The November wind came off the St.
Lawrence River cold enough to make her eyes sting, but Riona Mallister had stopped noticing weather as a luxury years ago. She stood at the top of the steps outside Saint Patrick's Basilica in Old Montreal, her son's hand wrapped around two of her fingers, and she understood with the kind of clarity that only arrives after you have survived something for a very long time that coming back had been a mistake.
She had not told herself it would be easy. She had told herself she was past the point of caring whether it was easy. Those were two very different things, and she had spent most of the flight from Vancouver conflating them.
"Mama? Is that a church?"
"Basilica."
Anel considered this. "What's the difference?"
"It's bigger."
He accepted the answer and looked at the limestone facade with the focused interest of a child cataloging a new thing. He had her dark hair and her tendency to go quiet around large spaces, absorbing them before deciding what to do with them. His eyes were gray-green—a particular shade she had spent seven years not thinking about the origin of.
She straightened the lapel of his small black coat. "Ready?"
"Is it sad in there?"
"Some of it."
"Okay." He said it like he was preparing himself. Like he had learned already that some rooms required a specific kind of attention.
They went up the steps together.
The interior smelled of beeswax candles and cut lilies going soft at the edges. The pews were filling with people who moved the way people move at high-stakes funerals—with precision, with intention, measuring their proximity to certain other people down to the inch. Riona had learned to read rooms like this. Eight years of living under a different name in a city three thousand kilometers away will do that.
She chose a seat near the back, left side, close to the secondary exit. She had been choosing exits since before Anel could walk.
Cosmo Ferrante, patriarch of the Ferrante family, had died at eighty-three after a decade of slow decline. He had been a man Riona had always struggled to categorize. He had run an organization that did things she would never be able to reconcile with her sense of how the world should work. But he had also, on a Tuesday afternoon when she had come in early and found him alone in the kitchen of the family estate, looked at her across a cup of espresso and said with the tired precision of a man who had watched many people come and go: You see things other people look past. Hold on to that. In this family, that kind of seeing will either protect you or destroy you, depending on who finds out about it first.
She had thought about those words more in the last eight years than almost anything else he had ever said.
The service began. She watched the entrances. She recognized faces—associates she had met during the two years she and Aldrich had been together, people from the three families whose alliances had defined Montreal's organized crime landscape for forty years. The Bertilini contingent from Toronto near the front right. The Omont family near the far windows, maintaining the specific distance of people who are present without being accessible. Two men near the rear columns who were not grieving but watching, conducting an assessment.
And then Aldrich Ferrante walked through the main doors, and Riona felt every breath she had been taking leave her body at once.
He was forty-two now. His hair was darker than she remembered—or shorter, she couldn't decide which—and there was gray along his jaw that hadn't been there before. He moved with the same particular quality she had forgotten: the way a room seemed to register him before anyone consciously chose to look. He was looking at the casket at the front of the basilica, his face arranged into the careful stillness of a man doing significant internal work.
Two men walked with him. Four more followed.
She pressed her hand flat against her thigh and concentrated on Anel's small shoulder against her arm.
She had loved Aldrich with the complete, slightly reckless certainty of a twenty-six-year-old who had never understood what it was to have someone see her clearly and choose her anyway. She had loved him through the complexity of what he was. She had been willing to stay.
And then Roland Vain had put a folder on a desk and spoken, and Aldrich had believed what was inside it in the time it took her to draw one breath and open her mouth to speak. She had counted. She remembered every second of that room.
The service finished. The pallbearers carried the casket down the center aisle. The congregation rose and moved toward the exits, murmuring.
"Careful." Riona reached for Anel's hand.
"Was that the man who died?"
"Yes."
"Did you know him?"
"A little. A long time ago."
Anel considered this with the solemnity of a child applying genuine thought. "Was he nice?"
May you like
"He was trying."
The truth of it caught her somewhere she hadn't expected. She navigated them toward the side exit, head slightly down, reading the room through peripheral vision. She was eight feet from the door when the crowd shifted. Someone stopped ahead. A ripple effect of stalled movement. She sidestepped sharply right to avoid a collision and walked directly into Aldrich Ferrante's path.
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