The Night My Ex Nearly Killed Me in an Alley… The Mafia Boss Took My Nephew and Changed Everything

The first hit drove my shoulder into the wet brick wall so hard my vision went white, and my ex-boyfriend laughed at the sound I made — the quiet, controlled laugh of a man who had always understood that cruelty worked better soft. My seven-year-old nephew Leo was thirty feet away inside Portside Diner, coloring in booth five, waiting for my shift to end. Then headlights flooded the alley, a black car door opened, and the man who stepped out said something I was not prepared for: “That child is why I’m here.”

PART 1

The rain had been going since noon.

By nine-thirty it had settled into the specific kind of steady rain that soaked through leather and ran cold down your collar and turned every alley in Providence into its own small river. I had been on my feet for eleven hours. The backs of my calves were past aching and into the specific numbness that came after the aching gave up, and the hem of my black work dress was wet from where I had walked through a puddle near the service entrance at seven and never had a chance to dry.

Still. Lipstick still on. That was the rule I had made for myself two years ago and kept even when everything else felt like it was unraveling: however bad the day got, the red lipstick stayed.

My sister Sofia had taught me that. She used to say a woman who keeps something small intact keeps herself intact. I had not understood what she meant when she said it. I understood now, because Sofia had been gone for two years and I had been keeping that lipstick on every morning since, sometimes in the bathroom mirror with Leo watching me from the doorway still in his pajamas, asking questions about colors.

He was seven years old and already very interested in why some colors were called brave.

I was wiping the last of the counter down when Marcus appeared at the diner’s side door.

Not appeared — materialized, the way he always materialized, as though he had been standing just outside the edges of your awareness for a while and had decided the moment was right. My ex-boyfriend had a gift for timing that had once seemed romantic and now seemed like what it actually was: a studied skill in when people were most vulnerable.

“I’ve been waiting,” he said.

“I know,” I said. I did not look up from the counter. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t come in here. Don’t talk to Leo. Don’t be in this building.”

Marcus laughed softly, and the softness of it was the part that made my hands stop moving.

“Gia,” he said. “We need to talk about the hearing.”

“My attorney talks to your attorney.”

“Your attorney is a woman who works out of a strip mall in Cranston.”

I set the cloth down.

In booth five, Leo had not looked up. He was doing the thing he did when he was concentrating — tilting his head to the left, pressing the crayon down with the precise seriousness of a child who believed the work mattered. He was coloring a stegosaurus. He was always coloring stegosauruses because Sofia had told him once that they were the most misunderstood dinosaurs and Leo had taken this personally on the stegosaurus’s behalf.

I picked up the cloth again.

“Go home, Marcus.”

“Or what.”

“Or Joseph comes out of the kitchen.”

“I’m not scared of Joseph.”

“Joseph is sixty-two and was a Marine. You should be.”

Marcus’s hand closed around my wrist from behind the counter, and he leaned in close enough that I could smell the whiskey underneath whatever else he had put on to disguise it. His voice went lower, smoother, the register he used when he was done being polite.

“The boy is coming with me tonight, Gianna.”

“He is not your son.”

“He’s nobody’s son anymore. That makes him available.”

That word — available — hit me somewhere that did not have a name yet. I twisted my wrist free and stepped back, and Marcus tracked me around the counter without hurrying because men like him never hurried.

“I want you to hear me clearly,” I said.

“I always hear you.”

“He is not available. He is a child. He is my nephew. He is under guardianship granted by a probate court in Providence County two years ago and if you come near him I will have you arrested so fast the restraining order will catch up to the handcuffs.”

Marcus looked at me with the expression he wore when he had already decided something and was waiting for me to finish the performance.

“That hearing is going to be interesting,” he said. “A waitress raising a kid alone on tips and rotating credit cards. The judge is going to ask some questions.”

“Let him ask.”

“I have answers.”

“You have lies.”

“Gianna.” He stepped closer. “I can make this easy or I can make this exhausting. You can’t afford exhausting.”

That was true and we both knew it.

The hearing was in three weeks. The attorney who worked out of the Cranston strip mall — Diane Marsh, who was actually excellent and cost me half my tips every month — had told me the case was strong but the other side had resources. Marcus had resources because Marcus had spent four years introducing me to the edges of his world before I had understood what his world was, and when I left him he had decided that leaving was an insult that required a response.

