Her entire life is a circle. A very, very small circle.
Yesterday I drove to Chestnut Hill and sat in a rental car across the street from the Marinos' house for four hours. Paul and Linda Marino. The planted family. The house is a two-story colonial on a quiet street with a lawn that's maintained by a service. A driveway with a Buick and a Toyota and a motion-sensor light above the garage. The kind of house that looks like every other house on the block, which is the point. Normal. Unremarkable. A place you'd drive past a thousand times and never look at twice.
Paul Marino came out at ten to get the mail. He's fifty-four, thick in the middle, gray at the temples. He sorted the envelopes on the porch and went back inside. Linda Marino left at noon in the Toyota and drove to a grocery store and came back with four bags. I watched them through windows for two hours after that. They ate lunch. They watched television. Paul made a phone call that lasted nine minutes. I couldn't hear it from the car, but I clocked the duration and the fact that he walked to the back of the house, away from the windows, to make it. That's a call you don't want overheard.
That's a check-in.
They're not a family. They're an installation. Two people placed in a house with a script and a salary and a bottle of pills. Every month they call a number and confirm that the asset is still inPhiladelphia, still medicated and still doesn't remember the first eight years of her life. They've been doing this for eleven years.
Like clockwork.
I'm going to kill them. Not today. Not this week. But I'm going to walk into that house and I'm going to use this knife and when I'm done, Grace will run out of pills and start to remember, and the people who installed the Marinos will notice when the check-ins stop, and everything that happens after that will be my responsibility.
I know this. I've known it since I found her in the records five months ago. I've had time to consider the cost and the timeline and the operational risk and I've considered all of it and none of it has slowed me down.
As every night before, I stand at the window for three hours and watch Grace work. She serves lunch and handles a difficult table, a man who sends back his food twice, and her face stays pleasant as she nods and listens to him. The man behind the bar, the friend, watches her handle it and I can see from here that he's ready to step in, his weight on his front foot, his hands on the bar edge. He doesn't have to. Grace manages it herself, and the man who sent his food back twice ends up tipping her well because she never let him feel difficult. She just kept bringing plates until one was right.
I think about that. The patience of it. The competence. This is a woman who was trafficked for five years and drugged for eleven and she handles a rude customer with the kind of practicedcalm that most people never develop. She doesn't know where that calm comes from. She thinks she's just good at her job. She doesn't know that the thing that makes her good at her job—the ability to stay present and functional while someone is making her uncomfortable—is a survival skill she learned in a room she can't remember.
The knife is in my hand. I clean my thumbnail. The edge catches and I work it free and the thin curl drops to the windowsill next to the one from last night.
I'm collecting them. I don't know why.
Leone picks up on the second ring.
"Delvecchio," I say.
"Handled?"
"Forty now. Rest by the thirtieth."
"Good."
That's the end of the Delvecchio conversation. Leone doesn't ask how I got the forty or what condition Delvecchio is in or whether the mechanic in the shop is going to be a problem. Leone asks if it's handled and I tell him it's handled, and we move on becausethat's how we've always worked. He trusts the result. I deliver the result. The details between are mine.
"The girl," Leone asks because he wants to make sure I’m okay and not getting too caught up like I do sometimes.
"Confirmed. Same schedule every day. Apartment is above the restaurant, third floor. She walks to work, works the shift, walks home. The friend behind the bar walks her back after closing."
"The family?"
"Chestnut Hill. Routine check-ins by phone. They're not surveilling her directly. The pills do the work and they file reports. I don't have the reporting cadence yet."
Leone is quiet for a moment. I can hear the compound behind him… someone talking in the next room, a door closing. He's in his office. I can see it without trying, the desk where Aurelio used to sit, the chair Leone inherited along with everything else his father left behind. That room. I don't miss it. I don't miss much, but I know the sound of it. I'll always know the sound of it.
"What do you need?" Leone asks.
"Time."
"You said that last week."
"I need more of it."
Another pause. Leone is not a man who fills silence with words, which is one of the reasons we understand each other. He's thinking. He's deciding whether to ask the question he wants to ask, which is the same question Danila asked two nights ago and the same question I don't have an answer for:why I'm here. Why I spent five months tracking a missing girl through sealed records and coded databases. Why I left the compound and came to a city where I have nothing except a shit apartment and a knife and a bag of his money under the bed.
He doesn't ask. He asks something else.
"What's Danila telling you about his people?"