Chapter 5: The Study

Not yet.

I sat on the bed in my grandmother's wedding dress and waited for him to say a name.

He didn't.

"Goodnight," he said to whoever it was, and the phone clicked down on the nightstand.

Then nothing. A drawer. The bed creaking under a big man.

I got out of the dress by pulling it over my head with twenty buttons still done up.

Nonna would have killed me.

I put on my nightgown and sat in the dark and watched the clock on my phone.

At two in the morning the house had been quiet for three hours.

I unlocked my door one click at a time.

The hall carpet was thick. The stairs were oak, and the fourth one creaked, and I stepped over it.

His study was off the front hall, behind double doors.

I'd been in it once, four years ago, when Nicky brought me to meet his father.

Dom had poured me a glass of wine and asked me what I thought about the Royals' bullpen.

He actually listened to the answer.

The doors weren't locked.

A man like that doesn't lock doors in his own house.

I used my phone's flashlight.

Books floor to ceiling. Cookbooks, history, poetry in Italian. A leather chair with a reading lamp. A desk the size of a dental chair.

I didn't know what I was looking for.

Something with Nicky's handwriting.

Something with an A on it.

Anything that told me if the man sleeping above me was the one taking thirty percent.

The top drawer had pens and a checkbook for Scarpa Produce.

The second had a framed photograph lying face down.

I turned it over.

Two boys on a dock, squinting into the sun.

The bigger one had his arm around the little one's neck.

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