I stare back at him.
He’s tired. I can see the marks of the long days under his eyes. He’s not afraid. That’s the part I can’t argue with. There’s no version of me that’s going to talk him out of going.
I try anyway.
“What if going is exactly what he wants? What if the whole point is to get you in a room?”
“Like I said, then I’ll be in the room he wants. And I’ll find out what for.”
“Raffaele.”
“Bea.”
He kisses me on the forehead. He stays there a beat. Then he pulls back.
“I have to move now. If I sit on this another day, Nico consolidates. If I sit on it two days, the families start picking sides, and I lose the ones I haven’t talked to yet. Victor’s offeringme a meeting before either of those things happens. Whatever he’s offering me is something he wants me to takenow, which means he’s pressured, too. I can use that.”
“Or he’s confident.”
“Or he’s confident. Either way, it’s information I get by going.”
He stands. He buttons the jacket.
I want to keep arguing. I can feel a dozen sentences waiting in my throat, all of them variations onplease don’t, none of them with anywhere to go. He’s already ten steps ahead of every one of them. I can see it in the way he’s standing.
“I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
He’s at the door now. He pauses. “Eight men on the property. Four on the perimeter, two on the gate, two on the dune side. Lorenzo’s deputy’s in the kitchen if you need anything. Nobody comes in or out without me on the phone. You’ll be safe.”
“What if I don’t want to be safe,” I mumble back. “What if I just want to be with you?”
“Then you’ll get your wish… after tonight.”
This time, he doesn’t even bother lying before closing the door behind him. There is noI love youto echo in the stillness, only silence.
I sit there for a few seconds with the duvet still in my hands. Then I get up. I walk to the window and pull the curtain back two inches.
Down on the gravel I spot two black SUVs, engines running. Lorenzo by the lead car with his phone to his ear, talking and watching the drive at the same time. A man I don’t recognize at the back of the second SUV, opening the door. Raffaele crosses to it, head down, shoulders set, not looking back at the house.
He gets in, and the SUVs start down the gravel. I watch them all the way down the drive until they’re a moving smudge against the trees. Then I watch the space where they were.
He’ll come back,I tell myself.He came back yesterday. He’ll come back today. He’ll come back tomorrow.
That’s what we are now.
I’m the woman waiting. He’s the man who comes back. The space between us is a driveway and a clock, and the work of the woman in waiting is to not count the seconds.
I close my eyes.
I count them anyway.
31
RAFFAELE
The warehouse is in the industrial district, twenty minutes off the turnpike, on a stretch of road where the streetlights stopped working years ago.