The response, it turned out, was my nephew.

He had no legal claim. He had no biological connection. What he had was money, patience, and the kind of contacts that made probate hearings more complicated than they needed to be.

“Go home,” I said again.

Marcus stepped around the counter.

I backed toward the kitchen door.

“Joseph,” I called.

“Don’t.” Marcus’s voice had changed again, losing the smoothness. “Don’t call him.”

“Joseph—”

Marcus grabbed my arm and pulled me backward, away from the kitchen door, toward the service exit, and for one second I looked at booth five where Leo was still coloring his stegosaurus, still tilted to the left, still concentrated.

He had not looked up yet.

The service door was cold metal under my free hand and then the alley was cold everything — cold rain, cold brick, cold wet concrete under my shoes — and Marcus had his hand in my collar before the door closed behind us.

“You think a court is going to choose you?” he said. “You think nine dollars an hour and a two-bedroom in Olneyville is a better option than what I can give him?”

“You don’t want to give him anything,” I said. “You want to use him.”

The slap was not hard enough to knock me down but hard enough to make the alley tilt. I put my hand against the brick wall and tasted blood at the corner of my mouth.

Marcus was already talking again, the words coming faster now, the controlled surface starting to crack the way it always cracked just before it got worse.

“You’re going to stop this. Whatever case you think you’re building. Whatever that woman in Cranston thinks she’s doing. You’re going to drop it and you’re going to tell Leo that I’m someone he should know and we’re going to do this the easy way.”

“No,” I said.

He hit me again, and this time I did go down, one knee on the wet concrete, my palm in a puddle.

I heard a sound from inside the diner.

Leo’s voice: small, sharp, the specific tone of a child who had heard something wrong.

Aunt Gia?

Marcus heard it too. He looked at the service door with an expression I recognized — calculating, considering whether Leo coming out would help or complicate things — and that expression was what made something in me go absolutely cold, because it was the expression of a man deciding how to use a seven-year-old.

That was when the headlights appeared.

A black car had pulled into the alley entrance without noise, the way expensive cars moved — heavy and certain. The rear door opened before anyone got out, and the first person was large enough that I registered him as a shape rather than a person, a broad-shouldered presence that filled the alley entrance and stood without speaking.

The second person came out more slowly.

He was tall, dark-coated, and moved with the unhurried precision of someone who had never had to rush because rooms arranged themselves before he got there. The rain fell on him and he did not react to it. There was a scar through one eyebrow, faint enough to miss in bad lighting, and his eyes moved over the scene — me on the wet concrete, Marcus standing over me, Leo’s face pressed against the service door window — in a sequence that suggested he was taking inventory rather than being surprised by it.

He looked at Marcus.

“Get away from her,” he said.

His voice was not loud. That was the thing. Men who were genuinely dangerous did not need to be loud.

Marcus turned with the irritation of someone who had not been frightened in a while. “Mind your business.”

The large man moved.

I did not see the specifics. I heard Marcus make a sound I had not heard him make before and then he was on the ground several feet from where he had been standing, in a position that suggested the conversation was over.

The man in the dark coat walked toward me.

He stopped two feet away and crouched down so he was at my level, which was not what I expected.

“Can you stand?”

“I can stand,” I said, and then found that I could, though the alley moved sideways once before steadying.

He did not touch me to help. He stood when I stood and watched to see if I needed catching.

“Your nephew,” he said. “He’s inside?”

My blood went cold.

“Don’t say his name.”

“I don’t know his name yet.”

Yet.

The service door opened and Leo appeared in it — small, rumpled, his stegosaurus drawing still clutched in one hand, his eyes moving from me to Marcus on the ground to the two men in the alley.

“Aunt Gia,” he said. “There’s blood on your mouth.”

“I know,” I said. “Come here.”

He came to me the way he always came to me in bad moments — fast and then deliberate, pressing his side against mine and looking out at the world from there.

The man in the dark coat looked at Leo.

Leo looked back at him with the particular directness of a child who had already experienced enough loss that strangers in dark alleys did not automatically disqualify themselves.

“You have a scar,” Leo said.

