What He Is Owed

The first thing Cecilia noticed was that Dominic Moretti had chosen the pallbearers.

Her father had three living brothers, eleven nephews and enough lifelong friends to fill every pew in Saint Nicholas of Tolentine. None of them carried his coffin. Six men in black suits lifted him instead, moving with the solemn precision of people who had been given instructions and understood the cost of getting them wrong.

Dominic walked behind them.

He did not look at Cecilia as the coffin passed. That took effort. She knew because everyone else did.

The September heat had settled inside the church before the funeral began, bringing with it the smells of candle wax, lilies and too many bodies pressed close together. Cecilia stood beside her older brother, Anthony, with a damp handkerchief twisted between her fingers. She had been back in Philadelphia for less than forty-eight hours and already the neighborhood had reminded her why she had left.

Here, grief belonged to everyone.

Women she had not seen in seven years kissed both of her cheeks and told her she had gotten thin. Men who had once shouted at her for riding her bicycle in the street touched the top of her head as though she were still twelve. Everyone had a story about Frank Russo. Everyone knew exactly when they had last seen him alive. No one could explain why a healthy sixty-one-year-old man had collapsed alone in the back room of the Via Roma Social Club at two in the morning.

The doctor had called it a heart attack.

Dominic had called it unfortunate.

Cecilia had heard the difference.

Father D’Angelo began the final prayer. Anthony bowed his head, but Cecilia kept hers raised. Across the aisle, Dominic stood with one hand resting over the other at his waist. He had always been still in a way that made everyone around him seem nervous. At thirty-eight, he had none of the softness men in the neighborhood usually acquired by that age. His charcoal suit fit too well, his face had grown leaner and a trace of silver marked the dark hair above his ears.

He looked like time had sharpened him.

As if he felt her watching, Dominic lifted his eyes.

For seven years, Cecilia had remembered them incorrectly. She had made them darker in her mind and stripped away the amber that appeared when light caught them. She had forgotten the small line beside his mouth and the slight bend in his nose from a break he had never explained. She had also forgotten what happened to her breathing when his attention settled fully on her.

Dominic held her gaze through the end of the prayer.

At eighteen, she had kissed him in the narrow passage behind her father’s house while fireworks burst over the stadiums. She had spent weeks planning it and years pretending she had not. Dominic had gripped her shoulders, set her away from him and said only one thing.

“You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

The next morning, he left Philadelphia for six months. By the time he returned, Cecilia had gone to college in Boston.

She had not seen him since.

Outside the church, sunlight struck the white marble steps so fiercely that Cecilia had to close her eyes. The pallbearers guided the coffin toward the waiting hearse. Cars lined both sides of Ninth Street, some parked half on the sidewalk, and people watched from open windows above the bakery across the street.

Anthony took her elbow. “You all right?”

“No.”

“Stupid question.”

“A little.”

Her brother looked older than thirty-three. He had their father’s heavy eyebrows and the same habit of checking the street while he talked, as if conversation should never interfere with knowing who was nearby. He had barely slept since calling Cecilia in Boston to tell her their father was dead.

Dominic came down the steps toward them. People moved without appearing to move, leaving a clear path between him and the Russo family.

He embraced Anthony first. The two men held each other with a familiarity that made Cecilia feel briefly like an intruder. Dominic had been Anthony’s closest friend since they were boys. He had eaten Sunday dinner at their table, spent Christmas mornings in their living room and helped carry Anthony home after a motorcycle accident when they were nineteen. Somewhere along the way, he had become the man her brother would follow without asking where they were going.

Then Dominic turned to her.

“Cecilia.”

Her name sounded different in his voice. It always had.

“I’m sorry about your father.”

“Are you?”

Anthony’s hand tightened on her arm. Dominic’s expression did not change, but something alert moved behind his eyes.

“Cece,” Anthony warned.

“I came home and found out Dominic arranged the funeral, chose the pallbearers and paid for a burial plot my father already owned. I think I’m allowed to wonder why.”

“Not here.”

Dominic kept his attention on Cecilia. “Your father left instructions. I followed them.”

“He left instructions with you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The corner of his mouth shifted, although there was no humor in it. “That is not a conversation to have on church steps.”

It was the same voice he had used when she was younger and doing something he considered foolish. Quiet, measured and infuriatingly certain that she would eventually obey him. Back then, he had been her brother’s handsome friend, the one man in the neighborhood who never flirted with her. She had mistaken his refusal to look for indifference.

Now she was no longer sure.

Dominic reached toward her face. Cecilia went rigid, but he only brushed a pale thread from the shoulder of her black dress. His knuckles grazed the bare skin near her collarbone, so lightly she might have imagined it.

“You should get into the car,” he said. “The heat is making you pale.”

“The heat isn’t the problem.”

“No,” Dominic said. “It rarely is.”

