He Protected My Baby's Killer, So I Left Him novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Ask Him About June Ninth

Elio gives her one sentence to ask Dominic; Dominic answers too fast; Emilio looks for a tow truck.

My aunt put a folding chair between me and the stranger.

"Five minutes," she said. "I'm timing you from the register."

Elio didn't sit.

He stood with his hands where I could see them, which I noticed because Dominic never had.

"I'm not here to remind you of the party," he said. "I know how I looked."

"You climbed on a chair."

"I did. It was the only way to get over the string quartet."

I didn't smile, and he didn't seem to expect it.

"A florist on Federal Hill is married to my cousin," he said. "She called me this morning. She said the Ardito wedding was cancelled by the bride, and she thought I'd want to know."

"Why would you want to know?"

"Because I've waited seven months for you to take that ring off."

My aunt stopped pretending to count the till.

He said it plainly, without leaning on it.

"I was sorry to hear about the baby," he said. "I mean that. I would have come to the hospital, but they'd have had me removed."

I thought of the four of them lined up around my bed, and I believed him.

"What did you shout?" I said. "At the party. I never heard it."

"You'd have stopped me if you had."

"What did you shout?"

"I said, ask him what he does on June ninth."

The back of my neck went cold.

For ten years Dominic had gone out to the bay every June ninth with his phone off.

I had never told anyone, not even my aunt.

"He visits Carina's brother," I said slowly. "It's the anniversary. He drives out to the water."

"He does."

"That's grief."

"It's a kind of grief." Elio chose each word carefully. "Ask him why the bay. Ask him whose idea it was to go there that night. Ask him and watch his face before he answers."

"That's all you're going to give me."

"For today. If I give you more, you'll hear it as a man you threw out of a party trying to turn you against your fiancé."

"He isn't my fiancé."

"Then you'll hear it as a man trying to turn you against your ex."

"I'm not going to ask him that."

He nodded.

"I'm not asking you to." He took a card from his jacket pocket and set it on the counter beside a jar of drywall screws.

Caprio & Sons Towing, a Hope Street address and a phone number.

"If you ever want the rest, I'm there every day. Early and late."

He turned to go, and my aunt came out from behind the register and said, in Italian, that if he made me cry she'd find his mother.

He said, in Italian, that he'd been trying not to.

Then he went out through the front door, and the bell stuck on its first ring.

I watched the tow truck pull away from the curb with its yellow lights off.

I put the card in my back pocket.

I hadn't decided to keep it.

I had been standing there for maybe a minute when the bell rang again and Dominic walked in with Emilio behind him.

"I said an hour," Dominic began. "I got here faster. Livia, I won't let you sit above a store feeling abandoned."

"You're early."

"Carina's calmer. I told her it was important." He looked past me to the aisle. "Who was in here?"

"A customer."

"Livia."

"What do you do every June ninth, Dominic?"

I had asked it before I knew I would.

He didn't blink, and he didn't laugh.

"Who told you that?" he said.

The words came out fast, before I had said anyone had told me anything.

I had been waiting ten years to see what his face did when someone asked, and now I knew.

It went still.

Emilio stepped between us. "That's an old family thing. It's not for a shop floor."

"I was asking him."

"And I'm answering."

My aunt had been in the back for a second, and she came out with the push broom held across her chest.

"Out," she said.

"Signora," Emilio began.

"My husband built this counter. He wouldn't let you stand at it. Out."

They went.

Dominic looked at me from the doorway for a long moment, dark-eyed and unreadable.

Emilio stopped on the sidewalk.

He scanned Atwells Avenue in both directions, and then he stared at the far corner where a tow truck with its yellow lights off was turning toward Hope Street.

He took out his phone.

I heard him say, to Dominic and not to me, "That's Caprio's truck."

He typed with his thumb and didn't look up.

"Carina needs to know he was here."

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