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore.”

“My mom had a scar,” Leo said. “She said scars meant you were still here.”

The man was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “Your mother was right.”

Something passed across his face that was gone before I could name it.

He looked at me.

“My name is Raffaele Conti,” he said. “And we need to talk about your nephew.”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“You’re going to say something that changes everything. Men who arrive like this always do. And I have a child with his hand in mine who has already had enough things change.”

Raffaele looked at me for a long moment.

“What I’m going to say will protect him.”

“From what?”

“From the people who sent that man.”

I looked at Marcus, who was sitting up slowly and holding his shoulder.

“Marcus came on his own,” I said.

“Marcus was paid,” Raffaele said. “To find out where you lived, where the boy went to school, and whether you had any legal protection.” A pause. “He was also paid to take him tonight if the opportunity was there.”

The alley was very quiet for a moment except for the rain.

Leo’s hand tightened around mine.

“Aunt Gia,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I think we should hear what he says.”

I looked down at him.

Seven years old, still holding his stegosaurus drawing, making the most reasonable suggestion anyone in the alley had made all night.

Sofia would have been proud of him.

I looked at Raffaele Conti.

“Where?” I said.

PART 2

The house was not what I expected, though I was not sure what I expected.

Something aggressive, maybe. Something that announced itself. The kind of wealth that used size and security cameras to say this is what power looks like.

Instead it was a brownstone on the east side of Providence — old, restrained, the kind of building that had been here long enough to stop needing to prove anything. The interior was dark wood and clean lines and a library on the ground floor with built-in shelves that went to the ceiling and a lamp that someone had left on.

A woman named Calla met us at the door — forties, calm, who looked at Leo immediately and said, “Are you hungry? I made soup.”

Leo looked at me.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He went with Calla without argument because Leo had the gift of reading people quickly, and he had decided Calla was safe the way he decided things: quietly and immediately and with more accuracy than most adults managed.

I stood in the entry hall with the man who had stepped out of the rain.

Raffaele Conti had removed his coat, which made him look slightly less like a threat and slightly more like a person. He was perhaps thirty-eight, dark-suited, with the stillness of someone who had learned that movement was something you conserved for when it mattered.

He poured two glasses of water in the kitchen and set one in front of me.

“You should sit down,” he said.

“I’ll sit when I know why I’m here.”

He sat. An invitation, not a concession.

I sat.

“Your sister,” he said. “Sofia Ferraro.”

The name in his mouth hit me the same way it always hit me — like pressing on something that had not finished healing.

“Yes,” I said.

“She worked at the Meridian for three years.”

The Meridian was a hotel on Federal Hill. High-end, the kind of place that attracted the kind of people who needed things managed quietly. Sofia had worked in accounts management there before she met Marco Bell, before the wedding, before Leo.

“What about it?” I said.

“While she was there, she came into contact with someone in my family’s business. Not me.” He looked at the table, and for a moment I saw something that did not belong in that controlled face — something old and unresolved. “My cousin. Enzo.”

I said nothing.

“Sofia and Enzo had a relationship for approximately four months. She ended it when she understood the nature of our family’s operations. She was not wrong to end it.” He paused. “A year after she left the Meridian, she married Marco Bell.”

“I know my sister’s life,” I said.

“Then you know she came to me two months after Leo was born.”

The kitchen went quiet.

“She came to you,” I said carefully.

“Yes. She asked me to look at something.” He pushed a photograph across the table. It was Sofia, outside what looked like a private clinic, wearing sunglasses and a coat I remembered. “She had run a private paternity test.”

My throat closed.

“She discovered that Leo was Enzo’s biological son.”

I stared at the photograph.

“Sofia did not want anything from us,” Raffaele continued. “She was very clear about that. She came to tell me because she said she was afraid of what would happen if she kept it and someone else found out first.” He looked at me. “She was right to be afraid.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I told Enzo.”

“And Enzo?”

His expression tightened.

“Enzo was not consistent in his responses. He was interested in Leo sometimes and angry about Sofia’s choices other times and drinking heavily throughout. He died eight months later.”

I did not know that.

I had not known any of this.

