Chapter 19: Atlantic Avenue

I told Luca about the ledger in the dark of the guest room, in six sentences.

He listened with his eyes on the ceiling and his hand over mine.

"Four million," he said at the end.

"Fifty-one payments. All in her pencil."

"She wants you to see them."

"Why?"

"I don't know yet." He turned his head. "But she left the ledger on the shelf where you'd find it, with you in the house. She didn't hide it."

I had thought of that, and I had pushed it away.

"Get dressed," I said. "I can't lie here."

At six we went out into a grey Brooklyn dawn, with ice on the parked cars and a smell of bread from the bakery on the corner.

I did not decide where we walked.

My feet decided.

We went down Fourth Avenue and across Atlantic, and I stopped at the curb of the big intersection by the old bank.

A bus sighed past with its windows lit.

Luca stood beside me and said nothing.

It was a very ordinary corner.

A pharmacy, a bodega with its shutter half up, a traffic light hanging on a wire.

Light turned green.

A delivery truck came up the avenue, heavy and slow, and rolled through the crossing at the speed limit.

My knees went weak.

I put my hand on the pole of the streetlight.

"Gemma."

"It's all right."

"Your hand is shaking."

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