Leo stopped eating on the first day.

He stopped talking on the second.

By the third, he had stopped sleeping more than an hour at a time, and Rosa had begun leaving the kitchen with her apron pressed against her mouth so he wouldn't hear her cry.

Rico sat outside his son's door every night.

At two o'clock, Leo cried out. At two o'clock, Rico sat with his back against the wall and listened and didn't go in, because the last time he had gone in, Leo had screamed at him until his voice gave out.

Clara. Clara. Clara.

His mother called on the third day.

"I hear the waitress is gone," Vittoria said. There was no triumph in her voice. That surprised him.

"She's gone."

"And the boy?"

Rico closed his eyes. "He won't eat, Mama. He won't talk. He sits in the corner of his room and holds that jar of Elena's cinnamon and stares at the door."

There was a long silence on the line.

"What did she do?" Vittoria asked finally. "To make you send her away?"

Rico didn't answer.

"Ricardo."

"She asked me a question," he said. "About Nico."

The silence this time was different. Heavier. He heard his mother breathe in, slowly, the way she did when she was deciding whether to say something she couldn't take back.

"Your cousin borrowed money from me in August," she said at last. "Fifty thousand. He said it was for a restaurant. He has never opened a restaurant." Another pause. "He has borrowed from me before. He has never been so frightened when he asked."

Rico gripped the phone.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because your son is not eating," Vittoria said quietly, "and I am an old woman, and I have buried enough of this family." And she hung up.

On the fourth night, Rico went downstairs and made warm milk.

He did it the way she had shown him. Small Nextcepan. Low heat. Test it on the wrist. He opened the jar marked Cannella in his dead wife's handwriting—Rosa had found it under the hall table, one corner of the lid dented—and stirred in a pinch.

He carried it upstairs.

He opened the door.

Leo was sitting in the dark on the floor of his room, in the corner between the bookcase and the wall, knees pulled up to his chin. He looked at his father.

He didn't scream.

He just looked, with eyes that were too old for his face.

Rico crossed the room slowly. He knelt on the rug, a few feet away, the way Clara had in the restaurant. He set the glass on the floor between them.

"It's warm," he said. "With the brown sprinkles."

Leo looked at the glass.

He didn't move.

Rico sat down on the rug. He breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

After a long time, Leo crawled out of the corner. He didn't go to the milk. He went to the little table beneath the window, where his crayons were, and pulled a piece of paper from the pile.

He brought it to his father.

It was the same drawing. Or nearly. Leo must have made it again, sometime in the last four days, when nobody was watching. Two cars. A red one. A stick figure with long dark hair beside it.

This time, the stick figure was holding something long and black.

Leo put his finger on the red car.

"Uncle Nico," he said. His voice was hoarse from days of silence. "Bad car. By Mommy."

Rico stared at the paper.

"Uncle Nico said shh," Leo whispered. "Or Daddy go away too."

He looked up at his father, small and trembling.

"I don't want you go away."

Rico Moretti, who had not cried at his wife's funeral, who had not cried when the police told him there would be no arrests, who had not cried in front of another human being since he was nine years old, put his face in his hands.

Leo watched him.

Then, very carefully, he picked up the glass of milk with both hands and held it out.

"Daddy," he said. "Warm."

---

At six in the morning, Rico called Dante into the study and closed the door.

"Nico's red Alfa," he said. "Who bought it?"

Dante blinked. "Boss?"

"Find out. Quietly. And I want to know who Nico owes money to. All of it. Every bookie, every card game, every loan."

Dante was silent for a moment. Then he said, carefully, "Boss, I already know some of it."

Rico looked up.

"Nico's in deep with Tommy Caruso. Has been for a year, maybe more." Dante shifted his weight. "I heard rumors. Before Mrs. Moretti. I didn't say anything because—because he's family. I figured you knew."

Rico said nothing for a long time.

"Find the car," he said finally. "Find who sold it, who bought it, if it's been repainted. And Dante—"

"Yeah, boss?"

"Nobody hears about this. Not my mother. Not my uncles. Nobody."

Dante nodded and left.

Rico sat alone in the study as the sun came up over Dyker Heights. On the desk in front of him lay two drawings—one from six weeks ago, one from last night. Two red cars. One small boy who had carried a secret too heavy for his body because a man he trusted had told him his father would disappear.

He picked up the first drawing. Beneath it, on the desk, he saw the faint impression of Clara's fingerprints in the dust.

Just look, she had said.

He had looked. And he could not unsee it.

---