My bitter laugh bounced off the green tiles as I hung up. I had to be a big girl and leave the building without Antonio.
After washing my hands, I looked down and did what I always did since the night Antonio and I met. I checked my shoes. A little square of toilet paper was stuck to my right heel, still white and flat, hanging on for dear life, hoping for rescue from the trash.
Come on, Theresa.
I picked it off. I should have thrown it away. But it reminded me of meeting Antonio, of those months and years before, when I felt incomplete, and how that had changed with him. I knew a piece of paper couldn’t bring that back. Only I could. But I couldn’t toss it without tossing the feeling away, so I put it in my pocket.
I took a deep breath and went into the hall. It was full of cops and lawyers, little metal carts with file boxes stacked high. Linoleum floors scuffed in the middle and shiny where they met the walls. I knew this place. I’d met Daniel here a hundred times, back when the doors didn’t mean a thing to me. Nothing behind them had been of interest.
“Daniel!” I said when I saw him opening one of the nondescript doors.
“Can you go to the waiting room?” he asked.
“No. I need to see Antonio, then I have to go to Jonathan. Then after that, you and I are going to talk about what happened at the Gate Club.”
“You don’t call the shots, Theresa.” He said it without reproach or vindictiveness. A man with toes everyone seemed to step on regularly, he said it so gently, I wondered if he was trying to ease me into a new reality.
“Phrase everything I just said as a question.”
“Mister Spinelli is occupied,” he said.
His insistence irked me, but I didn’t feel in a position to argue further. But I couldn’t just walk without talking to my Capo. If Antonio was occupied, it was probably Daniel who was occupying him, and there was a good chance he was behind the door Daniel was about to enter.
I stepped back. “Fine.”
“Don’t go far, Tinkerbell.”
I turned and walked away slowly. As soon as I heard the door squeak open, I spun on my heel and pushed past Daniel, through the door, and into an empty room with two folding chairs.
It was dark. The only light was from a window looking onto the adjacent interview room. Antonio sat alone at a metal table, in a beat-up wooden chair. If he knew the wall to his left was a two-way mirror, he didn’t show it by moving a muscle.
Daniel closed the door behind him. “You should go.”
“I’m going to bang on the window and shout.”
“No, you’re not. The room is soundproofed and it doesn’t look like a mirror on the other side, first of all, and second of all, you’re leaving.”
He reached for my wrist, but I pulled myself away before he could get a good grip. A door opened, and at first, I thought it was the door to the room I was in, but it wasn’t. It was the door to Antonio’s room.
Daniel muttered, “I didn’t want it to go like this.”
I glanced at him, his shoulders slouched, his eyes closed. I turned back to the interview room. Antonio was standing. In the doorway was a woman about my age and a boy of about ten. She had a cascade of black hair and olive skin. Her lips were full and sexual, and her limbs were lanky and long.
The boy.
Well.
The boy was a young version of the man I loved.
I lost the ability to swallow. Once I saw them, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Antonio. He could be stoic with the world, but he’d always shown his emotions to me. When he saw who entered the room, his face betrayed his heart. His joy was unmistakable as he said something in Italian.
“She heard he was dead and came here.”
Nella. It must be his sister. She was just stunning. A heartbreaking beauty with brown eyes that had seen too much and a quiet confidence that I tried to embody over the feeling of being incomplete.