Page 148 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
Then the other line rings.
Don Vincent’s man.
The voice is polished stone.
“Council dinner tonight. Six. The Don wants the shape of the day before everyone else draws it.”
“I’ll bring it,” I say.
“You’ll bring yourself and your paper,” he says. “Not the lady.”
“I know the rules,” I say.
I hang up before he can recite them.
Elisa’s already watching.
“So we are going to dinner.”
“I am,” I say. “You are going to help me pack a neat truth that keeps knives under coats.”
She pushes her stool back.
“What do you need?”
“Two pages. One showing the fraud. One showing the fix.”
“And what is the fix?” she asks. “What do you call what we did?”
“Order,” I say. “And a reminder.”
“A reminder of what?”
“That we can still sort our own mess without inviting a courthouse.” I meet her eyes. “Rule for tonight. No blood. Only truth.”
She nods, slow and tight. “I like that rule.”
We build the packet like we’re boxing a cake.
The manifest with Geno’s dead name highlighted, the café receipt with Marco’s code and Rosa’s neat totals, the union “find”, the ledger pages with just enough coffee stain to look real and just enough math to look lazy.
On top, I lay a single sheet that says, in polite words, this is what happens when ambition forgets to wash its hands.
She proofreads.
She always catches the small off notes.
“Your comma here,” she says, tapping a line, “wants to be a period.”
“Even my punctuation behaves until it doesn’t,” I say. I change it.
We eat eggs standing up.
She puts a hand on her stomach like it’s a vote.
I watch her.
She hates that.
