POV: Lena

I know his face before he sits down.

I've memorized it the way you memorize something you need to survive — the shape of his jaw, the width of his shoulders, the careful way he moves through a space like he's already assessed every exit. Dante Marcello. I've been looking at photographs of him for three years. Court documents. A grainy security still where he's walking out of a building thirty minutes after my father's life ended.

He's taller in person.

I wasn't supposed to be the one who seated him. Brea takes the corner booth every morning — it's her section, her regulars, her tips. But Brea called in sick and I needed the shift and now I'm standing here with two menus and my heart doing something I refuse to call fear.

"Table for one?" I say it before I can stop myself.

He looks at me.

Not the way men usually look at me — like furniture, like an afterthought. He actually looks. Like he's deciding something.

"Yes," he says.

Just that. No warmth, no performance. He slides into the corner booth like it was built for him, back to the wall, eyes on the door. Old habit. Mafia instinct. My father told me once that men who sit with their backs to walls are either soldiers or cowards, and you can only tell the difference by what they do when trouble walks in.

Dante Marcello has never run from trouble in his life.

I hand him a menu he doesn't open.

"Coffee," he says. "Black."

I write it down even though I don't need to. My hand is steady. I've practiced this — the steadiness. The way grief hardens into discipline if you hold it long enough, if you refuse to let it shake you in public, if you treat it like a tool instead of a wound.

My father is in year five of a twenty-year sentence.

My hand does not shake.

When I bring his coffee, Dante is looking out the window at something I can't see. The morning light catches the edge of his face and he looks almost human. Almost like someone who doesn't have a file in my notebook and a question he doesn't know he owes me.

"You're new," he says, without looking at me.

"Six weeks." The lie is easy. I've been here four months. I moved here fourteen months ago. I've been planning this for three years. The lies have layers now — I barely have to think about them.

He nods, like this is information he's filing away, and goes back to the window.

I stand at the counter and watch him drink his coffee and I think, very clearly: this is one of the men responsible for destroying my family. I don't let myself feel it. I just let it sit there, factual and sharp, and I breathe around it the way you breathe around a wound that's too deep to touch.

He comes back the next morning.

He doesn't ask for a menu. "Coffee," he says. "Black."

He comes back the morning after that.

On the fourth day, a man in a dark coat sits across from him for twenty minutes, and I watch the way Dante listens — still, attentive, unreadable — and I think about everything in my notebook and everything I still don't know.

On the sixth day, he comes alone and stays for an hour and reads something on his phone and doesn't speak to me except to say thank you when I refill his coffee, and something about the way he says it — like he means it, like he actually sees me — makes me angrier than everything else combined.

Don't, I tell myself. That's the job. That's the mask. That's what these men do.

On the ninth day, he slides a business card across the counter when I bring his check.

The name on the card is Marcello Holdings. Below it: Administrative Opportunities. A phone number.

"I'm looking for someone detail-oriented," he says. "Someone who doesn't talk more than necessary."

I look at the card.

I look at him.

He's watching me with those careful, assessing eyes and I think: he has no idea. He does not know who I am or what I want or what I've been building toward. He handed me this card because I'm good at looking like nobody.

Good.

"Think about it," he says, and leaves a fifty for a six-dollar coffee, and walks out without looking back.

I stand there holding the card.

I've been trying to find a way inside the Marcello organization for three years. I've followed trails that went cold. I've paid for information that turned out to be useless. I've spent more nights than I can count staring at my notebook and wondering if this is the year I finally accept that some debts never get paid.

He just handed me the door.

I put the card in my apron pocket.

I don't throw it away.