Page 33 of Graceless

"That's three blocks."

"I'm aware of the geography, Nina."

She looked at me for a long moment, and I watched her decide not to chase it — the way she does when a fact won't behave and dinner's still on the table. "Ex-military," she said, half to herself, like tightening a screw that keeps backing out. "They train for that. Okay. The kissing."

"It just happened. He looked at me and said, 'You're angry that you were afraid.' Just like that. Like he'd been reading my mail for thirty years. And I was shaking, and then I don't know which of us moved."

"And?"

"And what?"

"Caterina Rosa. AND?"

"And it was —" I looked at the window. "You know when I take overpaint off something, and a face nobody's seen in five hundred years comes up out of the dark, and I'm the one standing there? First person since the painter. You know how I get."

"Yeah."

"It was like being the painting."

Nina didn't say anything for a second. Then she put her hand flat on her chest, over the crucifix, and said, "Okay. Wow. Okay," and took her hand off her chest and pointed at me. "New terms. I meet him."

"Nina—"

"I'm not asking to interrogate the man, I'm asking to LOOK at him. From a distance. Like the aurora borealis." She picked the sponge back up, negotiation concluded in her favor, the way all negotiations with Nina conclude. "And the calls continue. Every night. Non-negotiable. A man takes a knife off two guys in one second, I want a heartbeat check on you every twenty-four hours like a hospital."

"Fine."

"Swear on the saints."

"I don't believe in the saints."

"SWEAR ANYWAY."

I swore anyway. And when I left she held my face in both her dish-warm hands in the doorway, in front of the whole street, and looked at me the way she's looked at me since we were seven, and said, "You're happy. Under all of it. You know that, right?" — and didn't wait for an answer, which was merciful, because I didn't have one.

I walked home under the el with the containers she forced on me, and my block was my block, gates down, lights on, Donnie's window flickering blue, and I let myself in through three locks and stood in my kitchen listening to how quiet it was.

The quiet had never bothered me before.

The next morning, the bell rang twice, and the real work began.

Two long pushes, and my pulse did a thing I didn't authorize, and I stood in my hallway for one second getting my face right before I opened the door. That's where we were now. I needed a second to open my door.

He looked — I don't have a better word for it — spent. Not tired; I've never seen him tired; something else, something banked lower than usual, and his sweep of the street before he came in ran longer than the paranoia standard, both directions, twice. I didn't ask.

Uncovering is mostly chemistry, and chemistry is mostly patience, and patience is mostly cotton. I spent two days on tests before I touched an inch that mattered. Little rolled swabs, a solvent ladder, each mix logged — you go up the ladder rung by rung until the overpaint softens and the original underneath doesn't care, and if you're lucky, if the centuries are on your side for once, there's a varnish layer between the two like a sheet of glass, and the overpaint comes off it clean, and the original underneath was never touched at all.

I was lucky. On the third day I got the layer to cleave, low on the robe, in the corner where the decades-old patch had already told me somebody'd been.

The days had a shape by then, and the shape had a problem.

Mid-morning I made coffee, because I'm Italian and he's breathing. I brought him the cup.

He reached for it. My fingers were still on it. For one second we both held it — his thumb against my knuckle, the ceramic going warm between us — and neither of us let go, and neither of us looked at the cup, and the basement got very small.

"Thank you," he said.

"Uh-huh," I said, like a person.