Sofia had sat across from me at my kitchen table a hundred times in Leo’s first two years and had told me so many things — about Marco, about Leo’s sleeping schedule, about the book she was reading, about the tile she wanted in the kitchen renovation — and had never once said any of this.

“Why are you telling me now?” I said.

“Because when Enzo died, his share of certain assets reverted to his estate. And his estate attorney discovered the private paternity test. And several members of our extended family became interested in Leo as an heir in ways that I find—” He stopped. “Unacceptable.”

“Interested how.”

“The way that man in the alley was interested,” Raffaele said. “As a financial and political asset. A child who could be used to consolidate claims.”

My hands went flat on the table.

“Marcus was working for someone in your family.”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“My uncle Sebastiano.” He said the name with the flatness of a man who had made peace with a truth he disliked. “He has been looking for Leo for four months. He found out about your custody hearing through Sebastiano’s contacts in the county clerk’s office. He planned to use Marcus to destabilize your case and then move for his own claim through a biological grandfather’s petition.”

I thought about Diane Marsh, the attorney in Cranston, who had told me three weeks ago that the hearing was looking complicated. Who had said a new party had filed a motion to intervene and she was working on getting it dismissed.

A biological grandfather’s petition.

Through Marco’s side, she had assumed.

Through Marco’s side because no one had known about Enzo.

“Sofia never told Marco,” I said. It was not a question.

“No. From what I understand, Marco knew the circumstances of Leo’s conception but believed Sofia when she said the test had come back inconclusive.” Raffaele looked at me. “He chose to raise Leo as his son.”

“He was his son,” I said. “He was Leo’s father in every way that mattered.”

“Yes,” Raffaele said, without hesitation. “He was.”

The answer surprised me the way his answers kept surprising me — landing without qualification, without the defensive asterisk I expected from a man defending his family’s claim.

“I am not here to take Leo from you,” he said.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because my uncle is, and because I spent three hours today learning that the one person standing between a seven-year-old boy and several adults who see him as useful is a waitress with red lipstick and a Cranston attorney and approximately zero awareness of how serious this has become.”

I looked at him.

“The red lipstick is non-negotiable,” I said.

Something shifted in his expression.

“I noticed,” he said.

Calla appeared in the doorway.

“Leo wants to show you his drawing,” she said to me. “He says it’s urgent.”

I stood.

“Where is he?”

“The library.”

I walked out without asking Raffaele permission and found Leo in the library, perched on the edge of a leather chair, studying the bookshelves with the focused interest he brought to anything that contained animals.

“They have three books about dinosaurs,” he said when I appeared. “I only saw two but I’m still looking.”

“How are you doing?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“My tummy hurts a little,” he said.

“I know.”

“Is that man going to help us?”

I crouched down in front of him.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

Leo looked toward the hallway.

“He looks sad,” Leo said. “But he’s trying not to show it.”

“Why do you think he’s sad?”

Leo considered this with the gravity he brought to important questions.

“Maybe he missed someone,” he said. “Like I miss Mom.”

I put my hand on his knee.

“We’re going to be okay,” I said.

“I know,” Leo said, without hesitation, which was the most painful and the most wonderful thing about him.

When I went back to the kitchen, Raffaele was on the phone. He ended the call when I came in.

“Sebastiano’s petition has been temporarily blocked,” he said. “My attorney filed an emergency motion an hour ago. It buys time.”

“Your attorney filed against your uncle.”

“Yes.”

“Does that cause problems for you?”

He looked at me steadily.

“Some.”

“Why?”

“Because Leo is not a claim,” he said. “And I was raised to understand the difference between family and property, even when the people around me forgot it.”

I studied him.

“You’re not what I expected,” I said.

“What did you expect?”

“Someone who would arrive in the rain to take something.”

“I arrived in the rain to stop someone else from taking something.” He paused. “There is a difference.”

“Is there?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“That is a fair question,” he said. “And I don’t think I’ve entirely earned the answer.”

I sat back down.

“Tell me everything,” I said. “About Sebastiano. About the petition. About what happens next.”

He told me.

It took a long time.

PART 3

The hearing was in seventeen days, and in those seventeen days several things happened that I did not have a category for.

