Chapter 6
A month later, autumn came to Boston, and the bell above the door of La Dolce Farina rang through the smell of vanilla and toasted almonds like a heartbeat.
Emilia looked up from the pastry case. The glass was new — you could not tell anymore which pane had shattered on the night the rain came in with guns. Somebody had fixed the lock, and the door, and the floorboards where the water had soaked through. Somebody, she suspected, had done it in the middle of the night, without a word and without a receipt.
Marco was upstairs in the apartment, sleeping off a broken rib and a mountain of shame. He had a limp that would last a while, and a guilt that would last longer. Three days after the hospital, he had tried to thank her from the bed, his face still a collage of bruises.
“You could have let them kill me,” he said. “What I did — the money, the lies, all of it — you had every right.”
“Marco.” She had sat on the edge of the bed and taken his hand, the hand that had held hers at their mother’s funeral, the hand that had signed his name to a loan to buy her the oven she baked their father’s recipes in. “You’re my brother. There isn’t a debt in this world that would make me let anyone touch you.”
He had cried then, ugly and open, and she had held him, and she hadn’t cried at all, because one of them had to hold the line, and it was not going to be him.
The gambling debts had vanished. All of them. The bookmakers had simply stopped calling — she knew because she had answered Marco’s phone once, expecting threats, and received a nervous silence and a dial tone. And stranger things: a new commercial oven had appeared in the back room one morning, the best money could buy, no note, no delivery slip. The property taxes on the shop had been paid a decade in advance. She never asked where any of it came from. Some gifts you do not open.
What she knew, because the docks whispered it, was that Aldo Ferrara was gone. Not arrested, not tried — gone, the way things and people go when they become inconvenient to the men who run the city from the shadows. His name had become a cautionary tale told in frightened voices over espresso, a ghost story that always ended the same way: don’t reach for what isn’t yours.
Emilia tried not to think about what “handled personally” had meant. She tried, and mostly failed, and every time she failed, she remembered the flat, quiet voice on the radio, and she told herself that the man who had spoken of her father’s cannoli with a tired smile was not the same man who had said take no prisoners. It was the only way she could sleep. It was almost working.
The bell rang again, louder, and Emilia looked up with a customer’s smile already forming — and the smile died.
Dante Romano stood in the doorway of her bakery.
Not in a tuxedo this time. A dark peacoat over a charcoal sweater, hair catching the afternoon light, and two men in suits waiting on the pavement outside like a fixed point of architecture. He closed the door behind him, and the whole busy city beyond the glass seemed to recede, leaving only the warmth of the ovens and the hush of flour in the air.
May you like
He walked to the counter, and the world moved with him, and he looked at her with a warmth she had seen exactly once before — in a panic room, through the smoke of a war he had survived because she had chosen mercy.
“I have a craving,” he said.
