The door slaps shut. We’re in a narrow room with shaded windows and wooden chairs set upside down on the tables, their legs up in surrender. To the right is a long counter with space to stand behind it and shelves with bottles standing like soldiers at attention.

I’ve never been inside a place like this. Nighttime places. I’d pass them and wonder what people did there. Why they were so crowded and loud. Now that I’m here, I still wonder.

Sergio’s sitting on a stool, one leg jutting into the aisle, one arm stretched across the bar. There are men in the shadows. I recognize my cousin Raymond, but not the others. Maybe they’re Agosti men from Queens who chose Sergio over Ettore. Maybe freedom makes you forgetful.

“Come on in,” Sergio says, sitting straight. He looks Massimo up and down. “You come for the dishwashing job, bro? Or is it like costume day at school or something?”

With his toes, he pushes a stool an inch toward Massimo. My brother does not sit. He just leans on his false cane.

“You look sexy as fuck, babycakes,” Sergio says to me.

I don’t look sexy as anything, and I don’t thank him.

He turns to Massimo. “What are we gonna do with her?”

“Whatever I say,” Massimo replies.

I could argue, because I’m going to do whatever I say, but it’s not a good time to pull the rug from under these guys.

“Sure, big guy. How’d that leg end up like that? She shoot you?” Sergio chuckles at the absurdity of the idea.

Massimo lets him trail off without answering, leaving the laughter hanging uncomfortably.

“This is my family, Agosti.” I didn’t know Massimo had it in him to make five words into such a threat, but the menace is there.

Sergio’s lips pucker for a moment and he looks away, then he gathers himself with a shrug.

“That’s it?” He takes a remote control from the bar. “You’re just like my fucking dad. No, ‘Good job holding shit down while I was off doing whatever’ or, ‘Thanks for catching this guy’? Nah. Never good enough.”

He points the remote at a bank of screens behind the bar. I’d see TVs like this through the windows. They usually had sports or what I now know is the news.

Now, when they flicker on, they show a man. I gasp. Even seeing only the top of his head, I know it’s Dario.

He’s pacing a tiny room, slightly bent at the waist as if he’s injured. His energy comes through the camera like a physical thing. He’s a tiger, newly captured, used to the wild, ready to lunge at the first fleshy thing within reach.

The force of his captivity presses against me. I am him. The bar is too small for me. I need to pace it—corner to corner—calculating the dimensions of my territory so that I can smash whatever’s holding me inside it.

My anger isn’t useful. It’s a jackhammer pumping the air. I cannot quiet it, but I cannot let it touch the ground.