The Pawn novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: What the Hem Held

Cosimo's POV

She stood over the photograph for so long that Lucio shifted his feet.

I did not.

I watched her hand rise and touch the edge of the print, very lightly.

"Nerina," I said. "We're leaving."

"Midnight," Pellegrino said from his chair, mildly. "That is the offer, Cosimo. Think on it."

I put my hand under her elbow.

She let me.

That told me more than anything she could have said.

Rocco covered our backs to the door with his coat open and his hand at his belt.

Nobody fired.

Pellegrino had wanted her to see the picture, and he had what he wanted.

In the car she sat with her hands in her lap and looked at nothing.

I did not speak.

I had learned long ago that silence was kinder than the wrong sentence.

At the flat I locked the door and she walked to the window and stood with her back to me.

"He was young," she said.

"Yes."

"My mother never told me she knew him. She said she grew up in a town in Indiana and came to Chicago at nineteen. She never said Lake Geneva. She never said a dock."

I said nothing.

She turned around.

Her face was white, and her eyes were enormous.

"Cosimo. What is he to me?"

It was the question I had known was coming for six months.

I had planned the answer a hundred ways, in cars and in the dark.

Standing in front of her, I could not find one that was not a wound.

"Tomorrow," I said. "I will tell you everything tomorrow."

"You said that last night."

"I know."

"That is two nights, now."

"I know that too." I stepped closer, slowly. "I'm asking for one more. Not because I want to hide it, but because you've been shot at, locked up and hunted for two days. You are shaking on your feet. Whatever I say tonight, you won't be able to hold it."

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