First: Raffaele’s attorney, a woman named Dr. Patricia Lund who dressed like someone who ironed her suits by hand and spoke like someone who had never lost an argument she cared about, filed a series of motions that systematically dismantled Sebastiano Conti’s petition. She sent me copies of everything, which I had not expected and which I read at my kitchen table at eleven at night with a highlighter and a cup of tea.

Second: Marcus was arrested, not for what he had done to me in the alley — I had filed the report but Marcus had resources and the initial charge was delayed — but for a separate matter involving a financial fraud case that Providence County had apparently been building for fourteen months. He would not be testifying at anyone’s custody hearing in the near future.

Third: Leo met Raffaele for the second time, at the diner on a Wednesday afternoon when I had asked Raffaele to come in rather than meeting somewhere that felt like his territory.

I had made that decision deliberately. The diner was mine. Booth five was Leo’s. If this conversation was going to happen, it was going to happen on ground Leo could feel safe on.

Raffaele arrived on time, no car, no visible security, in a coat and a sweater and the particular restraint of a man who understood he was a guest in someone else’s ecosystem.

Leo looked at him from booth five with the assessing expression he had inherited from Sofia.

“You came back,” Leo said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Raffaele sat in the booth across from him, which required some folding because the booth was sized for ordinary human beings.

“I’m trying to help your aunt,” he said.

“Are you her friend?”

“I’m trying to be.”

Leo seemed to weigh this.

“My mom said friends were people who showed up when things were hard,” he said. “Things were hard last week.”

“Yes.”

“You showed up.”

“Yes.”

Leo pushed a crayon across the table.

“You can color if you want,” he said. “I have extra.”

It was, from Leo, an enormous concession.

Raffaele looked at the crayon.

Then he picked it up.

I stood at the counter and watched a mafia boss quietly begin coloring a corner of a paper placemat while my nephew gave him instructions about the correct shade of green for a stegosaurus.

Joseph, our cook, appeared beside me.

He looked at the booth.

“You okay?” he said.

“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure yet.”

“That man took out Marcus without breaking a sweat,” Joseph said.

“I know.”

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a year.”

“I know.”

He went back to the kitchen.

After the diner, I walked with Raffaele to the street while Joseph stayed with Leo.

“He’s extraordinary,” Raffaele said.

“He is,” I said. “He’s also been through things that no child should go through, and he’s done it with more grace than most adults could manage, and I will not let him be touched by any of this more than he already has been.”

“I know.”

“I need you to tell me what you want,” I said. “Clearly. Not what you want me to hear. What you actually want.”

He stopped walking.

We were on the corner of Harbor and Dexter, rain not falling for once, the streetlights doing the amber thing they did in October when the light came at a low angle.

“I want Sebastiano to lose,” he said. “I want Leo to be safe from anyone who would reduce him to a claim. I want the court to confirm your guardianship permanently.” A pause. “And I want—” He stopped.

“Say it.”

“I want to know him,” Raffaele said. “Not to take him. Not because of what he represents to the family. Because he is Enzo’s son, and Enzo was the closest thing I had to a brother for most of my childhood, and Enzo died badly and left nothing behind that was good, and Leo is good.”

He said it quietly, without the architecture of justification.

Just the truth.

I looked at the street.

“That’s something I would have to think about,” I said. “For a long time.”

“I know.”

“On my terms.”

“Yes.”

“With Leo’s input.”

“Of course.”

“And if I say no at any point, you stop.”

He looked at me.

“Gianna,” he said. It was the first time he had used my name, and he said it the way people said names when they meant them. “I have watched men in my life use power as a replacement for right. I am trying very hard not to do that.”

“You’re not always succeeding,” I said.

He blinked.

Then he nodded.

“No,” he said. “I’m not. That is accurate.”

I almost smiled.

“All right,” I said. “Keep trying.”

The hearing was on a Tuesday in November.

I wore a fitted charcoal dress, my good black heels, a tailored jacket that I had pressed the night before, and my red lipstick. Leo wore his cleanest jeans and the blue sweater his grandmother had sent from Palermo and the dinosaur pin Sofia had given him on his fifth birthday, the one he wore when he wanted to feel like she was there.

He had asked me that morning if he would have to talk.

I told him Diane would ask him two questions and that was all, and that the judge was a person whose job was to make sure he was safe, and that being safe was what this whole day was about.

