Chapter 9: The Grave

Livia's POV

My father was buried in the old Italian cemetery on the east side, under a plain gray stone with a bronze plaque.

I made Rocco take me the next morning.

He didn't want to. He stood in the kitchen with his jaw set and his phone in his hand.

He said that Silvio had Thurston, and Silvio knew the house, and today was not the day.

"Today is the only day I'll be able to," I said.

"Livia."

"If I wait, I'll talk myself out of it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Two cars," he said. "My men stay on the road. I stay with you."

The cemetery was almost empty.

A gardener was trimming the hedge by the gate. A woman in a black headscarf was kneeling at a grave two rows over.

I walked up the gravel path with a bunch of white carnations from the market stand, and Rocco walked beside me with his hands in his coat pockets.

The stone was newer than the ones around it. The letters were sharp.

It had his name, and his dates, and under that one line of Italian.

He loved his family.

I stood and looked at it.

I had thought I would cry. I didn't.

I only felt empty and very tired.

"He asked for you," Rocco said, very quietly. "At the end. He asked for you twice."

"Don't."

"I only wanted you to know."

"Why didn't you come?"

It came out of me flat and hard, and I hadn't planned it.

He went still.

"Six years," I said. "You knew where I was. You had a man in Fells Point. Zia told me. A man outside my building every day."

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