Chapter 19: Dario's POV: The Empty Lot

Dario's POV

I paid the taxes on that lot every January for fifteen years.

I bought it at twenty-two with my own money, so no one would build there, and I put up a chain-link fence and a padlock.

Nobody ever asked me why.

The housekeeper's car had a bad clutch, and I drove it across Brooklyn at dawn with a burner phone on the seat.

The fence had been cut.

The padlock lay in the weeds with its shackle sawed through.

Mirella was sitting on a cinder block in the middle of the lot with the carving knife across her knees.

Where the kitchen had been, there was a square of dead grass and a few blackened bricks.

"You came," she said.

"You knew I would."

"You're so predictable, Dario. It's why you were such a comfort."

I stopped ten feet from her.

The two men who had followed her out of the cemetery stood by the shed at the back, with their hands in their coats.

I had given them both their jobs.

She had given them the raise.

"Whatever you do with that," I said, "do it to me. Leave Carina out."

"I'm not going to cut you."

"Then what is it for?"

She turned the knife over in her hand.

"It's from your mother's kitchen. I carved your Sunday roast with it for fifteen years."

I had never once noticed her do it.

I knew nothing about the woman who had slept beside me for three years.

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