Chapter 3 Smart Girls Stay Quiet

Fiona's Pov

Milo sleeps with his mouth open and one arm thrown over the stuffed bear he has had since the day he was born. I sat on the edge of his bed in the dark and watched the green numbers on the microwave clock through the doorway. 2:14. Nine hours left. Our apartment sits above a laundromat on Canal Street, two rooms and a kitchen the size of a closet. The radiator bangs all night. The floor always smells faintly of fabric softener drifting up through the boards. Tonight that smell made me want to cry, because it smelled like the only home Milo had ever known. The bear is called Captain. One of his eyes is a button I sewed on after the real one fell off, and his left ear is worn thin from years of Milo rubbing it between his fingers to fall asleep. He was the last thing Danny bought before he walked out of our lives. Milo doesn't know that. I never had the heart to tell him. I smoothed my son's hair back from his forehead. He mumbled something about dinosaurs and turned over. My father walked out when I was six. He left a note on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a lemon and didn't even take his coat. My mother kept that coat on the hook by the door for eleven years, like he might come back for it. He never did. I used to think leaving was the worst choice a parent could make. Now I sat in the dark with a dead man's secret in my apron pocket and a mafia king's name on a piece of paper, and I wasn't so sure anymore. I went to the kitchen and turned on the small light over the stove. I took out the cufflink and laid it on the counter. Under the light, it was beautiful. Real gold, heavy for its size. The anchor was carved in fine detail, right down to the twist of rope around the shaft. I turned it over. On the back, so small I had to squint, was a stamp. Two crossed keys and the letters C and S. I typed it into my phone with clumsy thumbs. The first result was a jeweler on Harbor Street. Castellano and Sons. Custom pieces only. By appointment. Someone had paid a lot of money for this. Someone who would want it back. My phone buzzed in my hand, and I nearly dropped it. Unknown number. I stared at it. It kept buzzing. Four times. Five. I pressed answer and lifted it to my ear without saying anything. No one spoke on the other end either. I could hear breathing, slow and even. A car engine running somewhere behind it. Then a soft click, and the line went dead. My heart was slamming against my ribs. I crossed the room on shaking legs and pulled the curtain back one inch. Canal Street was empty and shining with old rain. The streetlight on the corner flickered like it always did. And across the road, parked in front of the closed bakery, sat a dark gray car with its headlights off and its engine running. I could see the exhaust curling up into the cold air. I couldn't see who was inside. The windows were tinted black. The phone buzzed again. A text this time. Smart girls stay quiet. I let the curtain fall. I backed away from the window until I hit the kitchen table, and then I stood there with my hand over my mouth, trying not to make a sound that would wake my son. This was what Luca meant. Loose threads. I did the only thing that made sense to me. I pulled our old duffel bag out from under the bed and started packing. Milo's school clothes. His inhaler. The dinosaur socks with holes in both heels. My birth certificate and his, the four hundred and twelve dollars hidden in a coffee can behind the flour. Four hundred and twelve dollars. A bus ticket and a week in a motel. Then what? "Mom?" I turned. Milo stood in the bedroom doorway in his pajamas, squinting at the light, Captain hanging from one hand. "Hey, baby. Go back to bed." He looked at the bag. Then at me. His face changed, and I watched the sleep drain out of it. "Are we moving again?" he asked quietly. The last time we moved, he was seven. The landlord changed the locks while I was at work, and Milo sat on the front steps with his backpack for three hours in November because he didn't know where else to go. He still checks the lock on our door twice every night before bed. He thinks I don't notice. "No," I said. "No, sweetheart. I was just cleaning out some old stuff." He didn't believe me. He was nine, not stupid. But he nodded and padded back to bed, and I heard him whisper something to Captain before he pulled the blanket over his head. I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and pressed my fists against my eyes. I could run. I could take my four hundred dollars and my scared little boy and disappear into some city where nobody knew my name. And then I would spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for a gray car to park across the street. Or I could marry a man I didn't know, who might be a murderer, and who had looked at me tonight like I was the only honest thing he had seen in years. I didn't sleep. I watched the clock. 3:40. 4:55. At a quarter to six, headlights swept across the ceiling. I went to the window again. A black car pulled up in front of the laundromat. The gray car across the street started moving at the exact same moment, slowly at first, then fast, its tires hissing on the wet road until it turned the corner and was gone. The black car's door opened. Marcus got out, the older bodyguard with the gray beard who always nodded to me at the gate. He looked up at my window like he knew exactly which one was mine. He didn't knock. He just waited. Someone had been watching my apartment all night. And someone else had been watching the watcher. I pulled the folder out of my bag. I set it on the kitchen table and uncapped a pen from Milo's pencil case. It was purple and smelled like grapes. My hand hovered over the empty line for a long time. Then I thought about Milo on those front steps in November, and I signed. Fiona Hale. My handwriting looked like a stranger's. I woke Mrs. Bell downstairs and asked her to walk Milo to school. Then I got into the back of the black car with the license in my lap. Marcus didn't say a word the whole drive. When we reached the Moretti estate, the sky was turning the color of dishwater, and the big iron gates opened for us without anyone pressing a button. I should have gone straight to Luca. I should have handed him the paper and asked what happened next. Instead, I did the stupidest thing I have ever done. I slipped through the kitchen while Rosa was busy with the coffee, and I went back down to the cellar. The iron key was gone from the lock. The door opened anyway. The bulb was already on, swinging gently, as if someone had just walked under it. The floor was spotless. Not clean. Spotless. The stone had been scrubbed so hard it looked pale, and the air stung my eyes with bleach. The racks stood in perfect rows. There was no body. No puddle. Not one drop of anything. It was as if last night had never happened. I walked slowly to the shelf by the stairs where I always left my cleaning things. My spray bottles were there, lined up neatly. My scrub brush. My spare sponges. And the yellow rubber gloves I had worn last night, the ones with my fingerprints all over them, were gone.