He clenched his jaw against the pain shooting through his abdomen.
“I need to leave.”
“You need to lie down.”
“My people are looking for me.”
“Then let them keep looking.”
She marched him back to the bed like he was a misbehaving teenager instead of one of the most feared men in Boston.
From the doorway, Lily watched with a look of mild approval, as if this outcome seemed correct.
That was how the days began to pass.
Rosa left before dawn each morning to clean houses in neighborhoods rich enough to pretend South Boston was a myth. She scrubbed other people’s marble kitchens while her own joints swelled in the cold. Lily went to school in a coat that was too short in the sleeves and shoes she had learned to walk carefully in so the cracked soles would last one more month.
Dominic lay in the little room and watched their life happen around him.
He watched Lily come home at three-thirty, dump her backpack by the table, and do her homework without being told. He watched Rosa come in after dark with grocery bags cutting red lines into her fingers and still somehow find the energy to cook. He watched the rituals of a poor house made rich by care: the folded blankets, the polished old table, the dish towel always hung straight, the quiet reverence with which they stretched every dollar until it seemed almost holy.
Nothing in his world had ever looked like this.
Nothing in his world had ever been this small and this full at the same time.
On the second afternoon, Lily put something beside him on the blanket before heading to the kitchen.
He looked down.
