Chapter 3: The Wrong Address on a Headstone
The bold girl's name was Rosa.
Dante learned this in the back seat of his car, with the painting wrapped in his coat across his lap and all three girls pressed together on the seat beside him like birds on a wire.
Rosa sat closest to the door.
The quiet one — Mia — sat in the middle.
The third, who had not yet spoken a full sentence, sat against the far window with her forehead touching the glass.
Rosa told him her name was Cora.
"Where are we going?" Dante asked.
"Dorchester," Rosa said.
"But you have to park on the street.
She'll see the car from the window and she won't answer."
"She'll see me regardless."
"Then you should know she's going to be angry." Rosa looked at him steadily.
"She gets angry when she's scared."
Dante said nothing to that.
The drive took eighteen minutes.
Nico sat in the front passenger seat and didn't speak.
The two other men followed in a second car.
Dante watched the city change through the window — the boutiques giving way to triple-deckers, the clean sidewalks giving way to cracked ones, the October light going flat and gray as they moved deeper into the neighborhood.
The building was a narrow three-story on a side street with a broken front step and a buzzer panel where half the name tags were blank.
Rosa led the way up two flights of stairs that smelled of old cooking and radiator heat.
Mia held Dante's hand on the second landing without asking permission.
He let her.
Rosa stopped in front of apartment 2C and turned to face him.
"She's going to ask how you found us," Rosa said.
"Don't say we told you."
"I'll tell her I followed the painting."
Rosa considered this.
"That's actually true."
She knocked.
Silence.
Then the soft sound of someone moving carefully on the other side of the door — the particular quiet of a person trying to determine who was there without being heard themselves.
"It's us, Mom," Mia said.
"We're back."
The lock turned.
The door opened four inches, stopped by a chain.
One green eye appeared in the gap.
It moved from Mia to Rosa to Cora, checking them the way a person checks for damage, and then it moved to Dante.
The chain did not come off.
"No," Elena said.
Her voice was lower than he remembered.
Rougher.
But it was her voice.
Seven years of grief collapsed in his chest like a building coming down floor by floor.
"Elena."
"Go away, Dante."
"You're alive."
"I said go away."
"I have been to your grave." His voice stayed level only because he had spent twenty years learning to keep it level.
"I stood in the rain and watched them lower a coffin.
I put flowers on that headstone every year for seven years.
And you are standing behind that door telling me to go away."
A long silence.
"The girls shouldn't have brought you here."
"The girls were selling your painting on Newbury Street to buy your medicine.
That's why they brought me here.
Because they had no other choice."
Another silence.
Longer.
The chain slid free.
The door opened.
Elena Ward stood in the doorway in a gray cardigan that was too large for her, her dark-blond hair pulled back, her face thinner than the painting, her green eyes the same as he remembered except for what lived behind them now — something careful and exhausted and afraid.
She stepped back to let him in.
The apartment was small and clean.
A folding table.
Four mismatched chairs.
A bookshelf built from planks and bricks.
Children's drawings taped to the wall in a row, each one signed in a different hand — Rosa, Mia, Cora.
Elena sat down at the table.
She did not offer him a seat.
"You have ten minutes," she said.
"Then I need you to leave and not come back."
Dante set the painting carefully against the wall.
He sat down across from her without being invited.
"Who told you I was d\*ad?" he asked.
Her hands, folded on the table, went still.
"Start there," he said.
"Because someone arranged that fire.
Someone put a body in your car.
Someone made sure I identified your bracelet and your ring." He leaned forward slightly.
"And I need to know if you did it yourself, or if someone did it to you."
Elena's jaw tightened.
Outside, one of the girls said something to the others in a low voice, and then all three went quiet.
"It wasn't me," Elena said finally.
"Then who?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
The careful thing behind her eyes shifted — not gone, but moving aside for something older and heavier.
"His name," she said slowly, "is Vincent Caruso."
Dante's chair did not move.
His face did not change.
But Nico, standing near the door, took one quiet step backward.
Vincent Caruso was not a stranger to Dante Russo.
He was the man Dante had been walking to dinner to meet.
The man with the smile sharp enough to cut glass.
May you like
The man who had been Dante's closest ally for eleven years and who had, in the last eighteen months, been quietly, carefully positioning himself to take everything Dante had built.
"Tell me," Dante said.
