I step into the living room, though I can still see Cole through the doorway. He's cleaning up, scraping eggs off of plates, moving through my space with an ease that should feel like invasion but doesn't.
"Bambina." Sal's voice is tight, the way it gets when he's holding back something he wants to say. "The stronzo. The courthouse. I hear he needed stitches."
"Cole handled it."
"I handled it once before. From your hospital bed, remember?" A pause. The kind that carries eight years ofdebt and family obligation. "I can handle it again. More... thoroughly."
My fingers find the medal through my shirt, thumb running along the familiar edge of St. Christopher's face. Sal's thoroughness is why I owe him everything. Why some of my verdicts aren't mine and why I'll never be entirely free of the family no matter how far I run.
"No."
"Angelina—"
"I said no, Zio."
A beat of silence. "Castellano women. Testarda come tua nonna."Stubborn as your grandmother.Something almost warm underneath. "Anything changes, you call me. Not him. Me."
"I will."
I hang up and return to the kitchen.
Two plates. Two seats. Chesca's chair empty but not missing—her absence creating space rather than void.
Cole pulls out my chair. Waits.
I sit. He takes the seat across from me.
I pick up my fork from the left side of the plate, where he set it. That he might have remembered from before, from college, a lifetime ago when we were different people.
But the coffee is already made the way I take it now. Oat milk, not cream.
Twelve years of remembering. Seven years of learning.
All of it converging in my kitchen on a Saturday morning with coffee. Breakfast someone else made. The man who watched us for years, cooking eggs like he belongs here.
Maybe he does.
We eat in comfortable silence. When we finish, he washes and I dry, and the morning bleeds into afternoon without either of us naming what's building between us.
We don't talk about any of it. Not Adrian. Not Winchester. We move around each other with new awareness, not the crackling tension of before, but something quieter. The silence between us feels different than it used to. Comfortable instead of cautious.
He reviews security footage on his laptop while I read on the couch, my feet tucked under a throw blanket. I make lunch, nothing complicated, just sandwiches, and he eats what I put in front of him without comment. We watch a documentary about deep-sea creatures because neither of us wants to choose something that matters. His hand rests on my knee through the last hour, warm and steady, and I don't move away.
This is what normal people do. Weekends. Together. Without bodyguards and death threats and flowers counting down.
What would it be like to have this all the time?
A news ticker scrolls across the bottom of the screen. Red banner. Update.
Federal judge murders: FBI expands task force as death toll reaches eight—
Expanding. Three months and eight bodies later, and all they can do is expand the task force. More people looking at the same nothing.
The remote is in my hand before I finish reading. I flip to a cooking show. Someone making risotto. Anything else.
Cole's thumb stops moving on my knee.
"Angelina."