The Pawn novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Cottage

The cottage at the south gate had one room, a woodstove and a narrow iron bed.

Cosimo stood inside the door with snow on his shoulders and no gun on him anywhere.

He had walked the last two miles in a suit coat, and his lips were gray.

I put the key on the table and lit the stove without a word, because my hands needed something to do.

"Sit," I said. "Before you fall over."

He sat on the edge of the bed and did not take his eyes off me.

"Lucio told you the plan," I said.

"All of it. The rifles on the boathouse roof."

"And you came anyway. Alone."

"I came to tell you something I could not say on a phone." He held his hands out to the stove.

"I told Rocco to keep every man out of Wisconsin until I call. If you want to stay with Pellegrino, you can."

I turned around.

"You'd let me?"

"I'd put you in his car myself." His voice was steady, and his hands were not.

"He is your father. He can give you a name, and a house, and a seat at a table that has your face in it."

"And you?"

"I can give you a flat above a bakery, and the worst thing I have ever done."

"That's what you came to say."

"That's half. The other half is that I knew." He looked at the floor.

"Six months before the church. I knew whose child you were, and I brought you into my house anyway."

"I know. Rocco's driver told me how it started."

"Then you know I did it with a smile on my face."

"Cosimo."

"I'm not asking you to forgive me for my father. I'm telling you I have been afraid since the church."

"Afraid of what?"

"That you'll learn what you're worth to the other side and walk to him. And I'll have lost you by being exactly what I said I wasn't."

So that was what had been standing between us.

He had never once thought I might stay for him.

"Look at me," I said.

He did.

"You walked two miles in the snow with no gun to tell me I'm free."

"Yes."

"Nobody has ever done anything that stupid for me."

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