“Am I safe?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

He had looked at me in the mirror while I was finishing my lipstick.

“Aunt Gia,” he said. “You always put on the lipstick last.”

“Yes.”

“Mom did too,” he said.

I pressed my lips together once to set it.

“I know,” I said.

Diane Marsh, who worked out of a strip mall in Cranston and had kept my case alive for six months on half my tips, was already in the courthouse when we arrived. She was forty-nine, practical, and had the specific focus of a person who had decided decades ago that competence was more important than impression.

Beside her, to my surprise, stood Patricia Lund.

The two attorneys looked at each other like they had already agreed on something.

“Co-counsel,” Diane said. “Patricia’s firm is supporting our case pro bono because — how did you put it, Patricia?”

“Because the outcome matters,” Patricia said.

I looked at Raffaele, who was standing near the window with his hands in his pockets and the expression of a man who had arranged something and was uncertain how it would be received.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But I wanted to.”

“That’s different.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

Sebastiano Conti arrived with three attorneys and the specific composure of a man who had bought his way through enough rooms to believe buying was the only currency.

He looked at me once.

He looked at Leo.

Leo looked back at him with the evaluating expression and then looked away, which was Leo’s version of a verdict.

Sebastiano looked at Raffaele.

Whatever passed between them in that look was not warm.

The hearing took four hours.

Diane presented the guardianship record — two years, consistent, documented care; Leo’s school performance, his medical appointments, his therapy records. Patricia presented the legal argument that Sebastiano’s petition was procedurally invalid, filed in bad faith, and constituted an attempt to exploit a minor for estate purposes. She used the phrase using a child as a financial instrument in a tone that made the courtroom go very quiet.

Marcus’s attorney filed a statement saying Marcus had been misled about the nature of his involvement and was cooperating with investigators, which was a very polite way of saying Marcus had decided that cooperation was his best available option now that the fraud case had teeth.

The judge was a small woman in her sixties with silver hair and reading glasses on a chain who asked three questions: Was Leo safe, was Leo loved, and was his guardian capable of providing stability.

Leo answered the first question himself, which he had not been scheduled to do but volunteered when the judge asked if anyone else had something to say.

“I’m safe with Aunt Gia,” he said. “She keeps all her promises.”

The judge looked at him.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because she promised my mom she would,” Leo said. “And she never broke one of those.”

Sofia, I thought. You taught him well.

The petition was denied.

Guardianship was confirmed, permanent.

In the corridor afterward, Leo held my hand and Diane shook it with both of hers and Patricia said “good work” in the manner of someone who did not say it often and meant it when she did.

Sebastiano left without speaking.

His attorneys filed something on his way out, which Patricia caught and identified as a notice of appeal that she said had approximately the same chance of succeeding as a paper boat in November rain.

Raffaele had stood in the back of the courtroom for the entire four hours.

He came to us in the corridor.

He looked at Leo.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

Leo thought about it.

“Like when you’re sick and then you’re better,” he said. “But not totally better yet. Like the beginning of better.”

Raffaele nodded.

“That sounds right,” he said.

Leo looked at him.

“Are you going to be around?” he asked.

“That depends on your aunt,” Raffaele said.

Leo looked at me.

“Aunt Gia?” he said.

I was looking at Raffaele.

The man who had stepped out of a black car in the rain, who had knocked Marcus down and crouched to my level to ask if I could stand, who had told Leo that scars meant you were still here, who had filed motions against his own uncle and sent copies of everything to an attorney he didn’t need to tell, who had sat in a diner booth and colored the wrong shade of green because a seven-year-old handed him a crayon.

He was not simple. He was not clean. The world he came from would always have edges, and navigating it would never be uncomplicated, and I was not the kind of person who pretended those things were not real because a man had shown up at the right moment.

But he had shown up.

And he had tried.

And the trying had been — not perfect, but visible. Not without cost to him. Not without risk.

“We’ll see,” I said to Leo.

Leo considered this with the seriousness it deserved.

Then he said, “That means probably yes.”

Raffaele looked at me.

One corner of his mouth moved.

“It means we’ll see,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

But he looked like a man who understood that we’ll see from me was not nothing.