“What’ll happen if I put that in?”

“It’ll unlock the phone. You can call him. Just do it.”

He’s rushing me. I don’t like to be rushed. Dario was willing to give his life to save his brother and I just shot mine. I’m not sure he’d be proud.

“Do you swear it won’t do anything else?”

“Yes. Go on. Put it in.”

“I don’t want to shoot you.”

“You already shot me. I know what you’re capable of.”

“Good, because I don’t.”

I put in the address of our building in Stuyvesant town, where we lived lifetimes ago. The keypad disappears and turns into a grid of multicolored boxes. Right away, I spot the handset of a landline. I’m about to tap on it, as I’ve seen Dario do a hundred times, when the screen clears again and the phone makes a trilling sound.

UNKNOWN NUMBER

Another bend in the road nearly sends me into a guardrail. I give up, pulling over and putting the car into park before I slide down the berm.

The phone keeps trilling. Massimo holds out his hand.

“Either give it to me or pick it up.” He drops his arm to his bleeding leg. “Slide the green—”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

I’m lost. I can’t drive. The car’s practically in a ditch, and I don’t even know where I’m taking it.

Dario would have a plan. He wouldn’t do anything until he had a roadmap to victory. All I have is a goal. Make a life on St. Easy. Swim with sharks beside my husband.

I have to trade Massimo for him. That’s the way. But I don’t know what to do now.

The trilling is just another thing that—along with the smell of blood and Massimo’s pained breaths—pushes me toward panic.

Slide to answer.

I’m going to crack.

Don’t cry.

Will the phone trill forever?

For a moment I wonder if it’s my father calling my brother, but my father is dead. There is no father. I’m free of my father, but now I don’t know who’s in charge.

“They already know something’s fucked up,” Massimo says. “Just give me the phone if you don’t know how to answer it.”

“I know how.”

I blink hard to hold back the tears and stretch my neck. I’m looking through the top of the windshield at the tree line’s shape against the sky. A red brick church spire rises behind it. Bigger now. Maybe a bend in the road away.

DON’T CRY, COME BY!

I am suddenly calm. I slide the green dot across the bottom of the phone and put it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Mass—” the man cuts off the rest of the name, but his voice is distinctive enough. I could pick it out of a choir. “Who’s this?”

“I saw what you did, Marco.”

“Wait, hold on.”

Taking the phone away from my ear, I look at the glass. The red dot with the X ends the call, right? I tap it. The grid of boxes reappears. I put my ear to the phone. Hear nothing. Done.