, into Vermont on roads with single digits, a border crossing he's already chosen because a man he trusts told him which one has a bored guard shift on Tuesdays.

"No phone for this part," he says, before I ask. "A phone remembers a route. Paper doesn't unless somebody finds it and reads it, and by the time somebody finds this, it's ash in a barrel in Vermont."

"And the box."

"Montreal. A broker holds it. Two passports, cash enough to start, a name for each of us." He doesn't look up from the map. "We don't open it until we're ready. Not before. Once you open a box like that, you're not Maya Ferraro anymore, not even for a night, not even to buy gas. You understand what I'm telling you."

"That there's no halfway."

"That there's no halfway." He taps the crease of Vermont with one finger, the burn scar catching the bulb light along its ridge. "Once, not twice. Once we cross, we don't go back for anything. Not a coat left behind. Not a phone call home. Nothing."

I look at the map instead of him, because it's easier, and because somewhere under my ribs a small cold thing is asking a question I haven't let myself ask out loud yet.

"What happens," I say, "if the Commission finds us anyway. If somebody up there decides you killing a sitting boss without a sanction isn't a Florida problem, it's everybody's problem, and they come looking."

He doesn't flinch from it. I'll give him that — whatever else is true about this man, he has never once flinched from a direct question, not from me, not since September.

"It takes months," he says. "Longer, maybe, because nobody's in a hurry to spend money finding two people who already burned everything they had. If it happens, it happens as a phone call to somebody in Montreal who owes somebody else a favor, and then a car outside a building, and we'd have maybe an hour's warning if we're lucky." He folds the atlas shut, careful with the spine. "Money buys you distance, Maya. It buys you time. It does not buy you forgiveness. I want you to hear me say that once, clearly, so you're not surprised later if it turns out to be true."

"I heard you."

"Say it back."

"Money buys distance," I say. "Not forgiveness."

He nods once, like a man closing a ledger, and reaches for the duffel zippers instead of my hand this time.

---

There are no rings between us. No church, no priest, no words either of us would recognize as vows, and I understand by now that we are never going to have those, that whatever this is has to be built out of other material or it doesn't get built at all. So this is what we build it out of, on a Saturday, in a freezing garage, over two duffel bags: half the cash in mine, half in his. Never in the same car, not even for a single mile if we can help it. If one of us gets taken — car, checkpoint, a bad turn at a border — the other one keeps driving. Doesn't stop. Doesn't come back for a look.

"No," he says, the second I lay that last part out loud.

"Yes."

"Maya."

"You'll do it," I say. "You'd do it in a heartbeat if it were reversed and you know it, so don't stand there and pretend this is a hard rule for you and an easy one for me. It's the same rule. It just feels different depending which side of it you're standing on."

He goes quiet a long time, long enough that the ice-machine hum of an idea I don't have a name for fills the space where his answer should be. Then: "Fine."

"Say the whole thing."

"If you're taken, I keep driving." Each word comes out like it costs him something specific, a coin out of a very finite purse. "I don't come back for a look."

"That's the vow," I say. "That's the only one we get."

"It's a terrible vow."

"It's an honest one." I zip my duffel two-thirds and stop, leaving room for what's still on the table. "That's more than I ever got out of the last one I almost made."

---

We warm up in the car with the engine running and the heater roaring on high, hands held up to the vents like we're praying to them, and somewhere in the middle of that — his fingers finally losing their stiffness, mine still wrapped in gauze and paint-stirrer — I lean across the console and kiss him.

He goes still first, the way he does before he lets himself want something, and then his hand comes up along my jaw, careful, avoiding the splinted fingers entirely, and I feel my own toes curl hard inside my boots, an old cramped ache I've learned to recognize and pretend I haven't. His mouth tastes like the diner coffee we split at seven a.m., bitter and a little burnt, and under that, gun oil and orange peel, the smell that's been under every version of this man since September.