He walked away before she could answer.

The gathering after the burial filled the Russo rowhouse from the kitchen to the front steps. Trays of baked ziti covered every flat surface. Someone opened the windows, but the air did not move. Children Cecilia could not identify ran through the upstairs hall while their mothers shouted warnings from below, and three elderly women settled at the dining room table to discuss whether grief had made Cecilia rude or whether Boston was responsible.

She escaped upstairs with a glass of water and found the door to her father’s bedroom open.

It had been closed when she left for the funeral.

Cecilia stopped in the hallway. The noise from downstairs continued, silverware striking plates, a burst of laughter followed by immediate guilty silence. Nothing in the bedroom appeared disturbed. Her father’s brown shoes waited beneath the chair. His rosary lay on the nightstand beside a water glass and the mystery novel he had been reading.

Still, the room felt wrong.

She stepped inside and saw the scratches around the lock on his desk.

The rolltop had been forced open. Papers filled the pigeonholes, but the shallow drawer where he kept his bank statements hung empty. Cecilia pulled it farther, then checked the larger drawer beneath it. The green metal cashbox that had been there the night before was gone.

“Anthony?” she called.

No one answered. She went to the doorway, but a man had appeared at the end of the hall.

He was not a relative. Cecilia had seen him at the cemetery standing several rows behind Dominic. Mid-forties, perhaps, with thinning blond hair and a suit too heavy for the weather. His eyes moved from her to the open desk.

“Looking for something?” Cecilia asked.

He smiled as if she had made a joke. “Bathroom.”

“Other end of the hall.”

The man did not move. “Sorry about your old man.”

“Who are you?”

His smile widened. “Ask Moretti.”

He turned toward the stairs just as Dominic came up them.

The change in the hallway was immediate. Dominic did not raise his voice or reach inside his jacket. He merely looked at the man, and the stranger’s smile vanished.

“Downstairs, Paulie,” Dominic said.

Paulie glanced back at Cecilia. “I was only paying my respects.”

“You paid them.”

The two men passed each other without touching. Cecilia heard Paulie’s steps descend, followed seconds later by the opening and closing of the front door.

Dominic entered the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Close me into a room with you.”

His gaze rested on her face. “You used to invent reasons for exactly that.”

Heat climbed her throat. “I was eighteen.”

“I remember.”

The answer came too quickly. Dominic crossed to the desk and examined the damaged lock. He ran one finger over the splintered wood, then opened each drawer without asking permission.

“What was in the cashbox?”

“How do you know there was one?”

“Your father kept it there for twenty years.”

“Money. The deed to the house. Insurance papers.” Cecilia hesitated. “Maybe other things. He didn’t let us go through it.”

“Did you touch anything?”

“This is my father’s room. I can touch whatever I want.”

Dominic looked at her hand on the desktop. “That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Who is Paulie?”

“Paul Caruso.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“Good.”

“He told me to ask you.”

“Paulie enjoys believing he knows more than other people. It compensates for how often he doesn’t.” Dominic drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the brass handle she had touched. “Go pack a bag.”

Cecilia stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“Enough for several nights.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Someone entered this room during your father’s funeral. He did it while the house was full because he knew no one would notice him come upstairs. That tells me he has been inside before, and it tells me he was not afraid of being recognized.”

“Then call the police.”

Dominic’s eyes met hers.

It was not mockery she saw there. It was something worse: patience.

“Your brother will stay with me,” he said. “So will you.”

“I have a hotel.”

“Not anymore.”

“What did you do?”

“I checked you out.”

For a moment, Cecilia could not make sense of the words. “You went into my hotel room?”

“No. Maria packed your things.”

Maria had kept house for Dominic’s mother for as long as Cecilia could remember. That did not make the violation feel smaller. It made it feel planned.

“You had my belongings removed before this happened.”

“Before you discovered it.”

The correction landed between them.

Cecilia took a step back. Dominic had known someone entered the house. He had known before she found the desk, perhaps before they left for the funeral. He had stood on the church steps and touched her as if nothing were wrong. All the while, her suitcase had already been carried into whatever room he had chosen for her.

“How long have you known my father was in trouble?” she asked.

Dominic folded the handkerchief so the side that had touched the desk disappeared inside. “Long enough.”

“Was his death really a heart attack?”

Something hardened in his face, and Cecilia understood that she had finally asked the right question.

“Pack what you need from here,” he said.

“I’m not going with you.”

Dominic crossed the small room. He stopped close enough that she could smell starch, tobacco and the faint trace of the incense burned at the funeral. He did not touch her. He did not need to. His presence filled the space between Cecilia and the door until it seemed less like a man standing in front of her than a lock quietly turning.

“Your father asked me to keep you safe if anything happened to him,” he said.

“My father is dead.”

“I know.” Dominic’s voice softened. “That is why you are coming home with me.”