He calls every Thursday, which is a habit from when I was a girl, when he'd check in on my schoolwork and my training in a single conversation that managed to feel like neither.How are your studies, cucciola? How are your hands?The hands question meant the blades, not my skin. I understood this by the time I was fourteen. By sixteen I'd stopped finding it strange.
"You seem distracted," he says.
We've been talking for nine minutes. I've been sitting at my kitchen table with the Ortese in front of me, not reading it. "I'm tired. Long week."
"The restaurant keeps you busy."
"It's fine."
A pause, the particular pause my uncle uses when he's waiting to see if I'll fill it. I've learned not to. "Father Benedetto mentioned seeing you near the Vomero last Saturday," he says finally. "He thought perhaps you were visiting someone."
Father Benedetto is seventy-three and has cataracts. "I was walking."
"Of course." Another pause. "I only ask because you seem less present than usual, when you come to the church. Less focused."
I look at the ceiling. One water stain above the window, roughly the shape of Sardinia. "I'm focused."
"You're very good, cucciola. You always have been. The best I've trained." His voice is warm when he says this, the uncomplicated warmth of a man expressing a fact he's proud of. "But the work requires everything. A distraction at the wrong moment, and the work suffers. You understand this."
"I understand it."
"Good." He shifts to other things: a parishioner who's been difficult, a structural issue with the sacristy roof that the diocese is slow to address. He tells me about a confession he found interesting, in the abstract way he does, not breaking the seal but noting the moral texture. An old woman who stole from her employer thirty years ago and cannot stop confessing it, as if repetition might finally produce absolution. My uncle found it moving. He tells me why.
I listen. I say the right things. By the end of the call my voice sounds the way it always sounds, which is calm, which is what he needs to hear.
After I hang up I sit with the phone on the table for a moment.
He doesn't know. He can't know. I haven't said Niccolo's name to him, haven't mentioned the dinners, haven't mentioned anything beyond the ordinary report of a working week. And my uncle is careful about the people who enter my life, but like a priest, meaning he relies on information voluntarily offered. He doesn't surveil me. He trusts the architecture he built: the training, the ritual, the system, fourteen years of shaping the way I see the world. He trusts that it holds.
It holds.
I know what Niccolo Sorrentino is. I knew it before the candles confirmed it. I know the weight of what his family carries, the blood in the soil of it, the particular way men in his position move through Naples. I've been watching those men since I was old enough to understand what my uncle was asking me to do.
Niccolo is not like those men. He is exactly like those men. These two things are both true and they don't resolve.
The candles were dark.
That's what I have. The candles were dark, the same four candles that lit for the man in chapter one who murdered his wife and child, the same system that has never made a mistake in fourteen years of my watching it. The candles read the confession. The confession is the man.
Niccolo Sorrentino walked out of that confessional and the candles didn't move.
So I said yes to dinner. So I'm going.
I open the Ortese to the chapter I was reading. I read four pages. I read them again. I put the book down.
Saturday, I think. Eight-thirty.
I spend Saturday afternoon not preparing.
I do my laundry. I clean the kitchen. I reread the chapter of the Ortese I read Thursday night, the one about the blind girl, the one that always makes me feel like the city is watching me from a great height. I eat something at six that I won't remember eating. I change my clothes twice, settle on what I would have worn first, and take the bus to Vomero because I told him I'd meet him there and I meant it.
The restaurant is small. Off the main street, down a set of worn stone steps, the sign hand lettered. The kind of place that doesn't need anyone to know about it.
He's already inside.
He's sitting at a corner table with a glass of white wine and a focused expression, reading something on his phone, and he's wearing a different kind of stillness than the one I've seen in the restaurant and the church. More at ease. His collar is open. The jacket is there but the formality is off it, the way a man looks when he's somewhere he chose rather than somewhere he's required to be.
He looks up when I come in and something shifts in his expression. Quick. Controlled immediately after.