Page 153 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince

We walk farther, to where the fountain finally reveals itself behind a wall of cypress.

It’s newer, more symmetrical than anything in the Rossi house, but the sound of water trickling is still the same.

Constant.

Steady.

Like something in the bones of the world hasn’t changed.

He pauses beside it, resting both hands on the crook of his cane.

"I miss the old garden," he says, low. "It was never perfect. But it had history."

"So does this one," I say, glancing at the tiled border, at the faint initials carved in stone—some Salvatore ancestor who thought himself eternal.

He considers that, then exhales.

"You’ve made it feel different," he says. "More like a house that breathes."

I don’t answer at once.

Instead, I reach down and pick a single medlar from the tree behind us, still firm, not ready. I place it gently on the stone edge of the fountain.

"Let it ripen," I say.

His gaze lingers on the fruit for a long moment.

Then he nods, just once.

We stand there for a little while longer, and the past folds around us like an old coat—worn at the seams, but still warm.

Then, I lead him past the older rose beds that never quite took to the new irrigation lines.

He hums quietly, a tune I cannot name, something he must have used to fill time in the kitchen when the house was too quiet.

As we near the perimeter wall, he slows.

"I have not seen Signor Rafa in some time," he says. "I believed he would come home after you visited. But then the rumors started."

A pebble of goosebumps breaks across my arm, but I say nothing.

"I don’t believe most of what I hear," he adds, carefully. "But if even a piece of it is true, I thought you might need to hear it from someone who still remembers him before all of this."

"I don’t know what’s true anymore," I say quietly. "I want to believe there’s still a part of him that wouldn’t turn on us. That wouldn’t turn on me."

"He loved you," Renato says with a sigh. "Even when he didn’t know how to show it."

We reach the old iron gate that separates the orchard path from the outer boundary of the estate.

The gate itself is narrow and rust-streaked, warped slightly at the hinge from age or weather or something older.

Just beyond it, the hedgerow rises dense and uneven, a wall of thorny branches and scrub oak that was once trimmed with precision but now breathes like something alive.

Sunlight splinters through the upper canopy in crooked slants, and it smells of bark and distant citrus.

I pause just short of the latch.

My hand hovers over the iron.