"Mr. Moretti, call me Sean."
"That is not how this goes," he leans back.
"That is how this goes. Call me Sean."
He lets the silence sit.
"What is your birthday, Sean?"
I do not answer.
"You were born February 12, 1988. You were given to Frank and Karen Donovan a few hours after you were born. Frank Donovan was on the partial payroll of a Greek criminal named KostasStavros. He was murdered when you were thirteen. Karen the same night. The case was never closed."
He sits back.
"Two tours with the 75th Rangers. NYPD in 2014. Three years of investigating this family. A wound in your left side from a 9 millimeter round in a warehouse in Long Island City, a little over a week ago."
He lets the file land.
"Tell me if I am missing anything."
He knows my birthday, my placement, Frank, and Kostas. He has not said the wordtwin.
Either he does not know. Or he is letting me say it.
I do not say it.
"There is something you are missing."
"What?"
"That is not how this goes." The corner of my mouth. Not quite a smile. "Try again, Mr. Moretti."
He looks at me for a long second. Then he does the thing I have never had a man do across a table from me in fifteen years of interrogations.
He smiles.
Small. Brief. Gone before I have finished registering it. The first crack in the practiced nothing his face has been doing since he walked in.
"I am trying to decide whether to kill you or save your life. Help me decide."
I do not speak.
"You are a cop who has been investigating my family. You are also a man who walked into my warehouse on a night he should not have been there and saved my lawyer from a Greek mercenary team. You have a wound in your side that is healing because the same lawyer stitched you up on a kitchen island in the Catskills. These facts do not naturally co-occur in the life of an NYPD detective."
"No."
"They co-occur in yours."
"Yes."
"Why?"
I think about her hand on my chest in the kitchen. AboutI am yourswith her eyes open. About the family tree, I folded back the way I found it because I did not want to make her lie to my face.
I think about the fact that the man across the table is the one she works for. He is deciding whether to kill me.
"I do not know yet."
