Two Nights Later

You move before you think.

Six steps across the tile, over the sheet pan, your sneakers squeaking in a puddle of dishwater. The green steel door is at the end of the narrow back hall, between the walk-in and the mop sink, and the deadbolt is a heavy old brass thing Nana had put in after the riots of '88. You hit it with the heel of your hand. It shoots home with a clunk that you feel in your elbow.

Two seconds later, the handle turns.

Slowly. Testing. The door shifts a quarter inch against the bolt and stops.

You stand with your back pressed to the wall beside it, both hands over your mouth, and listen to a man breathe on the other side of a sheet of steel. He isn't in a hurry. You hear rain dripping off his coat. You hear him tap one knuckle on the door, lightly, twice, like a neighbor.

Then, far off and getting closer, sirens.

Somebody else heard the shots. Somebody on the second floor of the triple-decker across the alley, maybe old Mr. Halpin with his scanner and his insomnia. The sirens swell up West Broadway, two of them, three.

The handle lets go.

Footsteps, unhurried, going away.

You slide down the wall until you're sitting on the floor of the back hall with your knees up and your heart trying to climb out through your throat. The oven timer is still beeping. Somewhere in the front of the shop the wedding cake stands in the light, perfect and white and level, like nothing in the world has happened.

The patrol officers are young and kind and soaked. One of them, Officer Lavoie, gives you a foil blanket you don't need and a paper cup of your own coffee, which you made for them because your hands needed something to do.

You tell them everything.

You tell them about the man in the cardigan, the paper bag, "I've got a meeting Monday with the state." You tell them the tall one wore a tan overcoat and had silver at the temples and a thin pale scar straight through his left eyebrow. You tell them the man in glasses called him Burke.

Lavoie stops writing for a second at that and looks at his partner. Then he keeps writing.

"And then he looked up at you," he says.

"He put his finger on his lips." You show him. Your hand is shaking so badly it takes two tries. "Like this. Like I was a kid in a library."

"Okay. Okay, ma'am. You did great." He tears a card off a little pad and hands it to you. "A detective's going to follow up with you, probably in the next couple days. If you remember anything else, you call that number. And maybe don't stay here alone tonight, yeah?"

You don't have anywhere else to stay. You live upstairs.

By Friday noon the whole neighborhood knows.

The dead man was Eamon Mulcahy, forty-one, of Quincy, and the Herald website calls him "a reputed bookkeeper for the Fennelly organization." There's a photo of him at a church fundraiser in a sweater vest, smiling. He looks like somebody's math teacher.

Nobody in the line at Malloy's says the name Fennelly out loud. Nobody needs to. The Fennellys have run loans and unions and protection out of a club on L Street since before you were born, a club with a green door and no sign. Mrs. Feeney buys her half dozen hot cross rolls and whispers across the counter that it's a terrible thing, a terrible thing, but Eamon must have crossed someone, and you keep your mouth shut and give her the rolls.

"Close for a week," Dulce says in the back, pulling scones out of the oven with her hip. "Please, Ava. Go to your mom's in Arizona. Go anywhere."

"The Ferraro cake goes out at nine tomorrow."

"Screw the Ferraro cake!"

"Dulce."

"I'm serious!" She bangs the tray down. Her eyes are wet and furious. "You saw a man get killed. A Fennelly man. And you told the cops you could pick out the guy who did it. Do you know what happens to people in this neighborhood who do that?"

You do know. Everybody knows. That's the problem.

"I didn't do anything wrong," you say. "I saw what I saw. I told the truth. If I close, if I run, then what? Then he wins and I'm the one who loses Nana's shop?"

Dulce stares at you. Then she wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist, careful of the eyeliner, and says, "You're the most stubborn person I've ever met, and I'm dating a firefighter."

The Ferraro cake goes out at nine on Saturday. The bride cries when she sees it. You smile and hold the door and watch every car on East Broadway.

Nobody calls. No detective. No one.

Saturday night you check the back deadbolt four times before bed. You lie in Nana's old room over the shop and listen to the radiator clank, and every time a car slows outside, you're back at the sink, watching a man lift one finger to his lips.

The alarm goes at three, the way it has every morning since you were nineteen.

Sunday is short hours, but the dough doesn't know that. You pull on leggings and Nana's old cardigan, twist your hair up, and go down the narrow back stairs in your socks, the way you've done ten thousand times. The stairwell light is out again. You'll have to call the landlord. You feel your way down by the rail.

You smell it before you're at the bottom.

Coffee. Fresh. Strong.

You stop on the last step.

The kitchen is dark. The only light is the blue pilot glow from the ovens and the red standby dot on the mixer. Rain ticks on the alley window. And at the long maple worktable, in Nana's chair, sits a man.

He's just a shape at first. Broad shoulders in something dark. Both hands around a mug. He's turned toward the stairs, toward you, as if he's been waiting a while and doesn't mind.

Your hand finds the rolling pin on the shelf by the stairs without your eyes ever leaving him.

"Don't scream," he says.

His voice is low and quiet and very calm, with Southie in the vowels. Not a threat. Almost an apology.

"If I'd come here to hurt you, Ava," he says, "you'd never have seen me."