“That boy eats when he’s thinkin’. And lately he’s thinkin’ a lot.”
Below us, Sofia hasn’t moved. Mila hasn’t moved. They sit in their separate silences and share the corridor and that’s all. That’s everything.
And Nico reads on.
The Russian fills the corridor, soft and steady, and Mila’s head stays tilted, and the hallway changes. I can’t quite pinpoint what it is. But the air pressure drops. Not a threat. A beginning.
I look at this house. Not a compound. Not a base of operations.
My palm stays on Isabella’s back. The espresso goes cold on the railing. Rosa sings along to the radio downstairs. Marco’s footsteps cross the back hall again. Giada’s voice rises and falls behind a closed door. The house holds all of it.
Below us, Mila stands. Walks two steps toward her room. Stops. Turns back to look at Sofia, who hasn’t moved. Mila sits back down. Closer this time. Twenty-five feet instead of thirty.
“Five feet,” Isabella whispers. “She moved five feet.” Her hand covers mine on her back. Her fingers lace through my fingers. “That’s huge,” she says. So quiet.
“Yeah.”
“Five feet.”
My hand tightens on Isabella’s back.
Home.The word arrives without permission. The same way she did.
36
ISABELLA
Lorenzo takes my hand. No warning. No explanation. He finds me in the library where I’ve been pretending to read the same paragraph for twenty minutes, and his fingers close around mine with a certainty that leaves no room for questions.
“Come with me.”
Low. That unhurried cadence where every syllable lands like he chose it on purpose. I set down the book I wasn’t reading and let him pull me to my feet.
“Where are we going?”
“Outside.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s enough of one.”
His thumb moves once across my knuckles. Silence sits over the compound in that particular way it gets at golden hour, when the day’s business is done and the evening hasn’t started yet. We pass the kitchen where Nonna Rosa’s radio plays something slow and accordion-heavy, the rubboard keeping rhythm. The hallway smells like garlic and roux.
“You’re being mysterious,” I say.
“I’m being quiet. There’s a difference.”
“Not with you there isn’t.”
We turn left at the back hall instead of right toward the stairs.
My pulse kicks.
Left leads to the garden. His mother’s garden. The rose trellis and the stone bench and the space where I’ve seen him sit at three in the morning, alone with Mrs. Santoro’s ghost, showing it what the rest of the world never sees.
He’s never brought me here. I’ve found him here. Stumbled across him. Watched from the second-floor window. But he’s never taken my hand and led me toward this space.
I know what that means. My chest does something complicated.
