Alessandro walks to the window. Stands with his back to us. Looks at the city he has been the Don of for fifteen years.
He turns.
"Tell me everything. From the warehouse. All of it. And then we are going to decide together what we are going to do about my brother, your brother, and the woman Sean would die for."
The Don is waiting.
16
SEAN
Alessandro Moretti sits us down, and we sit down.
The penthouse living room is warm. Rugs and lamps. A child's drawing on the refrigerator visible through the kitchen door. A photograph on a side table of a woman with an emerald-cut ring on her left hand and a small dark-haired child on her hip.
Sofia is asleep down the hall.
Clara is on a plane. Alessandro called her tonight and told her he needed her to be on one. She is the Don's wife. She did not ask why.
Alessandro is in the chair. Matteo is on the couch to my left. Marco Rizzo is standing — Marco has not sat down in this room in fifteen years. His presence is the first sign this is not a family conversation.
This is a war council.
Alessandro speaks first.
"Tell me everything."
I tell him.
Twenty minutes. He does not interrupt once.
Frank. The payroll. The thirteen years. The federal disclosure letter Frank wrote in June 2001 and never sent. Thirteen years of evidence for the safety of a boy who was not his by blood but was his in every way that mattered.
The family tree. The snatch outside my building. The room. The envelope. Frank's box of files. The freight yard. Six a.m. and the dock.
Personally.
He looks at me when I am done.
"You have been in my house for ten minutes. You have told me you are my brother. You have told me my mother died not knowing what happened to you."
He stops.
"Frank Donovan was a good man, Sean. I am going to say it once because I am going to need to say a great many things in the next few minutes that are not good things."
He breathes.
"The war I have been pretending was over since my father died was never over."
"No."
"I am very angry. At my father, I cannot be. He is dead. At Matteo, for a while, and then I will not be, because Matteoalways chooses the path that protects the brother in front of him."
He looks at me.
"And at you. For being NYPD. I have spent fifteen years rebuilding this family clean, and the last thing this family needs is a sworn police detective in its living room."
"Maybe I would have been different," I say.
