Page 116 of Deadly Confessions
He sets the coffee in front of me. Sits down.
"His name," I say. My voice is scraped raw. "He said his name was my name. Ferraro."
"Yes."
"He was my father."
I look at the notebook. "He said the answers are in here."
Niccolo looks at it. Looks at me.
"When you're ready," he says.
I'm not ready. Not tonight. Tonight I drink coffee in a penthouse above the Bay of Naples while my father's body is being cleaned from the floor of a church by men who work for the man I love. Tonight I hold a notebook I cannot open and a key that has imprinted its teeth into the flesh of my palm.
We sit in his kitchen until four in the morning. I don't sleep. He doesn't leave.
Three days later we bury Father Domenico next to my parents.
I ask for this. Niccolo arranges it. Conversations with the cemetery, the diocese, whoever handles the documentation of a death that occurred in unusual circumstances inside a church. It happens the way things happen in Niccolo's world. Quietly. Completely. Without visible mechanism.
Three graves in one plot. My mother. The man who raised me as my father. The man who was my father. Three people bound by a single story, connected by what one man decided to do with his grief and jealousy and love, which was real,which the notebook will confirm, which I already know because I saw it in his eyes as he died.
The Ferrante intelligence pipeline is severed. Niccolo tells me this on the second day, not because I asked but because the information belongs to me. Without the confessional source, the Ferrantes are running on stale intelligence. Their war is collapsing. Niccolo will handle the rest.
He is the Don.
I read the notebook alone.
The first time, I can't finish. I get to the third entry, where his handwriting changes, where the letters tighten and the pen presses harder into the paper, and I close it. Set it on the table. Walk to the window. Stand there for an hour looking at the bay.
The second time, I read it cover to cover, standing in Niccolo's kitchen at midnight, unable to sit. The third and fourth times I read it methodically. Taking in what the words actually say rather than what I wanted them to say.
I don't tell Niccolo what I've read. Not yet. The story needs to settle into the correct shape inside me before I can give it to someone else.
Seven days after the church.
I go back on a Tuesday morning. Through the main doors, the way I went in the night I killed him. The nave is quiet. Morning light through the clerestory windows. A few parishioners scattered in the pews. The confessional is closed. A visiting priest from a neighboring parish is handling services until the diocese assigns a replacement.
I sit in the pew where I've sat a hundred times. Second from the back, shifted left. The candle alcove to my left is dark. All four holders empty. The wiring hidden in the stone will never be activated again.
My father’s confession is in my hands. The brown cover worn from my reading.
I look at the spot on the floor in front of the crucifix. The marble is clean. Nothing left to see. Niccolo's people are thorough.
He arrives quietly. The way he does most things. I hear his footsteps on the marble, distinct from the tourists, from the old women with their rosaries. He doesn't ask if the seat istaken. He sits beside me. His arm presses against mine. He waits.
"I need to tell you what's in here," I say.
He turns slightly. Gives me his full attention. The way he gives attention to everything that matters. Wine. Art. The woman beside him in a church pew holding the diary of the man she killed.
I open the notebook. Not to read from it. To hold it open. To have the handwriting visible, the ink on the page, the evidence that this story was real enough to write down.
I begin.
"He was nineteen when he met her."
I tell Niccolo about a young man named Domenico Ferraro who walked into a café in the Quartieri Spagnoli on an afternoon in late spring and saw a woman sitting at a table by the window. She was a few years older than him, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Dark hair that fell past her shoulders. Green eyes that didn't belong in Naples, that looked like they'd been borrowed from a coast further north.
