Page 77 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

I tell her what I can—vendors questioned, a driver tailed in Queens and shook him loose, a rumor that the Bureau is drawing a map of who lights candles at St. Adrian’s and when.

She nods, files it with her own quiet, and turns the burner down under the pot before it boils over.

On the second day, the wind comes up.

We walk again and cut it short.

She tucks into my side on the way back and I feel the fight in me go still.

I make soup with what we have and slice the good bread we brought from the bakery into thick pieces you can’t see through.

She reads on the couch, feet under my thigh.

I run laundry in the sink and hang it over the line in the kitchen.

When it dries, everything smells like pine and salt and a place that kept us safe for another hour.

At night, I talk about Marco.

Marco grew up across the river and liked noise early.

He learned the business fast and never learned patience.

He was at my table when we were young because our fathers were tied by godfathers and favors.

We did jobs on opposite corners and sometimes in the same car.

He liked the kind of fear that shows.

I liked the kind that keeps the street quiet.

That difference is small until it isn’t.

The last five years, he has taken corners that didn’t belong to him and called it growth.

He wants the Council to be a stage.

I want it to be a room that ends problems.

If he finds a way to hold hands with the Feds while he plays the tough guy in public, he will burn the city and call it winter.

Elisa listens with her chin on her knee.

“You still talk like you could pull him back,” she says.

“I can’t,” I say. “I can only make sure he doesn’t pull everyone else with him.”

On the third morning, we wake before the sun and lie there until the room turns gray.

I make coffee on the stove and plate the last of the biscotti the owner’s wife pushed on us.

Elisa takes one, bites, and smiles like she is somewhere safer than this.

I watch her look at the window and know she is thinking about her patients, her charge nurse, the man who comes in for blood pressure and a joke.

I want to give her a world where this cabin is a choice and not a tactic.

The day drifts.