Chapter 7: Cesare's POV: The Six Letters

Cesare's POV

At twenty to ten that night I drove Renata Orsini to the Table.

I had driven her father to it a thousand times.

I had never once driven her.

She sat in the passenger seat in a plain black dress from my sister's old closet.

Her father's ring hung outside her collar for the first time.

The dog slept on the back seat with her chin on a folded coat.

Renata held her hands in her lap, and her cut palm had a bandage across it that I had put on myself.

She kept her eyes on the road.

I kept mine on the mirrors.

"You were going to tell me," she said. "Why you left."

"Not before a Table."

"After, then."

"After."

She nodded and went quiet.

I thought about the day she was asking about.

It was a gray Thursday in February, fourteen months ago.

We had put the old man in the ground at ten.

I had stood at the back by the cypress trees, because I knew my place.

I watched her take Nico's arm at the grave.

Her face was white, and she leaned on him.

I told myself it was right.

He had been the old man's right hand, and she was twenty-five, with no one else.

At the reception Nico took me aside in the pantry and put a hand on my shoulder.

"The docks need a man," he said. "Starting tomorrow."

"I drive for the family."

"The family is me now. You can drive a forklift for me."

He squeezed my shoulder.

"Or you can find out how you'd look to an auditor."

He knew what I'd done for her father in my twenties.

He knew where some of it was buried.

I went to the docks.

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