I chuckled. “Maybe not that part.” I picked up the cutting board and carried it over to the sink. “Still. Brooklyn isn’t just my home—it’s my world. Or it was for a very long time. As a kid, I rarely left our hood. We had everything there. From the kids shooting the shit on the stoop to grumpy men playing chess on the sidewalk and talkin’ about the old country.” Which they’d never left in the first place. But since we’d lived in a Latin neighborhood, the Italians clung harder to old traditions, and suddenly everyone with roots in Italy missed the old country as if they’d been born and raised there before being welcomed to America on Ellis Island. “My family and everyone I grew up around were a few decades behind the rest of the world. The Brooklyn I knew when I was a kid changed a fuckload by the time Nicky was the same age.”

August nodded. “I think that goes for many places. My sister Tilda lived in New York a while before she moved to Chicago, and the first time we went up to visit her, our mother thought Brooklyn was a mafia stronghold like it was during the Murder, Inc. era.”

I grinned a little. “When was this?”

He squinted in thought. “I’d say…’77? ’78, maybe?”

A far cry from the thirties, but we’d still had some shit going down back then. I remembered when Castellano was gunned down in ’85. Mostly, I remembered Nonna swearing up a storm about it.

“I suppose I grew up in the remnants of it,” I replied. “It was drilled into my head that I wasn’t allowed to visit certain clubs and restaurants. Pop could suggest a joint for Friday night dinner, and Nonna would go, ‘No, no, can’t go there, the—whatever pazzi—runs that place.’ But other than that, it was minor shit. Similar to what we see in all bigger cities today.”

August’s eyes flashed with amusement. “I do like it when you use slang.”

I wiped my hands on a towel and furrowed my brow. Had I used slang?

“Pazzi,” he said.

Oh. “It’s what Nonna calls everyone who’s either batshit crazy or lives on the wrong side of the law—”

“Daddy!” Camden yelled from upstairs. “Are you busy?”

Today was not the day he learned not to yell either.

I smirked at August’s sigh, and then he hollered back, saying if Camden had something on his mind, he had to come down here.

The boy stomped quickly down the stairs and ran toward us with nervous excitement written all over him.

“I have gifts for you!” He hurriedly left two little packets on the kitchen island before he spun around and made another run for it. “See you at dinner—I’m too shy to see your reactions!”

“Baby!” August called. “Aren’t you supposed to clean your room?”