Chapter 6: Papers

I crossed 18th Avenue in my socks.

The asphalt was freezing.

The car window came down before I reached it.

Cesare looked like he hadn't slept since Thursday.

He had a white bandage across the knuckles of his right hand.

"Get in, you'll freeze," he said.

"I'm not getting in."

He looked down at my socks and closed his eyes for a second.

"Did that man touch you?"

"No."

"What's his name?"

I knew exactly what he was asking.

I'd been married to him for three years.

A name, said to Cesare Lanza in that voice, was an address the man would never come home to.

"No," I said.

"Lili."

"He's gone. She has a new lock. That's the end of it."

"I had a man on 79th the whole time," he said. "On the roof across the street. If that animal had lifted a hand..."

"Then you'd have saved me. And I'd owe you."

He didn't answer that.

"You don't get to sit outside my door," I said.

"It's a public street."

"Then go sit on a different public street."

He looked at me through the window for a long time.

"Go inside," he said finally. "Your feet are blue."

I went inside.

When I looked out from upstairs at two, the car was gone.

On Thursday, October 15, I sat in a lawyer's office on 86th Street over a nail salon.

She had a plant on the windowsill that was mostly dead.

"Contested?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you want anything? The house? Support?"

"I want my name back," I said. "Bruno. That's all."

She looked at me over her glasses.

"Mrs. Lanza, your husband is worth..."

"I know what he's worth."

She filed the papers that afternoon.

The next morning a courier came to the shop with an envelope.

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