Page 47 of Blood Orange Christmas
He licks his bottom lip and looks at Luca like he might find a softer judge. Luca gives him a bright, empty smile and steps half a foot closer, which is a movement men like Paolo always feel even if they pretend they didn’t. The pantry breathes. The villabreathes. I can feel the laundry girl on the other side of the wall holding her breath because she’s never heard me talk like this. I can feel Serena inside the room of my house that isn’t a room—somewhere in the shadow behind the door, somewhere near the lemon spoons, where the air bends differently.
Paolo spreads his hands and bleeds theatrics all over the tile. “If you ask me to leave, I leave. You know that. But it will look like something.”
“It will look like a man who respects a wall,” I say. “And if it looks like anything else, I’ll make it look like a lesson.”
“Dante,” he says, softer now, trying to find me with the exact voice he used the night we decided to move a shipment one street over to keep a child from hearing trucks in his sleep. “Family.”
I don’t blink. “There is a child sleeping two rooms from where we’re standing. If you ever use that word in my house to ask for permission to make me choose something that isn’t good for him, I will let Luca pick which shoulder you prefer to live without.”
He lifts both hands to his shoulders like we’re at a fitting. It almost makes me laugh and I hate that it almost does.
Camilla’s two taps hit my phone again. A still from the corner cam that caught a face in profile and the cuff of a glove with a slit where a man hides what other people hope won’t exist. She writes one word under it in our code.Sardine—someone small, slippery, used by bigger fish. She follows it with a time stamp and a map dot. The dot sits exactly where the camera stuttered. The part of me that has spent half my life drawing lines on top of maps pulls a thread.
“Walk,” I say to Paolo and push him with two fingers in the direction of the study as if we’re headed back to a civilized conversation about wine. “You can explain to Bellini how the cellar was too cold for your sinuses.”
He straightens his jacket, fixes his cuffs, and glances once toward the pantry door with a private look meant for a mirror. I don’t like men who practice faces on their way into a room. He makes his smile and puts it on, and we walk together like we’ve never had a single argument.
We cross the saints. Everyone looks up when we move through a space like this. They smell temperature changes before the weather changes. The Moretti cousins turn their cheeks toward us like the sun just shifted. The old man who never uses a shovel smiles with his mouth and not his eyes. The women look at my hands first and then my face because women always look where the honest parts are. I keep my jacket open and my hands empty and bring Paolo back to Bellini like a host making reparations for a delay.
“Avvocato,” I say warmly. “My cousin?—”
“I’m not your—” Paolo begins, and I put a little weight on his elbow with my fingers. He flinches the way a man does when he suddenly remembers all the times he didn’t.
“—was in the wrong corridor doing the right thing,” I finish, as if we rehearsed this. “He was checking that an old vendor didn’t bring the wrong box to the wrong door and end up on the wrong end of Gabriella’s opinion. He wanted to make sure your table keeps getting fed. He should have told me first.”
Bellini folds his napkin onto the edge of the empty bowl like it might refill itself if he looks humble. “I admire initiative when it’s polite.”
“It wasn’t,” Paolo says, contrite because I told him that’s what he is. He lowers his chin and plays at self-awareness. “It won’t happen again. I’m taking some air. A little weak.” He touches his stomach where my fist lives and manages a smile for me that almost sells as gratitude. “Forgive me.”
“Always,” I say, because I like telling lies that feel like choices.
He slips away the way men in our line do when they want to be seen leaving and not seen after they leave. Luca has the door he wants ready for him. Rocco is already sending the text to three teams that says Paolo is now a guest on the outside of my property line and should be treated like any man who insists on arguing at a gate.
Bellini watches all of that without moving his head. He’s a professional. He decides what to file for later and lets the rest leave the room. “You keep a clean house,” he says.
“I cook in it,” I answer, because Serena’s stew is still in the air and I want him to taste that sentence with the next spoon he lifts.
He nods and begins a sentence about seating, about Christmas Eve, about a nephew with a long memory and a short fuse, and I let him talk because I can listen and plan at the same time. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Harrison slide along the back wall of the study like a hinge, ledger under his arm, face saying nothing, presence saying we will owe each other a conversation that none of these people in good shoes should hear.
Camilla texts me a second still and a string of numbers—the routing log for that driver’s truck, the plate number shaken loose by two phone calls and a favor from a cousin’s husband who doesn’t like Paolo. The truck stopped twice before my gate and once at the lower village road where the cell signal drops. The same stop that sat on Paolo’s calendar this morning as “coffee”. I was chasing a ghost in the hills. Serena was in my kitchen cutting fennel. A bottle in my cellar had a message in its throat and a man with a dull letter opener had turned the rag into a confession.
I feel the weight of my house settle differently on its foundations. I see the seating again without looking at the paper we drew it on. I see Christmas Eve move like a slow tide across a table that isn’t as long as some men think it is. I see the kitchen and the pass and the pantry lane like a map where every line is a vein. The missing gyuto hums in a corner of my head. I hear the word from the bottle—La cena è l’arma—and I hear Serena’s voice telling me we can make a dinner a trap and feed the room with the real plates while the fake ones sparkle.
“I need to excuse myself,” I tell Bellini after the right amount of listening. “Your bowl’s next. If you’re still hungry, I’ll bring you something that isn’t strategic.”
He smiles like he likes that sentence because it lets him feel human about a thing that isn’t. I leave him with his linen square and the painting and walk out into the corridor that has all my saints in it and none of my forgiveness.
The kitchen door is a good hinge. It knows how to move without being heard. I push it with the flat of my hand and step into heat and lemon and steel and the hum that means every plate that should land is going to. Gabriella clocks my face and nods once for news I didn’t bring. The pastry girl looks busy with threethings that need one person. The dish pit sings. Luca drifts in at my back, posture laughing, eyes not, and I shake my head twice—not here, not now.
Serena’s shadow is where I expect it to be, tucked into the shelf of the pantry doorway, one hand braced on the frame like she’s arguing with wood. Her hair is tied back, her sleeves pushed, there’s flour on her forearm and lemon zest caught in the divot at the base of her throat. She’s a map I can read by touch. She’s also the only person in this house who sees through every room I enter and every room I leave.
She doesn’t say a word. She just watches. Which is worse.
“How many bowls?” I ask Gabriella without taking my eyes off Serena.
“Sixteen now, six waiting,” she says, because she can count and talk and catch fire without moving. “Two for saints. One for your study.”
“Send Bellini a second,” I say. “Make it look like an apology we can eat.”
