Harborwalk

You don't sleep much after his texts. You lie there with the phone on your chest, reading them back, trying to hear his voice in them, trying to decide what it means that a man who never learns the drivers' names now texts one at midnight.

At 5:55 a.m. he's standing in the hall in a black running jacket, stretching one calf against the wall.

"You're late, Ethan," he says.

"It's five fifty-five."

"Then you're early for being late." He looks at your shoulder. "Can you run?"

"Can you?"

That gets you a look, sideways and dry, and then he's down the stairs and out the door, and you follow him into the blue cold.

The Harborwalk at dawn is empty except for gulls and one old woman walking a dog in a sweater. The water is flat and pewter-grey, the airport lights still blinking across the harbor. Saverio runs the way he does everything: easily, without wasted motion, like the world is something he decided to allow. You keep up for a mile before your shoulder starts screaming, and then he slows down without being asked, until you're walking side by side along the railing, breath smoking.

"You didn't have to slow down," you say.

"I didn't." He pulls in a long breath. "I'm thirty-two. My knees have opinions."

"Liar."

He stops walking.

For half a second you think you've made a mistake. Then he laughs, short and surprised, out over the water, and it changes his whole face. It's the first time you've heard him laugh, and you think you'd do something fairly stupid to hear it again.

"Nobody calls me that," he says.

"Maybe somebody should."

He leans his forearms on the railing and looks out at the harbor. You lean beside him, close enough that your elbows almost touch.

"My mother used to walk here," he says after a while. "Every morning. She said the North End was too loud and the water was the only place she could think." He's quiet. "Nine years ago, the Mulqueens and my father were at war over the docks. Somebody put a bomb under his car. He was supposed to drive her to Mass that morning. He had a phone call. She took the car alone."

You don't say anything. There isn't anything good enough to say.

"I was in Bologna," he goes on. "I'd just signed a lease on a little place near the university. Twenty seats. I was going to call it Mirella's." His mouth twists. "My father called me at four in the morning and said, Come home, she's gone. I came home. I never went back."

"And the Mulqueens?"

"The man who built that bomb went into the river that same year." He says it flatly, without pride or apology. "My father made sure of it. It didn't bring her back."

The wind lifts his hair off his forehead. He's looking at the water, but you can feel him paying attention to you, the way you'd feel heat from a stove you weren't facing.

"Why are you telling me this?" you ask.

He turns his head. Those eyes. In the dawn light they're almost green.

"Because you asked me something real last night, Ethan," he says, "and I didn't answer it. This is me answering it."

On Thursday you tell him you need an hour for a doctor's appointment, and he says, "Take two," without looking up from his phone, and you go to East Boston.

The Suds Palace is warm and loud and smells like dryer sheets. Paulette is at the back folding table with a garment bag.

"Navy wool, good brand, your size. Mic's in the left lapel seam, battery's in the hem, recorder pocket behind the inside breast pocket." She unzips it a few inches to show you. "You'd have to cut it open to find it. Four hours of tape on a charge. Swap the card every night, drop it in the box at your grandmother's like before."

"Okay."

She doesn't let go of the hanger right away. "Hasselbeck's been asking a lot of questions about you. More than usual."

"What kind of questions?"

"Where you live now. What car you drive. Whether you've been to the son's place." She frowns. "It's his op. He's allowed to ask. It just feels..." She shakes her head. "Ignore me. I'm old and I see ghosts."

You take the jacket. It's heavy in a way that has nothing to do with wool.

You think about the kitchen on Sunday night. The plate of tagliatelle, the sage going crisp in the butter, his arms folded while he watched you eat. You think about the Harborwalk and the word Mirella. You try to imagine standing behind his chair at the Circolo with a microphone in your lapel, recording him, and something in your stomach turns over and won't turn back.

"Ethan." She catches your arm. "If it gets bad, you call me. Not him. Me."

"It's not going to get bad."

"Famous last words, kid."

You walk out with the garment bag over your good shoulder. The street is grey and wet, buses hissing past. You stop at the corner to wait for the light and look up, out of habit, scanning windows and doorways.

Across the street, in the doorway of a closed bakery, a man is standing with his phone held up sideways at chest height. Dark coat. Handsome, restless face.

Ercole Brucato.

He lowers the phone when he sees you see him. He doesn't hide. He smiles, slowly, and lifts two fingers to his forehead in a little salute, and then turns and walks away down the block, unhurried, like a man who has all the time in the world.

Your blood goes cold and then hot.

The light changes. You don't cross. You stand there with eighteen months of work hanging off your shoulder in a garment bag, counting how many pictures he could have taken. You and Paulette in the window. You and Paulette at the door. You and Paulette's hand on your arm.

Your phone rings.

Saverio.

You let it ring twice, breathe, and answer. "Hey. I'm just leaving the..."

"Kitchen," he says. His voice is very calm. Too calm. "Now. Come alone."

And he hangs up before you can ask him why.