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And I keep packing.

I wipe my face, open the car app, and book a ride for five in the morning to Port Authority. From there, a bus. From there, anywhere.

We’ll leave before daylight. The way I did it the first time. The only way I’ve ever known how.

CHAPTER 27

ENZO

At one-fourteen in the morning, in the back of a car on the Pulaski Skyway, my phone tells me that Stevie Callahan has booked a ride to Port Authority for five a.m.

I read it twice. Then I tell Carmine to turn the car around.

I’m not proud of how I know. The phone in her pocket has reported to mine since the first night she slept in my house. I told myself it was security, and it was. It was also the only way I could sleep.

I climb the stairs to her room. The door is ajar and the light is on, and there’s a suitcase open on the bed.

I see it all in one still moment. Matthew’s clothes are there, folded beside his dinosaur book. I see documents, a bank envelope thick with cash.

For a moment, I don’t say anything. I can’t. The whole world has gone very quiet and very cold.

Because I understand what I’m looking at. She’s leaving. She’s taking my son and she’s going to vanish into this city the way she vanished five years ago, and this time I’ll know exactly what I lost, which is so much worse.

Stevie walks out of the bathroom with a stack of Matthew’s shirts and stops dead when she sees me. “Enzo.”

“You’re running.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s come out flat and arctic, the voice I use right before something terrible happens, and I watch her hear it. “You’re taking him and running. Again.”

“You weren’t supposed to be home.”

“Clearly.”

“How are you even here?” Her eyes go to the door, to the hall. “Marta promised me…”

“Marta didn’t tell me anything.” I hold up my phone, the booking confirmation glowing on the screen. “You did.”

She stares at it. I watch her understand, and I watch the color leave her face.

“You’re in my phone.”

“I know where it is. I know what it does. Since the day I gave it to you.”

“Since the first day?” Her voice drops to something I’ve never heard from her, low and shaking. “You put a leash on me and called it a phone.”

I don’t deny it. There’s nothing to deny.

I step into the room. She tenses, which makes me sick to my stomach, because I’ve earned her acting this way with my behavior.

“And the folder in your desk,” she says. “The photographs. Matthew in the laundromat window. Eight months, Enzo.”

So she found that, too. I left the key in the drawer. I have never in my life left a key in anything.

“Yes,” I say.

“Eight months of his face in your desk,” she says, “and you never once did the math?”

“I did it every night,” I say. “And every night, I stopped before the end. Because once I knew, I could never have let you go.”

Then I reach behind me without looking and turn the lock on her door. The click is very small. She hears it anyway.