Chapter 11: What Grief Does

"Tell me it isn't true," Fiorella said.

She came out from behind the pillar with her hands shaking.

Her mascara had run down both cheeks.

I wanted to hold her.

I also wanted to slap her, and the wanting felt equally real.

"It's true."

"He's my father."

"Mine too, for seventeen years."

"You're lying," she said.

"You're doing this to take everything, because you found a letter and a man with a scar."

"Papa wouldn't kill anyone."

"He wouldn't, he's gentle, he reads to Mama at night."

"He just said it, Fio."

"You heard him say it."

Her face crumpled, and for a moment she looked like the child who'd followed me through the garden with a toy rabbit.

Then she wiped her cheeks with the back of her wrist and straightened.

"I'm not your sister," she said.

"Whatever you are, I'm not your sister."

"I'm Papa's real daughter, and I'm going to tell Tancredi what you said."

"Tancredi will know what to do."

"Tancredi lit a fire with an old woman inside it," I said.

"He'll know what to do to you, too."

She walked out of the bank without answering.

I watched the glass door swing shut behind her.

Corrado came up beside me, holding a stranger's pistol.

"She'll run straight to him," he said.

"I know."

"Then why tell her the truth?"

"Because she asked," I said.

My voice sounded odd.

"I'd like to be the one person in that family who didn't lie to her."

He put the gun in a clerk's wastebasket and took my arm.

He had rooms at the end of Pier Four, above a chandler's shop that smelled of tar and rope.

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