Vittoria came three days later.

She didn't bring the driver. She took a car service, alone, and walked up the curved driveway in her black wool coat with her back as straight as ever.

Rico met her in the foyer. Clara stood at the top of the stairs, holding Leo's hand, ready to take him away if she needed to.

Mother and son looked at each other for a long time.

"You went to the police," Vittoria said.

"Yes."

"Your uncles are calling it betrayal. They say you've broken fifty years of silence. They say you're finished."

"They're right," Rico said. "I am finished. I'm selling the trucking company. The warehouses. The construction firm. Ruiz has the books. Anything that's clean, I keep. Anything that isn't, I'm walking away from."

Vittoria's mouth tightened.

"Your father built all of it."

"And it killed my wife." Rico didn't raise his voice. "Mama, it killed her. Nico sold her for four hundred thousand dollars, and the people he sold her to were men we've shaken hands with at weddings. That's what Papa built."

Vittoria said nothing.

Then she looked up the staircase. At Leo.

Leo looked back at her. He was holding the stuffed rabbit from the room below; he hadn't let go of it in three days.

"Nonna," he said.

Vittoria's face broke.

It happened all at once, the way ice cracks on a pond. The straight back curved. The perfect chignon tilted forward. She pressed a gloved hand over her mouth, and her shoulders began to shake.

"Mio Dio," she whispered. "Elena. Elena. I let him sit at my table. I fed him with my own hands."

Rico crossed the foyer and put his arms around his mother.

Clara led Leo down the stairs slowly. She stopped a few feet away.

Vittoria lifted her head. Her eyes were red. She looked at Leo, then—for the first time without any coldness at all—at Clara.

"Your father," she said to Rico, "would have killed Niccolò in that hallway."

"I know."

"And then the Carusos would have killed you. And then someone would have killed them." She drew a ragged breath. "I buried a husband, Ricardo. I buried a brother. I buried my daughter-in-law. I don't want to bury anyone else."

She crouched down—stiffly, with Rico's hand at her elbow—until she was level with her grandson.

She didn't reach for him.

"Leonardo," she said. "May Nonna have a hug?"

Leo looked up at Clara.

Clara smiled.

Leo walked into his grandmother's arms.

---

The news broke on a Thursday.

MORETTI COUSIN CHARGED IN MURDER OF ELENA MORETTI, the Daily News announced. The Post went with FAMILY BUSINESS, over a grainy photograph of Nico being led out of a precinct in Bay Ridge with his jacket pulled over his wrists.

Tommy Caruso was arrested two days later at his social club on Eighteenth Avenue. Sal Greco had already started talking. So had the shop owner in Canarsie.

The house in Dyker Heights became a strange island of calm in the middle of it all. Reporters camped outside the gate for a week. Rico didn't speak to them. When one shouted a question at Rosa as she came back from the market, she stopped, looked him up and down, and said something in Neapolitan so withering that he lowered his camera and didn't come back.

Dante came home from the hospital with fourteen stitches and a cane he refused to use.

"Boss," he said on his first morning back, standing in the kitchen doorway. "I heard about the business. The selling."

"You've got a job as long as you want one," Rico said. "But it's going to be a different job."

"Different how?"

Rico glanced at Leo, who was sitting on the counter eating cereal out of the box and supervising Rosa's tomato Nextce.

"Mostly driving a four-year-old to preschool," he said. "And doing a lot of crouching."

Dante looked at Leo. Leo looked at Dante. Then Leo held out the cereal box.

Dante took one piece, very solemnly, and ate it.

"I can live with that," he said.

---

They went to the cemetery that Sunday.

It was cold and bright, the trees bare, the grass silvered with frost. Elena's grave was near an old oak tree. The headstone was simple white marble.

ELENA MARIA MORETTI

BELOVED WIFE. BELOVED MOTHER.

Il vero amore non finisce mai.

Leo stood in front of it, holding his father's hand on one side and Clara's on the other.

"Mommy's here?" he asked.

"Part of her," Rico said. "The part that's still with us is somewhere else."

"Where?"

Rico thought about it. "In the cinnamon," he said finally. "In the song. In the room she made for you."

Leo considered this with great seriousness.

Then he let go of both their hands, stepped forward, and laid the drawing he had made that morning against the white stone. It showed a house, a garden, a fountain, and four stick figures holding hands: a big one, a medium one with a ponytail, a small one, and a very old one with a round circle of white hair.

Above them all, in yellow crayon, he had drawn an enormous sun.

"Mommy," he said to the stone. "This is my family."

Rico's hand found Clara's.

He didn't let go for the rest of the afternoon.

---