Niccolo doesn't speak.
He crouches beside me. His hand comes to my shoulder. Light. Just weight. Just presence. He doesn't try to move me.He waits with the patience of a man who has learned that some things cannot be hurried.
I don't know how long it takes before I can let go.
When I do, my hands are shaking. I look at them. Blood under my fingernails. Blood in the creases of my knuckles. I've had blood on my hands before. I've knelt in rooms with candles and drawn my own blood and felt the weight of what I'd done move through me, the prayer closing it, the system holding the structure.
This doesn't move. This stays.
Niccolo puts his hands around mine. Holds them steady.
"Come with me," he says.
I start to stand. My legs are numb from the marble. He helps me up, his arm around my waist, taking my weight. We take three steps toward the side door.
I stop.
The key. The drawer. The journal.
"Wait," I say.
He looks at me. I look toward the sacristy door. The thin line of yellow light beneath it, the light from the office where my father sat for decades processing parish accounts, lighting candles for his brother, carrying the key to a drawer that holds the full story.
"I need to get something."
He doesn't ask what. He lets go of my waist. I walk to the sacristy door. Open it. Cross the small room to the office.
Everything is exactly as it was. The photograph of Tomasso in the silver frame. The espresso machine on the bookshelf. The parish accounts open on the desk, the pencil where he set it down when I walked in. The ordinary objects of a priest's life.
I go to the desk. Bottom right drawer. The lock is small, brass, the same vintage as the key in my hand.
I kneel. Insert the key. Turn it. The lock clicks.
The drawer slides open.
A notebook. Plain. Dark brown cover. The kind he used for parish records, indistinguishable from a dozen others on his shelves. No markings on the outside. No title. Nothing toindicate that this notebook contains the complete architecture of my life.
I take it out. Hold it. The weight is ordinary. The weight of what's written inside is something else.
I close the drawer. Lock it. Stand.
I don't open the notebook. Not here. Not in this room that smells like his espresso and his incense and the specific staleness of a man who spent too many hours in a small space with his own thoughts.
I carry the notebook back through the sacristy, into the nave where Niccolo is waiting. He sees it in my hands. Doesn't ask.
"I want him buried next to my parents," I say.
"I'll arrange it."
He puts his arm around me. We walk to the side door. I apply pressure on the lower hinge. It opens without sound.
The Naples night. Warm. The vicoli of the Sanità quiet at this hour, the laundry hanging still between the buildings. Enzo is in the street with two men. Niccolo gives him a look. Enzo nods. Goes inside with the others.
They will clean it. By morning the church will look the way it always looks. Stone, incense, silence. No one will ask questions that require answers.
Niccolo takes me to his car. I sit in the back holding the notebook in both hands, looking out at the city passing in the dark. He drives without speaking because there's nothing adequate.
At the penthouse he makes coffee. I sit at the kitchen counter. The notebook sits in front of me, unopened. The Beretta is still on the counter where I left it, disassembled, the magazine beside it. The zip ties. The gloves. My weapons laid out in a row like evidence at a crime scene.