Chapter 12: The Stoop

I told him to meet me on my grandmother's stoop.

It was the one place Donata's guards didn't know.

A narrow brownstone on Delancey Street, with a green door I hadn't opened in three years.

I got there first and sat on the top step with the folder in my lap.

The rain had thinned to a mist.

I told myself I'd come to hear what he wanted.

I think I'd come to see his face.

He walked up the street at nine o'clock with no coat and no driver.

His hair was wet, and his tie hung loose, and he looked ten years older than he had in the ballroom.

He stopped at the bottom step and didn't climb it.

"You came," he said.

His voice was the voice from the phone.

Flat, with nothing behind it.

"You said something was wrong with you."

"Yes."

"Say it."

He looked at his hands.

He turned them over, front and back.

"The morning you left, I woke up and reached for you," he said.

"The bed was empty, and I noticed it the way you'd notice an empty chair. I felt nothing."

"You've been told I was gone."

"I know I was told."

He lifted his eyes to mine.

"I stood in the kitchen and looked at your coffee cup, and it was only a cup."

I kept very still.

"Fabrizio," I said. "You were smiling in that video."

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