Page 44 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
He is already moving through shadow like he has a personal arrangement with it.
He checks the back door and the window boards with quick fingers.
He listens for a beat that is not ours.
I stay near the counter the way people stay near a kitchen table when their life has just shifted and they don't know where to put their hands.
When I step toward the inner door to the storage room, my foot hits paper.
The sound is small.
It might not have registered if the room were not so quiet.
Something thin has been pushed under the front.
My stomach tightens the way it does when a doctor says my name first in a huddle.
“Nico,” I say.
“I see it,” he answers, already angling to catch the front in the reflection of the glass bakery case.
He does not rush me.
He does not bark.
He lets me choose.
I crouch.
The envelope is regular white, the kind you buy in packs of fifty.
No name.
No return address.
The flap is tucked, not sealed.
The paper is a little gray at the edge where shoes scuffed it.
Someone slid it under and walked away with time to spare.
I slip a finger under the flap.
Inside is a photograph and a small note clipped to the corner.
The photo is grainy, printed from a cheap machine, contrast turned up too high. I know the angle before I understand the content.
It's the hospital side door, the one where staff cut out between the ambulance bay and the dumpsters on long nights.
In the photo, a woman with her hair in a knot and her shoulders tired steps into the frame.
She looks like me because she is me.
The timestamp in the corner is last week.
The note is typed in block letters, the kind a printer spits out when someone does not want a handwriting expert anywhere near their life.
The paper clip is the thin kind that bends if you breathe on it.
