MATTEO
I didn't mean to go to the bakery.
I was bleeding, and the safe house was compromised, and the hospital would ask questions I couldn't answer, and the only place I could think of that wasn't a Moretti property and wasn't watched was Rossi's Bakery on 3rd.
My mother used to buy bread there when I was a boy. Before my father got shot in his car. Before I became the man who went to funerals and stood in the back and didn't cry.
I pushed the door and the bell jingled and I almost fell through the doorway.
Elena was there.
She was sweeping, hair up in a messy knot, flour on her cheek and her forearm. She looked up, saw me, saw the blood soaking through the side of my shirt, and her face went very still. Not scared. Calculating.
"Lock the door," I said. My voice sounded wrong in my own ears.
"Get out."
"Please."
I don't say please. I haven't said it since I was twelve and begging my father not to go to the meeting where he died. The word felt foreign and humiliating in my mouth.
She stared at me for three long seconds. Then she walked past me, locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and pulled down the shade.
"Take off your coat," she said. "Sit down before you fall down."
I did. On a sack of flour. It was undignified. I was too tired to care.
She got the first aid kit her father kept for burns and cuts. She didn't ask who did it. She didn't ask if I was going to die on her floor. She just knelt in front of me and started unbuttoning my shirt with hands that didn't shake.
"You're going to need stitches," she said.
"I know."
"You have a gun."
"I know."
She looked up at me then, really looked, and I saw the anger in her eyes and underneath it, something worse: exhaustion. The same exhaustion I saw in the mirror.
"This is going to hurt," she said, and threaded a needle.
It did. I gripped the edge of the flour sack and didn't make a sound. My father taught me not to make sounds when I was hurt. It was the only thing he taught me that ever stuck.
She worked fast. Her fingers were warm and sure. She smelled like yeast and coffee.
"You come here a lot?" she asked, not looking up.
"My mother used to buy bread here. Before."
"Before what?"
"Before everything went to shit."
She tied off the last stitch. Her knuckles brushed my skin and I flinched. Not from pain.
"Why here?" she asked. "You could've gone anywhere. You have people."
I should have lied. I'm good at lying. It's my job.
"Because you hate me," I said. "And you won't call the cops. And you won't tell anyone I was here because you want me to owe you."
She stood up. Wiped her hands on her apron. Left a faint smear of my blood on the white fabric.
"I don't want you to owe me anything," she said. "I want you gone."
I stood. Too fast. The room tilted. I put my hand out to steady myself and it landed on the piano in the corner — her father's old upright, out of tune, keys yellowed.
When I pulled my hand away, there was blood on middle C.
"I'm sorry," I said. I meant the piano. I meant her brother. I meant showing up at her door and bleeding on her floor and making her touch me.
I left money on the counter. More than enough.
She threw it in the trash after I left. I watched from across the street, smoking, until she turned out the lights.
She didn't wash the key.
I came back the next night. I told myself it was to check the stitches.
It wasn't.