Page 73 of Masked Don

“I don’t know how to be what you’re describing,” he says finally, quietly. He sounds almost lost. “I was raised in this. It’s the only language I have. You’re asking me for words I was never taught.”

“I know,” I say. “That’s the whole problem.”

And we sit in the gold-and-black study, the two of us, with the thing finally said out loud and lying between us like a body, and I feel something shift in me that I’ve been pushing down for weeks.

“Then try,” I say. “Before the bullets. Try the other way first. Promise me that much.”

He holds my eyes for a long moment. “I promise.”

“I should check on Matthew,” I say and stand; my legs hold me up, but just barely.

He rises, too. “Stevie.” He doesn’t come around the desk. He’s learned that much, not to rush to the door and try to block me. “Don’t decide anything tonight. That’s all I’m asking. Not tonight.”

“Good night, Enzo,” I say.

It’s not a no. But it’s pretty damn close.

CHAPTER 26

STEVIE

After our fight, Enzo leaves for a meeting across the river. Marta says it will run until dawn.

At eleven, I go back down to the study to leave the correspondence folder on his desk, the way I do every night, and I find the top drawer open.

It’s never open. It’s the drawer with the lock, the only one in this room I’ve never seen open. Tonight he left in a hurry, and the key is still in it.

I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. I do it anyway.

The ring is in there. My ring, the one from that night, on black velvet in a box that isn’t closed all the way. Under it, still folded the way I left it, is the money I wouldn’t take. He never spent a dollar of it. Under that is a folder.

Inside the folder is my life.

Photographs. Me outside the diner on Wyckoff Avenue at the end of a double, my apron balled up in one fist. Me on the platform at Myrtle-Wyckoff with Matthew on my hip. My building in Bushwick, my window, the fire escape outside it. Candy on the stoop with a cigarette. Matthew in the window of the laundromat on Knickerbocker with both palms pressed flat against the glass. There are dates on the back in a neat, slanting hand. They go back eight months.

Under the photographs there’s a typed sheet with my shift schedule. The five companies that interviewed me and loved me and never called. Two of them have a line through them in black ink.

And at the bottom, a purchase agreement. Paula’s agency, bought through three holding companies with names I’ve never heard of, signed eight months ago by a man whose signature I see fifty times a day.

I sit down in his chair, because my legs have stopped working.

Paula, getting creative with her net. Six candidates sent home in under an hour. A job with no name on it and a salary nobody sane would pay. I really thought I’d gotten lucky.

There was no luck in it. He watched me for eight months. He closed the last doors in my face himself, until there was only one left, and then he stood behind it and waited for me to walk through.

I put everything back exactly as I found it. I turn the key to where it was. Then I go upstairs and take the suitcase out of the closet.

I pack the way I learned to pack a long time ago, quietly, smartly, taking only what matters.

I collect documents first: Matthew’s birth certificate, his Social Security card, the little folder of paperwork I’ve kept up-to-the-month current for exactly this kind of situation.

Then the cash. I’ve been quietly setting it aside since my first paycheck, stashing away what I could, building my cushion back up slowly but surely, because some animal part of me never stopped getting ready to run, even when the rest of me was falling in love.

Matthew’s things are next. I can’t take all of them, which is part of the cruelty of running. I triage, find the things that matter, his dinosaur book, Mr. Bun, the stuffed rabbit that’s more gray than white now, the one he can’t sleep without, with a split seam in his belly I keep promising to sew. Mr. Bun stays in his arms until the last minute. Everything else goes in the bag.

I find two changes of clothes and grab a few of those fancy star-shaped fruit pouches from the kitchen. It doesn’t make sense, even as I do it. Maybe a tiny luxury will help this all go down smoother.

I think about the phone he gave me. I go through every setting the way Candy showed me once: location, sharing, the apps I don’t recognize. There’s nothing. Whatever Enzo is, he’s a man who watches through a long lens. He doesn’t need to be in my pocket, too.