Page 116 of Graceless

"That's a hospital bracelet."

"It's a bracelet, Angela."

By dinner the entire neighborhood would know that Cate Fontana came home in Nina Costanzo's car with a hospital bracelet on. There is no version of that street where they don't.

I got out. The stoop light was on, faithful, guarding nothing. The window boxes needed everything. The bathtub Madonna two doors down had a new plastic rose in her hand since I'd been gone.

My legs went to water halfway up the walk.

He was there before I could reach for the rail — not touching me, close, both hands almost. And then he stopped himself and stood up straight and looked at me, and asked.

"May I carry you down your stairs?"

Four days. Four days and two miles of cold road and a hospital bracelet, and there it was, out loud, on my sidewalk, in front of Nina Costanzo and God and the Madonnas.

"Yes," I said, and the word cost me exactly what he'd earned — which is to say I heard my voice go soft on it, one degree, and Nina heard it too, and I did not take it back.

He bent to pick me up — and stopped, halfway, with his hands not quite on me, and looked down the steps at my door.

"What," I said.

"My brother is in your kitchen."

I looked at the door. Closed. Locked. Dark behind the glass, the way I left it four days ago.

"He's what?"

"He is sitting at your table. He has been there some time." Raq's jaw moved. "I would have told you from the corner. I have been trying to decide, the entire way up this walk, whether telling you would frighten you, and I have decided that it is not mine to decide."

And that — that, on a sidewalk, with the hazards going and Mrs. Esposito watching from her stoop — was the first evidence I had that anything in him had actually changed.

"Okay," I said. "Then let's go find out what he wants."

He picked me up and carried me down my steps and through my door and into my kitchen, and there he was, exactly as advertised, sitting at my table with his hands folded like a man at a wake.

He stood when he saw me. Tall as Raq, close enough, and put together in a way that made you check your own hands: dark hair, dark clothes, a face like something off a museum ceiling. Nothing about him belonged in a basement kitchen in Bensonhurst, and he was sitting in it like he'd been waiting a while and was prepared to wait longer.

Behind us, Nina came through the door with the gas station bag and the hospital paperwork and stopped so hard the bag swung.

"Oh, come on," she said. "How are there two of them?"

"Nina—"

"No, I'm asking. Genuinely. In what universe." She put the bag on the counter without looking at it, and squared up, and pointed. "Who the hell are you?"

"Camael." He inclined his head. "Cam. Raq's brother. You'll forgive the intrusion — I heard there was trouble, and I came, and there was no one home, and I let myself in rather than stand on the stoop and be discussed by the entire street." A pause, and then, warmer, exactly calibrated: "You must be Nina. He speaks of you. You're the one who runs everything."

And I watched my best friend — furious, exhausted, ninety minutes off the highway — get handled.

"Somebody has to," she said.

"Somebody always does." He looked at the container in her hand, at the cabinets she'd already opened. "Please continue. I've upset the house enough for one evening."

Nina turned to me with her eyebrows all the way up. The brother? the eyebrows said. The brother lets himself in?

I gave her nothing. I sat in Nonna's chair with a hospital bracelet on my wrist and gave her absolutely nothing, and she took it, and I watched her file it exactly where I knew she'd file it: two enormous men, no wives, no mothers, no cousins, one of them sitting in a locked house at nine at night on business he wasn't naming.

The family. That's what her face said. Of course there's a brother.