I pulled the braid taut.
He wanted me to trust him. To put my blinkers on and just work.
I knew how to do that. I’d done it my whole life.
Not this time.
I set the braid on the tray and reached for the next three strands, and my hands started over without me, over, under, pull taut, and I watched the back of him crossing my kitchen in the cold gray light, and I decided, the way I decide a flour order, the way I decide everything down to the koulouraki count.
I was not going to let it lie.
Iwentatitsidewaysfirst. You don’t go head on. My father taught me that without meaning to, watching him deal with the men who came to the old place wanting things—you smile, you offer coffee, you let them think you’re slow, and you find the shape of the thing before you ever say the thing.
So I rolled cannoli shells and didn’t look up.
“So tell me more about Marco,” I said. Easy. Light. A woman making conversation over the dawn work. “Your cousin’s husband. The one who married—Serafina, was it?”
“Marco.” I heard the smile come into his voice from across the kitchen. “Marco’s the charming one. Runs a nightclub. Everybody underestimates him, which is exactly how he likes it.” A laugh, low. “He’ll be at the wedding being insufferable. You’ll like him. Everybody likes Marco. That’s his whole problem.”
“Sounds a lot like you!”
“No way! Nothing like me. I’m handsome!”
“Mm.” I pressed dough around the form. “And he calls you a lot, does he? Late?”
A beat. Small. I felt it more than heard it, the way you feel a draft when a door’s been opened somewhere in a house.
“He calls when he calls.” Still easy.
I looked up then, because I needed to see the face, and that was a mistake, because the face was annoyingly, infuriatingly gorgeous this morning. He had flour to the elbow and a smear of it on his jaw and the broken boxer’s nose that should’ve been a flaw and wasn’t, and his hair pushed back where he’d run his hand through it, and he caught me looking and the grin tipped sideways, knowing, and I felt the green lace against my skin and hated the both of us.
I went back to the shells.
“So what did he want?” I said. Less sideways now. “Last night. On the phone.”
“Family business.” He hauled the proofing rack a quarter turn. “Boring. Linens. Logistics. Tella’s making everyone insane about the seating.”
“Tella was at the bakery yesterday handling the seating herself.” I set a shell down. “She didn’t need to call you about it at—what was it. Past midnight.”
The rack stopped turning.
“Katerina.”
“In Sicilian,” I said. “Fast. With your back to me. Your grin went out.” I wiped my hands on my apron, slow, and faced him full across the kitchen with the bench between us like a border. “I’m going to ask you a straight question now and I’d like a straight answer, because I am not good at the other kind and I don’t think you’re as good at it as you believe you are. What are you actually doing on this block, Tonio?”
And there it was.
The morning-man grin held for one more second—he tried, I’ll give him that, he reached for it the way I reach for a lie when I’m cornered—and then it went flat. Drained right off him. I watched it happen the way I’d watched it happen last night, the easyleaving, the steel coming up underneath, the soldier rising into his eyes where I could see him.
“There are secrets I need to keep,” he said.
Quiet. Even. No apology in it, and that was almost the worst of it, the no apology.
“I told you that the first night,” he said. “I sat at your counter and I told you straight—there are things I won’t say. And I meant it then and I mean it now. It’s not because I don’t—” his jaw worked, “—it’s not about you. It’s the opposite of about you. But there’s a part I keep—a part of me—and this is it, and I’m asking you to let it be.”
“No,” I said.
“Katerina—”
