Isabelle Moretti Vitale.
My breath catches. I turn the pages. Poetry in Italian. I understand some, though not all. Enough to know the tone is bleak in a cultured way, which seems appropriate for a dead mafia wife.
Several pages are marked with thin slips of paper. I turn to the first. A line underlined. I translate slowly:
The house keeps what the mouth cannot.
Well. That’s not ominous at all.
I turn to the second marked page:
He locked the door and called it mercy.
My skin prickles.
Third. No underlining. A pressed flower. Dried flat between the pages. Something small and blue. A forget-me-not, perhaps. What I know about flowers comes from funerals. Not much more.
Behind the flower is a folded scrap. I unfold it carefully.
Only three words.
Non un’altra correzione.
Not another correction, I translate.
Chapter 24
The Witness Returns
POV:Evie
The problem with frightened men is that they are never still. They think hiding means disappearing into one fixed point. A room. A village. A cousin’s flat above a closed bakery with damp in the walls and a door that swells in rain. They think survival is distance.
It isn’t. Survival is motion.
Frightened men drift. They circle back to places they should know better than to touch. They check old locks. Call old numbers. Stand across streets from doors they will not enter because some irrational part of them believes proximity can become control if they look at it long enough.
Fear makes men sentimental. Which is useful.
I find Roberto Greco because I’m not looking for him. That’s the irritating way truth behaves. Spend weeks clawing through ledgers, receipts, route logs, staff pauses, fuel records, prayer candles, and the back channels of men who speak in fragments, and you get nothing but dust under your nails. Stop looking for one hour, and a witness appears across the street from abutcher’s shop with his collar turned up and fear written into the angle of his shoulders.
I see him from the car. Not clearly at first. A reflection in the glass as Luca slows for a delivery truck blocking the narrow village road. A man half concealed beneath the green awning of the butcher’s, pretending to read a notice pinned beside the door.
Pretending badly, because most people read with their eyes. He reads with his whole body turned toward the street.
I know the look of hunted attention. I’ve been wearing it for months.
My hand stills on the paper bag in my lap. Inside it: crackers, ginger sweets, and three lemons Teresa insisted would “settle things”—“things” being my stomach. My mood. The twins. The future. The entire violent topography of my life.
“Stop the car,” I say.
Luca’s eyes meet mine in the mirror. “No.”
I smile. “I didn’t realize we’d begun negotiating.”
“We haven’t.”
The car keeps moving. Roberto lifts his head. For half a second, our eyes almost meet through the windscreen. I recognize him from the photo I saw of him on his license.
