POV:Evie
My father dies in a city that smells like rain on stone, old money, and exhaust.
Which feels unfair. A man like Seane Brennan should die somewhere ancient and dramatic, if he has to die at all. A cliffside. A chapel. The floor of his own study, with a tumbler still in reach and someone important bleeding beside him.
Not in a narrow Italian street behind a private club where men in polished shoes pretend not to look at the blood being washed into the gutter.
By the time I’m allowed past the second line of men, the scene has already been arranged. That’s the first thing I notice. Thearrangement.
Two police cars at the corner. One ambulance with its rear doors open and nothing urgent happening around it, which tells me everything I need to know before anyone says a word. Three men in dark suits speaking to uniforms with the relaxed posture of people who’ve already decided which parts of the truth will survive.
Rain falls straight down now, cleaner than it was two weeks ago in Dublin. Less theatrical. Less honest.
A man with an umbrella steps in front of me. “Miss Brennan?—”
I look at him. He moves.
Good.
I continue walking.
There are too many people doing too little. That’s how you know something has stopped being an emergency and started becoming a story. Emergencies are loud. Stories are managed.
My shoes slip slightly on the wet stone. Someone catches my elbow. I turn.
Luca Romano releases me immediately.
I know his name because my father made sure I knew the names and positions of everyone. He’s Alessandro’s driver, security, whatever word they use when they want violence to sound logistical. He was at the club earlier, standing near the entrance. Watching everyone without seeming to.
Now he stands between me and the worst part of the street. “Careful.”
There are many things a person can say to a woman whose father is dead. “Careful” is certainly one of the least imaginative.
“Where is he?”
Luca doesn’t so much as twitch.
“Tell me.”
His jaw shifts once. “You should wait for Don Vitale.”
“No.”
I step around him. He could stop me. He doesn’t.
The ambulance sits beside the alley mouth. Its lights flash blue over the buildings, over the wet pavement, over the faces of men pretending this is a civic matter and not a political one.
My father is on a stretcher. Covered. Of course. They’ve covered him as if modesty matters now. As if a sheet can make him less dead. As if there’s etiquette at the edge of catastrophe.
For a moment, I don’t move. I count instead. One alley behind the club. Two doorways along the left wall. One service entrance with a broken latch. Three visible police. Five Vitale men. Two Brennan men, who look wrong without instructions. One ambulance. Four possible exits, none useful.
Then I look at the sheet. The outline underneath it that’s too familiar. Broad shoulders. Left hand fallen slightly off the side before someone tucked it back in. The shape of him made smaller by being horizontal.
My father always looked wrong sitting down. Dead, he looks impossible.
Someone says my name behind me, but I ignore them. I move closer. The paramedic reaches to stop me, then thinks better of it. He has the expression of a man who has learned that grief in expensive families comes with weapons nearby.
Smart man.
