Chapter 4 - The Scent of Rosemary
The kitchen on the forty-ninth floor had not seen actual cooking since the late summer of twenty-one.
It was an industrial monument of brushed stainless steel, six-burner Wolf ranges that had never had grease splashed on their grates, and three sub-zero refrigerators that contained nothing but imported sparkling water, vacuum-sealed steaks for Dante’s late-night meetings, and seventy-two bottles of vintage Barolo.
At four in the afternoon, it smelled of burnt butter, flour dust, and bruised rosemary.
Mia sat on the stainless prep island, her bare feet swinging over the edge, kicking rhythmically against the cabinet doors. She was wearing a pair of yellow cotton dungarees Sarah had bought at a Target on Elston Avenue for twelve dollars, the tags cut off with kitchen shears to keep the rough nylon from scratching her neck.
Bella stood on a wooden step stool beside the sink, her small hands submerged up to the elbows in a plastic basin of warm, soapy water, washing three wooden spoons with furious, solemn concentration.
Between them, Sarah had spread a five-pound bag of bleached all-purpose flour across the marble surface.
She wasn't using a rolling pin. She was using her thumbs, pressing indentations into a mound of soft, wet dough, showing Mia how to make small indentations that looked like bird tracks.
"You don't push hard," Sarah murmured, her hands white to the wrists with flour. "If you push too hard, the bread gets angry. You just press like you're tapping a kitten’s nose."
Mia watched her.
The little girl hadn't spoken a single word in sixteen hours, but her dark eyes—identical to the cold, lethal eyes of the man on the fiftieth floor—were wide, tracking every grain of dust that rose into the afternoon sunbeams cutting through the south window.
Slowly, hesitantly, Mia lifted her small right hand.
She pressed her thumb into the dough.
A tiny, perfect crater appeared.
Mia looked up at Sarah. A small, miraculous crease appeared at the corner of her mouth—not quite a smile, but the first loosening of the iron jawline that she had carried since her mother’s funeral.
"Look," Mia whispered.
The word was so small, so thin and fragile, that Sarah almost thought it was the hum of the sub-zero compressors.
Behind them, standing in the pantry doorway where the shadow fell across the industrial spice racks, Dante stood motionless.
He had been there for twenty minutes. He had not taken off his coat. His Kimber was still under his arm, but he had removed his shoes at the threshold of the service hall—something Arthur had not seen him do since he was nine years old—so the click of his heels would not disturb the air.
He watched his daughter's thumb in the dough.
He remembered Isabella standing in the kitchen of the farmhouse in Mondello, her sleeves pinned up with safety pins, her forearms covered in flour from the semolina loaves she insisted on baking every Saturday morning despite the two cooks on the household payroll.
"A house that doesn't smell of yeast isn't a house, Dante," she had told him, laughing while she wiped a streak of flour across his cheekbone. "It’s just a warehouse where people wait to die."
He closed his eyes.
A single, hot needle of pain drove through the center of his skull. For three years, he had tried to erase the scent of the woman from his life because every memory came wrapped in the burning rubber and gasoline of the car on the bridge. He had given his daughters sterile rooms, silent nannies, and the finest pediatric psychologists in Europe, and all he had given them was an expensive, climate-controlled mausoleum.
Bella turned off the tap.
The three-year-old girl turned around on her stool, her small hands dripping soapsuds onto the floorboards, and saw him.
Dante’s body tensed. He prepared himself for the scream. He prepared himself to step backward into the pantry, to disappear before the terror could reset the clocks in their heads.
Bella didn't scream.
She looked at his black coat. She looked at his socks—dark silk, sticking to the damp floor where she had splashed water.
She hopped down from the stool. Her small, bare feet made soft pat-pat-pat sounds against the oak. She walked straight to him, stopped six inches from his knees, and looked up into his face.
"Dough," she said.
Dante looked down. His breath hitched in his throat. His knees felt hollow, as if the steel rods that had held him upright through three gang wars had suddenly turned to wet twine.
He sank down onto his haunches.
He had not knelt before another human being since his father died in the chapel of Saint Anthony twenty years ago. He knelt now on the wet floor, his expensive suit trousers soaking up the greasy suds from the sink.
"Bella," he whispered.
The little girl reached out. Her hand was wet, covered in bubbles that smelled of lemon dish soap.
She reached up and pressed her small palm flat against his rough, unshaven cheek.
Dante did not move. He did not breathe. A single drop of soapy water ran down his jawline, catching in the dark stubble of his neck.
Behind them, Sarah Jenkins did not look up from the prep island. She kept humming the low, broken modal song from the olive groves, her thumbs pressing another row of bird tracks into the soft, white flour.
May you like
"She likes the rosemary," Sarah said quietly to the dough. "Isabella told my mother she liked to put the sprigs in the salt cellar so the kitchen smelled like the hills after the goats came through."
Dante leaned his forehead against his daughter's small, wet shoulder, and for the first time in one thousand and ninety-five days, the master of the Moretti family closed his eyes and let the silence stay.
