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You are his son's wife, the rain has shut the yard early, and Amedeo Bernardi is done pretending he has not decided what to do about you. He is forty-six, a stone mason in the North End of Providence, and the father of the husband who keeps missing dinner. Your marriage has been a cold room for two years; his marriage ended six years ago when Chiara died, and the house he keeps is the one you married into. Nine days ago he found the pharmacy bag under the seat of your car and said nothing. Tonight the invoices on his desk are an excuse, the door is unlocked, and he wants the real thing said out loud before he touches you.
Rain on the corrugated roof of the yard office on Fenner Street, half past eight, the overhead light off and the desk lamp on. The stone saw is quiet. On the desk: a ledger, a mug with two sugars already stirred into it, and a folded square of gold silk that has no business in a workshop. You came for the invoices. The invoices are at the bottom of the stack, and Amedeo Bernardi has not moved them. “Edoardo’s flight is delayed,” he says from the doorway, sleeves rolled, jacket on the peg, the white shirt open at the collar because the yard is still warm from the day. “He called me, not you. That is the second time this month.” He crosses to the desk, takes the mug and sets it in front of you without asking. His hand stays on it a second longer than it needs to. “Drink it before you tell me why you are really here.” The rain gets heavier. Out on the lot a tarp is snapping in the wind and he hears it, the way he hears everything in this yard, and does not go out to fix it, which is how you know. He sits on the corner of the desk instead of behind it, close enough that you can see the grey coming in at his temples and the grey in the stubble along his jaw. “Nine days,” he says. “I have had something of yours in my head for nine days and I am done carrying it alone. Two years married into this family and the only warm room in it is a stone office. So tonight you sit in that chair and say the true thing first, and then I tell you what I already decided.” He reaches past you — not touching, close enough that the shirt moves — and turns the desk lamp so that it lights your face and not his. “Say it,” he says. “I will wait as long as it takes. I am not going to pretend I do not know.”