Chapter 14: Stay

Lorenzo kept his oath to Fiorella.

She walked out of San Rocco on her own feet.

A taxi took her away, and two of his men followed it at a distance.

Lorenzo stood on the church steps beside me and did not watch her go.

He was looking at the door of the sacristy, where an old man had once held him over the font.

"He sat at my father's table every Sunday for thirty years," he said.

"Then he knows where your house keeps its locks."

"Yes."

"Will the commission take his word over yours?"

"The commission takes a vote," Lorenzo said. "He has been counting them since before I could shave."

He put his phone away without making the call he had been about to make.

"Not yet," he said. "I will not warn him by moving first."

I nodded.

I did not feel anything I had expected to feel.

Paolo asked for me that afternoon.

They had put him in a room on the ground floor with a bed, a window and a guard in the hall.

He sat on the bed with his hands hanging between his knees.

"I want to go to the police," he said.

"Pao."

"I want it written down, Liv."

"Why?"

"If it isn't, Mama will tell me in a month that I dreamed it. She's good at that." His voice cracked on the last word.

"I'll say all of it," he said. "The gun, the kitchen, what she said to me."

"You'll go to prison."

"I know."

"For a long time."

"I shot Papa," my brother said. "Twice."

I sat down beside him on the bed, and neither of us said anything for a while.

He leaned his head on my shoulder, the way he had when we were six.

I let him.

Lorenzo's lawyer drove him to the station at four, with one of the men for company.

Donata went an hour later, kicking and shrieking in the back of a car.

When the officers took her out at the curb, she turned her head and looked straight up at my window.

She did not say a word.

I closed the curtain.

That night I could not sleep.

I lay in the east wing bed with the door unlocked, listening to the house settle.

My whole body was awake and aching.

Everything had been taken out of me by the day, and what was left was one plain want.

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