The Morning After The Decision
1335 Words
She had not said yes.
She had also not said no.
She had eaten dinner across from the most dangerous man in Milan and she had thought about her parents and about Carlo Vespi's easy smile and about a dead man who had apparently written her name in a file before she was old enough to know what files were — and she had driven home at ten thirty with her hands steady on the wheel and her mind anything but.
She had not slept well.
She was on her third coffee by seven am standing on her small balcony watching Milan wake up below her and having a very honest conversation with herself about the situation she was in.
The honest version went like this —
A man she did not know had come to find her. Had told her the truth about her parents when he could have used it as leverage instead. Had laid out her options clearly and without manipulation and had then let her order dinner and think in peace without once pushing her toward an answer.
That was not the behavior of a man who simply wanted to use her.
That was also not the behavior of any man she had ever encountered before.
She drank her coffee.
The other honest thing —
She wanted to know what happened to her parents. She had wanted to know for fifteen years. The door she had kept closed all this time was not closed because she didn't want to open it. It was closed because she had never had a key.
Dante Ricci was a key.
An extremely dangerous, complicated, infuriating key who looked at her like she was a problem he couldn't file correctly and who almost smiled sometimes in a way that did things to her composure she was not prepared to discuss with anyone including herself.
But a key nonetheless.
Her phone buzzed.
She looked at it expecting Gianna.
It was not Gianna.
It was a single line. No greeting. No preamble.
You don't have to decide today.
She stared at the message for a long moment.
Then she typed back —
I know.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Then —
How's the coffee.
She looked at her cup. Looked at her balcony. Looked at the Milan skyline going about its morning business with magnificent indifference.
She almost smiled.
She did not smile.
Adequate, she typed.
Mine is better.
I don't doubt it.
She put her phone face down on the balcony railing. Picked it back up.
Why did your father choose me, she typed. The real reason. Not the condition language. The real reason.
The three dots appeared for longer this time.
I don't know yet, he wrote. But I think your father and my father knew each other. I think whatever your father found — my father knew about it. I think the connection between our families is older than either of us.
She read that three times.
Older than either of us.
She thought about her father. A journalist. An investigator. A man who had found something and had been killed for it. She had a photograph of him on her nightstand — dark haired, laughing at something off camera, completely unaware that the photograph would outlast him by fifteen years. She had looked at that photograph so many times the edges of it had gone soft.
She had his eyes. Everyone always said so. She had his eyes and her mother's mouth and a scar above her right eyebrow that nobody had ever been able to explain.
My father, she typed. Do you know his name.
Marco Leone, Dante wrote back immediately. Investigative journalist. Based in Naples. He was good at what he did. Very good. Good enough that the wrong people noticed.
She sat down on her balcony chair.
Marco Leone.
Her father's name in someone else's mouth felt strange. Like hearing a song you only knew in one language suddenly sung in another. The same notes. Completely different sensation.
You've been researching him, she typed.
Yes.
Since when.
Since I found your name in the file.
That was two days ago.
I work quickly.
She stared at her phone. The audacity of him was genuinely breathtaking. She could not decide if she found it infuriating or something else entirely and she was not going to examine that question in any detail before at least a fourth coffee.
What else do you know, she typed.
More than I can put in a message.
Then we should talk.
The three dots.
Yes, he wrote. We should.
She looked at the city below. At the morning light on the rooftops. At Milan going about its business like everything was ordinary when nothing was ordinary anymore and hadn't been since a Friday night and a bar and a hallway and a man who moved like a decision.
She picked up her coffee.
Made a decision of her own.
Tonight, she typed. Same place.
His response came in six seconds.
Seven o clock.
Eight, she typed. I have work.
A pause.
Eight, he agreed.
She put her phone in her pocket and finished her coffee standing up looking at the city and she thought about her father laughing at something off camera and her mother who she barely remembered except as warmth and the smell of something floral and a voice that had been the first sound she ever loved.
She thought about fifteen years of a closed door.
She thought about keys.
She went inside to get ready for work.
At Romano's shop Tomas looked at her when she arrived and said — you look different.
She hung up her jacket. Put on her work coveralls. Pulled her hair back.
I look exactly the same, she said.
Tomas studied her with the skeptical precision of a man who had been reading people across car hoods for thirty years.
You look like someone who made a decision, he said.
She picked up her wrench.
There's a Honda Civic in bay two that needs a full service, she said.
Tomas.
Aria.
She walked to bay two.
Behind her Tomas watched her go with the expression of a man filing something away for future reference.
The Honda Civic's engine turned over when she started it and she listened to the particular complaint of it the way she always listened — with her full attention, reading the sound the way other people read faces.
Something was wrong with the timing.
She knew how to fix that.
She wished everything was as straightforward as engines.
Engines told you exactly what was wrong with them if you listened carefully enough. They did not have dead fathers who had known dangerous men. They did not have uncles who had kept secrets for fifteen years. They did not have conditions written in wills by men who had apparently decided before anyone was born exactly how the story was going to go.
They just needed the right person to listen.
She got to work.
At seven fifty five she was parked outside the restaurant.
She had not changed her clothes.
She sat in her car for three minutes.
Then she got out and walked through the dark wood door and across the quiet low lit room and sat down at the same table.
He was already there.
Of course he was.
He looked at her work clothes. At the faint trace of engine oil she hadn't quite managed to scrub from her left thumb. At the hair she had pulled back quickly in the car park.
He said nothing about any of it.
He simply — looked at her. In the way that was becoming familiar and inconvenient in equal measure. Like she was the most interesting thing in whatever room she occupied and he was still not sure what to do with that information.
She sat down.
Ordered water before anyone asked.
Looked at him.
Tell me everything, she said.
And he did.
- Writer
