Chapter 10: What the Watch Remembers

Teo's POV

I have not forgotten my wife for one hour of my life.

I lay on the couch in my own study with my shirt still smelling of her, and I listened to the ceiling.

She was awake upstairs.

I heard the floor creak twice, then a small steady clicking.

She was winding the watch.

She did it every night, in every house we ever lived in, and for six years I told myself not to ask.

I knew whose it was.

I knew on our wedding night, when she took the pins out of her hair.

She set a steel watch on the nightstand, and I saw the scratch across the case.

I had seen that scratch before.

I had seen it on a chain hanging out of a dead man's vest, in the gutter outside a restaurant on Mulberry Street.

Benny's car was still running at the curb.

I was twenty-eight then.

I had stood on the corner as lookout and watched the door.

Benny went in.

I heard two shots.

Aldo Bellandi had been the boss of the East Side, and a man who once paid for my mother's funeral.

I got his territory three months later, as a reward for keeping my mouth shut.

At his burial a girl in a gray coat stood at the back and never cried.

She was twenty.

A year after, a woman named Mara Costa walked into a bank I had an interest in.

She had a degree in finance and gray eyes I knew at once.

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