Page 48 of Masked Don

That’s the question that kept me up all night. I don’t have a good answer, so I give him the true one. “Then I burn down whatever he touches. Nothing leaves this house, Carmine. Not a guess, not a rumor. You, me, Marta.”

“Marta already knows. She knew the second she saw him in the hall.”

Of course she did.

“To a man like Luca,” Carmine says, “a child in your house is a soft place. An exposed throat.”

“I know what Luca is.”

“I’m not talking about Luca. I’m talking about you.” He tips his chin toward Stevie’s desk. “Look.”

A photograph is propped against her monitor in a small, cheap frame, the kind they sell in drugstores. I cross to it without meaning to.

It’s Matthew at maybe six months old, in a high chair, spaghetti sauce smeared across his face and fists and hair. His mouth is open in an ecstatic laugh, two tiny teeth showing at the bottom.

I stand there too long. I can feel Carmine watching me do it.

“Two teeth,” I say.

Carmine doesn’t answer.

“If he’s mine, I missed that.” I set the frame down exactly where it was, squared to the edge of her desk. “I missed all of it.”

“Then don’t miss the rest,” Carmine says. “That part’s still up to you.”

He leaves. I stay at the glass and watch the boy climb the little wall and stand at the top of it with both arms in the air, like a man who just took a city.

Stevie walks in at seven sharp, dressed for work and armored for war. She doesn’t look at the playground through the window. She looks at me, then at the couch, then very carefully at neither.

“Mr. Accardi.”

“Miss Callahan. Your son seems to be enjoying the new playground.”

Her mouth tightens. “You built him a playground overnight.”

“I had productive insomnia.”

“Most people stay up all night watching Netflix.”

“I’m not most people. And a boy needs a place to play.” I lean back in my chair. “Any boy. Even one whose father lives in Phoenix.”

The color comes up in her cheeks, fast and hot. “Don’t.”

“I’m not asking. I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t.” I hold her gaze until she has to look away first. “But I want to spend time with him.”

Her whole body goes still. “Why?”

“You know why.”

“He isn’t…”

“Then there’s no harm in it. An hour in the garden. You can watch every second.”

“No.” It comes out hard and fast, the no of a woman who has built every wall around her son by herself and is used to holding them alone. “You don’t get to decide something like that because you built a swing set. He doesn’t know you. To him, you’re the man who owns this giant house and gave his mommy a job. If you start showing up in his life, he’s going to get attached, and then what? What happens to him when this ends?”

“What makes you think it ends?”

She doesn’t answer that. I don’t think she can.