Page 31 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

Light finds its way through old paper and dusty glass and paints the room in a soft gray that makes everything look gentler than it is.

I'm on the cot with his heat still on my skin and the taste of coffee on my tongue because somewhere between one heartbeat and the next, I decided we needed caffeine more than we needed to think.

He sits with his back against the wall, blanket low on his hips, bandage clean under my hand because I checked it twice while he pretended not to notice.

He looks like trouble and medicine at the same time.

I look like a woman who didn’t plan for any of this and keeps doing it anyway.

He reveals little. “What you saw in the hospital was the outcome of a job gone bad.”

I try to sound like a nurse who is very interested in blood pressure and not like a girl who grew up listening to grown men talk in the bakery after mass. “You were sent to stop a rebellion.”

“I was sent to keep the Riccari family from tearing itself in half,” he answers, and his gaze slides to the window before it comes back to me.

“You did it,” I say, not a question.

My body knows the answer.

It's in the way he holds himself when everything else takes on the quiet kind of watchfulness.

He nods.

My mind goes where it always goes when someone says the Riccari name out loud.

To my mother’s voice at Christmas, to Uncle Sal’s stories about the old days when the bakery carried more secrets than bread, to the way the neighborhood learned to keep its chin up and its mouth shut after the Castellano wars left saints and sinners counting who was still at the table.

I see the Christmas Eve dinners in my head the way I imagined them as a kid peeking through the banister—not just fish and family, but the real meeting, the one where forgiving and eliminating look like cousins.

My mother called that night a council and then laughed like she shouldn’t have said it.

She taught me that if you crossed the Riccaris in December, you didn’t see January.

It sounds theatrical until you live three blocks from a man who wears a lion on his ribs like a tattoo and tells you the dates that still keep him up.

“Why tell me any of this?” I ask, because my mouth likes the taste of honesty even when it's bracing.

“Because it belongs to you now,” he says, and the words land heavy and careful. “Because I have been in your bed and in your house, and because I brought the kind of weather that destroys gardens if you don't prepare.”

“You talk like a farmer,” I say, because humor keeps me from blinking too much. “I have a basil plant. It lives in the bathroom and refuses to die. We can learn from it.”

He laughs, a low sound that feels like my favorite song and smooth bourbon and something that should not be allowed this close to my heart.

He tips his head back against the wall and closes his eyes for a two-second prayer.

When he opens them, he looks directly at me.

“I owe you,” he says.

The words are simple.

My body makes them complicated.

A debt is a rope.

It can pull you up or tie you to a rock.

In this neighborhood, people have lived their whole lives on the difference and died on it too.