They Wrecked Her Shop He Found Her novel · Chapter 1 of 3
Chapter 1: The Window
Dawn on Taylor Street. Lucia finds her shop window smashed, mannequins slashed, and Joe on the floor with his cane broken. Across the street the bakery camera is still running.
I was already awake when the phone rang.
I wake up at four now. My body does it without asking.
The voice on the line was my neighbor from the bakery across from my shop.
"Lucia. Come down here. Right now."
I put on yesterday's cardigan over my nightgown and drove eleven blocks with my hair still down.
Taylor Street was gray and empty under the streetlights.
Then I saw my window.
The whole front of Lucia's Alterations was open to the street.
Glass lay out across the sidewalk in a wide fan, catching light.
My three mannequins were on their sides in the window.
Somebody had taken a blade and cut every dress off them.
Cream silk. The wedding gown I'd been fitting for six weeks. Slashed down the middle.
I stood there in my cardigan and my slippers and looked at my work on the pavement.
Then I heard a sound inside.
I went through the empty frame where the door used to be.
Joe was on the floor by the cutting table.
My dad. Face down on his side, one arm folded under him wrong.
His cane had been snapped in two pieces and left by his hand.
"Dad."
He moved his head. His lip was split. His eye was already going shut.
"Lucia. Don't touch the glass."
"I'm not touching the glass. Can you sit up?"
"I don't know yet."
I got my arms under him and he did most of the work himself, which is how he's always been.
He sat against the cutting table with his good hand on his knee.
His left hand lay in his lap and didn't move.
That hand has been slow since 2019.
Now it looked wrong in a new way.
"Who did this?"
"Two men. They were waiting when I came to open for you."
"Dad, why were you here at four in the morning?"
He looked at the floor.
"I come at four every morning. I fix the register tape. I sweep. You sleep in once a week and I don't tell you."
Six years of that and I never knew.
"Did they say anything?"
"One of them did the talking." Joe's jaw worked. "He said the shop's a message. He said tell your daughter to answer her phone when Mr. Lazzaro calls."
I hadn't answered Vito Lazzaro's calls in three weeks.
I kept standing there, because if I sat down I wasn't going to get up.
Then I remembered the bakery.
Mrs. Marchetti's bakery across the street has a camera over the register.
It points out the window at the whole block.
I went back out through the empty door frame and looked across Taylor Street.
The camera was still mounted under the awning.
The little red light under it was on.
It had been on the whole time.
"Dad. Stay right there. Don't move."
"You're not the boss of me."
"I'm calling an ambulance."
"An ambulance is four hundred dollars."
"Then it's four hundred dollars."
I got him on the phone with the dispatcher and stood in the doorway where he could see me.
Sirens in this neighborhood take a while. The sun was starting to come up behind the el tracks.
I counted my mannequins again. I counted the dresses.
Six weeks on the wedding gown. Three weeks on the alterations rack.
All of it in pieces on my floor.
Then a car door closed across the street.
I looked up.
A man came out of the bakery.
Black hair, dark overcoat, no hat, moving like the sidewalk belonged to him.
I hadn't seen him in six years.
He was taller than I remembered, or I'd made myself remember him smaller.
He stopped at the edge of the glass and looked down at it, then at me.
Matteo Santangelo.
He didn't say hello. He didn't say my name.
He lifted his hand and showed me what was in it.
A small black camera card in a clear plastic sleeve.
"The bakery file," he said. "I got here twenty minutes ago."
I didn't ask how he knew to come.
I didn't ask how he got Mrs. Marchetti to hand it over at five in the morning.
He looked past me, through the empty window, at my father on the floor.
His jaw set.
"Your dad?"
"Yes."
"Lucia."
He said it the way you say a word you've been holding a long time.
"Don't," I said.
"Your shop is wrecked and your father's hurt."
"I know what happened to my shop."
"Then you know this file is the only thing on this block that saw it."
The ambulance turned onto Taylor Street and its lights went red across the glass.
Matteo put the sleeve in my hand and closed my fingers around it.
"Watch it before you decide anything," he said.
"About what?"
"About whether you'd rather do this alone."
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