Rafe Corvino took my brother's knife out of my hand at his own front door, and I let him. My fingers simply opened. Nico had drilled me for a year on never doing that.
He had said nothing about it for eleven miles, though I had held it against his ribs the whole way. Why hadn't I fought?
The car stopped at the end of a gravel drive. The house stood on a cliff over the south harbor, gray stone and too much glass, and the wind came off the water hard enough to hum in the windows. Gull Point. A woman who would live there nine days did not need to love it.
Then Rafe held the knife out to me, handle first.
"You're giving it back."
"Should I keep it?"
"You took it."
"You had it against my ribs for eleven miles." His gray eyes didn't change. "I wanted to see if you'd ask for it."
I took it. The bone handle was warm from his coat. I hated that I noticed.
"You have the run of the house," he said. "Kitchen, library, the terrace if you like wind. One door stays locked. The study, at the end of the upstairs hall."
"What's in it?"
"Do you want me to say?"
He went inside ahead of me and did not look back to see if I followed.
The guest room had a bed made so tight it looked punished. Uncle Aldo's cardboard box was already on the chair, delivered while I was still standing in the cemetery wind. I took out Nico's watch and put it on. It slid to my elbow.
I called my father before I could talk myself out of it.
"Livia." He sounded like a man sitting down. "Are you hurt?"
"Why did you warn him, Papa? About the knife. You called the man who killed Nico and told him I was coming."
"Because I know my daughter." Slow, heavy, kind. "A knife in that man's house gets you killed, my girl. And I need you breathing at that altar."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the only one tonight." A pause, and I heard him touch his own face, the way he did when he wanted me to hear him do it. "You want to hurt him. Good. Be useful about it. Be my eyes in that house. Get me his shipping schedule."
I stood very still. My father had never once asked me for a thing that touched the other side of the books.
"Why?"
"So I know what this peace is costing us."
I thought of Nico's voicemail. Fourteen seconds. I'm fixing it tonight. Then I thought of the man at the grave who had said, I was there when he died, and had offered nothing else.
"Yes," I said. "Fine. Yes."
Serafina Dorado was seventy and had cooked in that house for forty years. She put a bowl in front of me without asking, and a heel of bread still hot enough to burn my fingers.
"Eat. Then hate him." She sat across from me with her arms folded. "You'll do it better full."
I ate. It was the best soup I had ever been angry at.
"What do you do, when you're not being traded?" she said.
"I keep the family books." I tore the bread. "Half the Ferro accounts have my name as signatory. Papa liked a clean signature."
Serafina looked at me a moment longer than the sentence needed. "Clean," she said, and took my empty bowl to the sink.
At 2:14 in the morning the house had gone quiet except for the wind on the glass. I checked the time on my phone. Then I checked it against Nico's watch, because I couldn't stop myself, and the watch said 2:17, the same as it had said for six days.
Three minutes ahead of me. It would stay there now. He'd never once cared about time.
I went barefoot down the upstairs hall with a hairpin from my coat. Nico taught me this at twelve, kneeling beside me at the back door of Alder Street, his hand over mine. Little tension, Liv. Listen for it. Don't push.
The lock gave in under a minute.
The study held a desk, a lamp, a window full of black harbor. And on the blotter, squared to the edge as if he had left it for me, a stack of papers headed Corvino Maritime, Q4 Sailing and Berth Schedule.
I should have been cleverer than that. I should have asked why it was so easy. Instead I turned on the lamp and photographed every page, because I photograph everything, because numbers on a screen are the only way I know to hold a thing. Fourteen pages. Vessels, dates, berths, the names of two captains.
I sent them to my father in one message. The little bar crawled across, then finished.
Delivered.
I stood there with my hands shaking and waited to feel like a person who had done something to Rafe Corvino. What I felt was the hairpin, still pinched between two fingers.
When I put the lamp off, my knee bumped the desk, and a bottom drawer slid out a hand's width. Something glass flashed in it.
I should have shut it. I knelt and opened it wider.
A framed photograph lay face up under a folded sail bag, as if someone had meant to hide it and couldn't bring himself to bin it. A small white sailboat, the name Gull painted on the stern. Two boys in the cockpit with their arms around each other's necks, laughing so hard their eyes were closed.
The older one was Rafe at nineteen. I knew the jaw.
The younger one had my brother's crooked front tooth. He was fifteen, and sunburned, and happy in a way I had not seen on him since our mother died.
Nico had never told me he knew Rafe Corvino. Not once. Not at dinner, not in the fight, not in fourteen seconds of voicemail.
My hands had stopped shaking. I noticed that, too.
I turned the frame over. On the back, in Nico's handwriting, the slanted capitals he used on birthday cards: "R. Next summer I win. N."