didn’t, and he couldn’t make himself move. He woke Nonna up for dinner a little while later, helped her eat, and filmed her weekly message for Toni. Maybe at the weekend he’d bring Toni for a visit. Sunday, if he didn’t spend it getting drunk and snogging Luis.
Like that’s happening again.
Paolo’s heart didn’t believe that either.
The nurses arrived to give Nonna a bath. Paolo took his cue and left. On the bus home, he sent the video message to Toni and left out the part about the hospital trip. The X-rays hadn’t revealed anything new.
He got off the bus at the wrong end of the high street. The walk back woke him up after the stuffy bus ride, and as he got closer to the cafe, he found himself jogging.
The front door was locked, but the lights were on.
It felt like a metaphor Paolo didn’t quite understand. Then he saw Luis, sat at the family table, slumped over a newspaper, and nothing else seemed to matter. He rapped on the door. Luis didn’t hear him. Paolo pulled out his phone and tapped out a message.
i’m here, let me in
Luis’s phone flashed with the incoming message. He glanced at it and blurred across the cafe, moving faster than his tall frame should’ve allowed.
He unlocked the front door and pulled Paolo inside. “How is she? Is she okay?”
“She is now. They gave her an injection to help the inflammation.” Paolo gazed around the cafe. It was spotless, cleaner than Paolo had ever left it in his entire life. The condiment bottles were full and wiped down, sugar packets topped up. Even the floor had been mopped and dried. “Wow. You went to town on this place. Was it that quiet?”
Luis shrugged. “The road was closed, remember? I left the order tickets by the till so you could match them up to the cash count. The card receipts are behind the twenties.”
“Match them up? You think I pay that much attention?”
“Maybe, after you’ve left an ex-con in charge of your family business.”
“Did you go to prison for stealing things?”
“Kind of.”
Curiosity bubbled in Paolo’s gut, but he swallowed it down. Toni had warned him against prying too deep into that part of Luis’s story. “Leave the past where it belongs, boy. Dragging it up won’t help us trust him.”
Us. At the time, the word had infuriated Paolo. Where was the “us” when it was him who had to make the decision and bear the weight if he got it wrong? But Toni had been more right that he’d ever know. Paolo didn’t care about Luis’s mistakes. Fuck knows, he’d made plenty of his own.
He wandered to the till and opened the drawer. The cash levels looked the same as they always did after a weekday shift, especially one where traffic had been blocked off for most of it. He flipped through the card receipts and then the order slips Luis had clipped together in a neat stack. “Jesus. That’s a lot of full fry-ups to cook by yourself. Are we gonna get rinsed on Trip Advisor?”
“Didn’t have any complaints, so I hope not, mate.”
Puzzled, Paolo slipped into the kitchen and inspected the fridge, the surgically clean dishwasher, and the dry store. He went back out front, studied the grill, and found it as clean as it had been when Uncle Romeo had installed it twenty years ago. What am I missing?
He spun around. While he’d run his inspection, Luis had gone back to his newspaper.
Paolo crossed the cafe and pulled out a chair dramatically enough to make Luis look up, though he didn’t sit down. “All right. Spill. There’s no way you ran that service by yourself with no training or experience. What gives?”
Luis sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “Nothing gives. I told you I could handle it, and I did. Did you want me to fuck it up?”
“No. I just had no idea you could run the cafe singlehanded without me. Do you seriously think I’d have left you washing dishes all this time if I had?”
“I don’t think you’d have ever left me alone regardless. You’re a control freak, and I’m a convicted criminal.”
Luis spoke with no inflection. Facts, not accusations.
Nothing Paolo could deny. “I’d never have left you because I didn’t need to. But I wouldn’t have kept you washing dishes and doing the shitty jobs all the time.”
“I know.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
Luis started to shrug. Paolo growled and yanked him to his feet.
If Luis