Chapter 2

Six a.m. My eyes opened on their own. Five years of federal schedule had rewired something permanent in me.

December sixteenth.

My birthday. For what that was worth.

I dressed in the only clean outfit I had—dark slacks, a gray button-down that had seen better years. In the bathroom mirror, my fingers found that scar below my right ear before I'd made any conscious decision to touch it. Old habit. Like checking that something you've lost is still gone.

Today I needed work.

The first three places didn't let me finish my sentence. The word record landed on application forms like a lit match, and every manager's face did the same thing—a small, practiced withdrawal, eyes dropping, the folder closing.

Convenience store. Dry cleaner on Nostrand. A diner off Atlantic Avenue. No.

My knee was throbbing by noon, that deep bone-ache that showed up whenever I pushed it too long on hard floors. I stopped outside a place called Valentina's—Italian, red awning, the smell of garlic and burnt butter leaking through the door. A hand-printed card in the window: Staff Wanted. Inquire Inside.

The manager was a woman named Greta. Fifties, no-nonsense, the kind of face that had heard every story and filed them all under not my problem. She read my application without expression.

"Background check. Standard."

"Go ahead."

She looked up. Studied me for a moment the way people do when they're deciding whether the risk is worth the labor shortage.

"Trial week. Lunch shift. You carry, you clear, you don't touch the bar." She slid the paper back. "You drop anything, we're done. Clear?"

"Clear."

The lunch rush was brutal. Heavy trays, slick floors, a kitchen that ran hot and loud with the chef barking in a mix of English and Italian that nobody seemed to need translated. My knee screamed somewhere around the second hour but I kept moving, kept smiling at tables that looked straight through me.

A waitress named Dana nudged me near the service station, voice low. "You're favoring your left side. Greta'll notice."

"I'll manage."

"Just saying." She shrugged, refilling a water pitcher. "She fired the last girl for a single spilled Barolo. This place has standards." She said the last word the way people say things they find privately ridiculous.

I finished the shift. Greta handed me an envelope at four o'clock without ceremony. "Tomorrow. Don't be late."

Outside, the last of the afternoon light was going gold over the rooftops. I stopped at a bakery two blocks down and bought the smallest birthday cake they had—single serving, strawberry, a paper-thin candle already stuck in the center. The girl behind the counter didn't ask who it was for.

I already knew the answer.

The Caruso estate was lit up when I got back, music bleeding through the walls before I'd even reached the gate. An event. Of course. I'd forgotten, or maybe I'd simply chosen not to remember.

Rosa intercepted me at the side entrance before I could make it to the stairs.

"Use the kitchen passage," she said, not looking up from her clipboard. "The foyer is for guests."

I went around. Through the kitchen, past the catering staff who looked through me the same way the restaurant customers had, up the back staircase that the family used for people and things they didn't want seen.

Don Caruso—my adoptive father, Enzo—caught me in the second-floor hallway. He was dressed for company. Charcoal Brioni, pocket square pressed to a knife's edge, cufflinks that probably cost more than my entire week's pay. He looked at me the way men in his position looked at inconveniences.

"You smell like a kitchen." His voice was quiet. That particular quiet that the Caruso men used when they wanted you to understand they didn't need to raise it. "Tonight is Serena's night. Try to remember you live in this house."

"I was looking for work."

Something shifted in his expression. Not quite amusement. Closer to the look men give when they've heard a punchline they expected. "Work." He let the word sit there. "You've been out one day and you're already—" He stopped. Looked me over once more. "Go to your room. Don't come downstairs."

He walked away without waiting for an answer.

From the ballroom below, I could hear the live quartet playing something I recognized—a piece I'd choreographed for Serena's Sweet Sixteen, movement and tempo I'd spent three weeks building from nothing, now floating up through the floorboards like it had always been someone else's.

I locked my door. Set the little strawberry cake on the windowsill. No plate, so I folded an old newspaper into something roughly flat. Lit the candle.

The flame wavered in the draft from the old window frame.

I didn't make a wish. I'd stopped believing that worked somewhere around year two.

The wax dripped. I ate a piece of the cake standing up. Too sweet. The kind of sweet that sits wrong.

A knock, then the door opened without waiting for me—Mrs. Caruso, Vittoria, in floor-length silver, a diamond tennis necklace at her throat, her hair done by someone who charged by the hour.

"Serena wants you downstairs."

I followed her.

The ballroom was full—capos, associates, their wives in couture, the outer ring of people who orbited the Caruso name hoping some of the gravity would catch them. Serena stood at the center of it in ivory Marchesa, twenty-five candles on a cake that was taller than seemed structurally reasonable.

"Sorella." She took both my hands when she saw me, voice warm as a performance. "You're finally here."

Dante stood beside her. He looked the way he always looked—like something carved specifically to make women believe in the wrong things. He nodded at me once. Kept his arm where it was.

Serena blew out the candles. The room erupted. She turned to face me, and for just a moment, the performance slipped—something sharper underneath, something that had always been underneath.

"My wish," she said, clearly, for the room, "is that my sister finds the grace to let me have Dante."

Dead silence.

"Serena." Dante's voice was flat. His arm didn't move.

"I mean it." Her eyes filled on cue. "Without him, I don't know what I am. You've always been so strong, Mia. You understand things like this."

Around us, the guests murmured. I caught pieces.

—only adopted—

—Serena's always been too generous—

—she should be grateful the family took her in—

Vittoria leaned toward Enzo and spoke in Sicilian, low, under the noise: "She was never one of ours. Let Serena have what Serena wants. That's always been the arrangement."

Enzo answered without turning his head: "Dante belongs with Serena. The other one was never the right match for this family."

They thought I'd never learned the language.

Twenty-three years in a Sicilian household, and they still thought that.

I stepped forward.

"Il vostro amore," I said, loud enough to carry, the Sicilian clean and unhurried, "fa schifo."

Your love disgusts me.

The room stopped breathing.

Enzo's face went rigid. Vittoria's champagne glass paused halfway to her mouth. Serena's tears fell—real ones this time, because genuine shock is harder to hold back than the manufactured kind.

I turned and walked across the ballroom floor, through the gilded doors, and out into December.

The cold hit clean and sharp.

Behind me, the party started to come apart.

I kept walking.