Chapter 17: Say It to My Face

"You can't," I said.

"I can't take them," Ugo said. "I came to."

Stefano pressed the gun harder under his ear.

"Drop it."

Ugo opened his hand, and the gun fell on the linoleum.

Stefano kicked it under the bed.

"Mrs. Lucarelli," Ugo said. "Let me say something."

"No."

He blinked.

I stood up from the bed, and I walked across the room until I was close enough to smell his cologne.

It was the same one he had worn on Friday.

I had smelled it over my head while he pinned my arm to the dining table.

"You will say it to my face," I said. "Say what you did."

His throat moved.

"I held your arm."

"Louder."

"I held your arm down, while the doctor put the needle in."

"What else?"

"You asked me to let go, and I didn't."

"What else, Ugo?"

"I told you to stop crying," he said, "because it made the blood slow."

Stefano's face did not change.

Nardo, in the bed, shut his eyes.

I slapped Ugo with my whole arm.

The crack went down the corridor.

His head swung to the side, and his cheek turned red along the line of my hand.

He did not lift his own hand.

He turned back and stood there with his cheek burning, and he looked at me.

"Again," he said.

"I'm done."

"You can have another one. I held a woman down who had been good to my mother."

I stared at him.

"You sat with my mother for the last two weeks," Ugo said, "when no one from the family came. I forgot it, because he told me to."

I had forgotten it too.

His mother had died of cancer four years ago in a flat over a dry cleaner's.

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