“We colored for three hours,” Cora said. “Gemma has strong opinions about staying inside the lines.”
“Gemma has strong opinions about everything.”
“She also made me a grilled cheese.” She paused. Considered. “Two grilled cheeses.”
Behind her, Gemma appeared in the doorway. Still in pajamas. The sippy cup in her hand—her own, the one with the painted design I couldn‘t identify. She looked at me and her brown eyes held something quiet and certain. The look of a woman who had spent an afternoon caring for someone and was handing her back in better condition than she’d received her.
“She‘s good,” Gemma said. Soft. Just for me.
“Thank you.”
Gemma waved. The small gesture—dismissive, fond. Go. I’ve got it handled. Then the door closed and it was just Cora and me on the sidewalk, the November air moving between us, the dark blue Altima two blocks behind us with its engine running.
I didn’t look at it.
In the car, Cora talked. The words spilling out of her with a freedom I hadn’t heard before—the verbal equivalent of the brightness in her eyes, the sound of a woman who’d been allowed to be small for an afternoon and had come back with her reserves refilled. She told me about the mandala she’d finished—green and blue and something she called “accidental purple” where the colors overlapped. She told me about Gemma’s rabbit Caravaggio and how he was, apparently, romantically interested in Cora’s rabbit, and the two of them had been arranged in compromising positions on the couch for their entertainment. She told me about the animated movie Gemma had put on while they colored and how they‘d both cried at the end and pretended they hadn’t.
I listened. I laughed in the right places. My voice sounded normal because I was making it sound normal, the way I made everything sound normal when the alternative was letting the thing I’d seen leak into the air between us and contaminate what she was giving me, which was her happiness, offered freely, and I would cut off my own hand before I took that from her.
My eyes were on the mirror.
Every intersection. Every turn. I took the route home the way I’d been taught—not direct, not efficient. The countersurveillance pattern: a left, a right, another left, the particular geometry of a man who was testing whether the space behind him was occupied by something that shouldn’t be there. Three checks. Three clean mirrors. No dark blue Altima. No tinted windows. No exhaust plume in the cold air.
The car didn‘t follow.
But it had been there. Two blocks from Dante’s building. Engine running. Sightline to the entrance. Parked with the casual precision of someone who knew what they were doing and had done it before.
Cora’s hand found my knee. Warm. Trusting. The crayon smell still on her fingers.
“You okay?” she asked. “You’re quiet.”
“Just thinking,” I said.
“About what?”
I covered her hand with mine. The scabbed knuckles. The split skin healing over the bones that had broken against my brother’s jaw because someone had suggested using her as bait. My hand over hers, holding on.
“About how I’m going to keep you safe,” I said.
She squeezed my knee. The grip firm and unafraid.
I drove us home with one hand on the wheel and one hand on hers and the weight of what I hadn’t told her sitting in my chest like a second heart, beating out of time with the first.
Chapter 16
Cora
Hespreadthenapkinon the kitchen table like a battle plan.
Which, I supposed, it was.
A pen from the junk drawer—the one that only worked if you held it at an angle—and Santo‘s handwriting, which had improved marginally since I’d started making him label the grocery list. He drew an oval. Put an X on one side. Then another X beside it.
“That’s me,” he said, tapping the first X. “That’s you.”
“Together.”
“Together.”