I want more than this. I know it the way I know cold, immediately and without permission — want his hands somewhere other than my jaw, want the heater and the fogged windows and the two duffels of money in the back to disappear entirely for twenty minutes — and I can feel him wanting it too, feel it in how carefully he's holding himself back, like a man rationing something he isn't sure he'll get more of.

We stop anyway. Not because either of us doesn't want it. Because there's a garage full of counted money behind us and a road atlas open to Vermont and neither of us has the right, today, to spend an hour on anything that isn't survival.

"Later," he says, forehead against mine, breath still uneven.

"Later," I agree, and it isn't a lie, exactly. It's a hope wearing a promise's clothes.

---

We break the phones on the garage floor, one at a time, heel of his boot, and drop the pieces into an empty coffee can that used to hold something else entirely. The Federal Hill house keys — three of them, brass gone dull with handling — go through the mail slot of Teresa Malandra's office on the way to the highway, no note, because the message is the keys themselves: there's nothing left in that house worth taking, and I'm not coming to collect it.

Rosalba's notebook gets wrapped twice in a plastic grocery bag, packed flat at the bottom of my duffel where a search would have to know to look. I watch him do it, watch his hands go slow and exact the way they never go for anything else, and I don't say a word, because some things you honor with silence and this is one of them.

What we keep, in the end, is almost nothing. Two blue passports with our real names inside them, kept only until the border because after that they're kindling. The receipt from the Montreal broker, folded into the lining of my coat. And the letters — Salvatore's letters, the ones from the room with the number nine on the door, rubber band gone slack from a car floor in Florida — which Dominic packs into his own duffel without a word of argument, though I watch for it, half expecting him to tell me to burn them with the phones.

He doesn't. I notice that he doesn't. I don't ask him why.

---

Bruno arrives at two with a thermos and doesn't come past the doorway.

He's got his coat buttoned to the throat, no bowling shirt today, which is its own kind of announcement before he says a single word. He hands the thermos through the gap in the aluminum door like he's not sure he's allowed all the way inside anymore, and Dominic takes it, and the two of them stand there a second too long not saying anything, two men who've spent thirteen years driving toward this exact silence without either one planning to.

"I'm not coming," Bruno says.

Nobody asks him to explain it, but he does anyway, the way people do when the truth's been sitting in them so long it comes out whether it's wanted or not. His sister runs the restaurant alone now, has for two years, and somebody's got to be free to help her when the register's short and the dishwasher breaks, and thirteen and a half years is a long time to be somebody else's hands, and he's fifty-one, and Providence is the only place he's ever cooked in a kitchen that was his.

"You don't owe me an explanation," Dominic says.

"I know I don't." Bruno's eyes are wet, though his voice never breaks. "I'm giving you one anyway."

Dominic pays him — an envelope from inside his coat, thick, no rubber band on this one — and Bruno takes it without counting it, folds it once and puts it away like it's something ordinary, groceries money, and then the two of them do a thing I've never once seen Dominic do with another man: they embrace, hard, arms all the way around, Bruno's face pressed briefly into Dominic's shoulder, and neither one of them says goodbye out loud, the same way they've never once said it on a phone call in thirteen years.

Bruno steps back first. Wipes his face with the flat of his hand, no shame in it at all, and turns toward his car.

Then he stops at the door.

"One more thing," he says, and something in the way he says it makes the cold in the garage feel suddenly much colder than the thermostat has any right to make it. "Thursday. My sister's place. A fella came in — quarter-zip, real polite, one of those watches that counts your steps, kept checking it while he talked. Rental car outside, plates from the airport lot." He glances at Dominic, then at me, like he's sorry about what he's carrying and can't put it down anywhere gentler. "Asked her, casual as anything, whether she knew of anybody renting garages around here. Manton Avenue, specifically. Paid for his coffee with a twenty and told her to keep the change."

Nobody says anything for a second.

"Two days ago," Bruno says. "He already had the street."