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“The temp agency sent six people. You sent them all home within the hour.” He turns from the glass. “This one, you hire, and with a child, no less. You want to tell me about the woman and child I just watched walk out of your house?”

I shouldn’t have hired her. I shouldn’t have done a great many things to make sure she ended up in that chair. But I did, and I’d do every one of them again.

“An old acquaintance,” I say.

“I see.” Carmine has been at my side for years, even before I had a side worth standing at. He reads me better than anyone else on this planet, which is a mixed blessing. For instance, at this moment, I know he’ll see right through any line of bullshit I try to sell him. But I sell him one anyway. It’s part of our dynamic.

“From years ago,” I add.

The ghost of a smile forms on his lips. “And I’m sure she made such an impression with her skills that you remembered her all these years later.”

“Careful, Carmine.”

“I’m always careful, which is why I’m still here.”

I don’t tell him the rest of the story.

I don’t tell him that I went back up to that room with two espressos and a plan I had never once made for a woman. Breakfast. Her name. A second night, and a third, and however many came after that.

I don’t tell him I found the ring on the pillow and the sheets already gone cold. Or what else was on that floor, or the things I told myself about it.

I don’t tell him that I had the building’s cameras pulled before the sun was all the way up, and that I sat in a dark security office and watched her walk out the delivery door fourteen times. Grainy black-and-white. A rabbit mask dangling from her fingers. Chin up. Never once looking back.

I had men walk every block between that alley and the subway. I had them show a still from the footage to every bodega owner and bus driver in Manhattan. They came back with nothing, every one of them, because I had kept my word and never told her who I was, and I’d never asked who she was. I had her face and nothing else. I’d been arrogant enough to think I’d have time to learn the rest.

She worked that night through a cash-only outfit that staffs masked parties under first names, and the first name on her sheet was Bunny. Luca Santini knew her real one. I could see it in the way he looked at her. But every road to it ran straight through Luca’s crew, and any man I asked would have carried my question back to him. Asking would have told Luca she still mattered to me. By the time I found a quieter road, she was gone from Astoria, with no lease, no payroll, and no phone in her own name. She worked cash, off the books, everywhere she went. So I looked the slow way.

And I don’t tell him about the drawer.

It’s the top drawer of the desk behind me, the one with the lock. The ring is in it. It was my mother’s. I wore it on my little finger every day after we buried her, right up until the night I worked it off and slid it onto a stranger’s hand. It has been in that drawer ever since. Some nights, when the house has gone quiet and the work is done and there’s nothing left between me and my own head, I take it out and turn it over in my fingers like a man worrying a bullet he dug out of his own body.

I am not a sentimental man. I have buried friends without it. I have given orders that would turn Carmine’s stomach, and Carmine’s stomach is made of iron.

But I kept the ring.

Under the ring is the money she left on the side table that morning. She counted out what she’d earned and left the rest. I’ve never counted it.

I don’t keep things. I kept that.

I counted something else that week. Ricci’s fingers. I had Carmine call me after each one, and I listened to every one of them. He tipped her. He looked at her. That was enough.

I don’t tell him about the last eight months, either.

About the night one of Luca’s soldiers got drunk at a table in my club on Mulberry Street and laughed about a waitress Santini had blacklisted from every decent job in the city. A curvy girl with a smart mouth. The Velvet Room. I knew who it was before he finished the sentence.

Luca never laid a finger on her in all that time. He didn’t dare. The whole city heard me say she was mine, and even Luca Santini wasn’t stupid enough to touch something I’d claimed. So he did the coward’s version instead. He made sure nobody would hire her, and he called it a joke.

Four years I looked for her, and Luca Santini handed her to me over a bottle of grappa.

I found her in two days. She had a boy with her on the subway platform, small and dark-haired, holding her hand. A son. Some other man’s, I told myself, and I made a point of never learning more.

Tomorrow, I’ll put a phone in her desk drawer and call it secure. It will be. Secure from everyone but me.

She doesn’t know any of it. She thinks a desperate recruiter got lucky.

I intend to keep it that way for as long as I possibly can.

“But she did make an impression,” Carmine says. “She must have, if you’re hiring her.”