Chapter 10 - The Salt on the Wind
Six months later—May 1986.
The small coastal boat The Sea Lark dropped its heavy canvas sails as it bumped gently against the creaking wooden pilings of the timber wharf at Black Point, Maine.
The air here didn't smell of coal smoke, hot lard, or the damp grease of city drainage ditches.
It smelled of wild bayberry, cold granite, dry pine needles, and the vast, salty stretch of the open North Atlantic pushing against the iron rocks of the coast.
I stepped off the wooden gangplank onto the wet spruce timber of the dock, wearing a simple navy blue wool coat, carrying my father’s canvas tool bag in my right hand and a small leather suitcase in my left.
The village was small—no more than twenty white-shingled houses clustered along a narrow gravel road that climbed up a steep, pine-covered hill toward a high granite headland.
Sitting at the end of the dock, beside a long wooden shed filled with stacked hemlock logs and rolls of heavy iron cable, was a small, two-story house built of dark cedar shingles that had turned a soft, silvery gray in the salt air.
A blue smoke drifted slowly from its brick chimney, carrying the sweet, clean smell of burning birch wood into the cold morning air.
Standing on the low stone porch of the house, wearing a faded gray wool sweater and a dark canvas apron covered in wood dust, was Alessandro.
He wasn't standing like a Don. He didn't have two captains behind him, or a car idling at the curb with a driver holding his door.
He held a long wooden splitting maul in his right hand, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his forearms tanned dark by the sea sun, his dark hair streaked with fine gray at the temples where the sea wind blew it back from his forehead.
He set the heavy maul down against a birch log and stepped off the stone porch, his heavy work boots clicking softly against the gravel path as he walked toward the dock.
He stopped ten feet away from me.
His gray eyes looked at my face—at my dark hair tucked behind my ears, at my navy blue coat, and then down at my hands.
My left hand was bare.
There was no seven-carat cushion-cut diamond on my third finger. No platinum basket. No military-grade transponder hidden beneath a yellow gold filigree.
Only my skin—smooth, warm, healed—and resting in the palm of my right hand was a small, plain wooden box tied with a thin piece of tarred hemp twine.
"Adriana," he said. His voice was lower than it had been in Chicago, smoother, carrying the quiet rhythm of a man who spent his days listening to the tide come in against the rocks.
"Alessandro," I said.
He looked at the small wooden box in my hand. "What's that?"
"It's a gift," I said, stepping forward across the gravel until I was standing three feet from his chest. "From Mulberry Street."
I untied the tarred hemp twine and opened the plain pine lid.
Sitting inside on a bed of fresh green moss from the woods behind the shop was a single, small silver key—not an iron key for a floor vault, not a brass key for a heavy oak door—but a small, hand-carved silver key designed to fit the drawer of an old watchmaker's bench.
And beside the key lay a simple, thick band of cold-cast yellow gold, set with a single, dark crimson garnet that my father’s tools had burnished into its bezel six months ago.
Alessandro looked at the ring for a long, quiet moment. He didn't reach for it immediately.
He raised his right hand—his fingers rough, calloused from timber logs and cold sea water—and touched the side of my face, his thumb resting gently against the point of my jaw, just as he had in the dark hallway of the Bellini building.
"Is it heavy?" he whispered, his gray eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that held no fear, no secrets, and no shadow of the Romano name.
"No, Alessandro," I said, a soft, beautiful smile breaking across my face as the ocean wind blew my hair across my cheek. "It isn't heavy at all. It’s just gold and dark stone—and it’s light enough to wear anywhere in the world."
He reached into the wooden box, took the yellow gold band between his thumb and forefinger, and slid it onto his own right hand, where it sat clean, bright, and solid against his skin in the clear Maine sunlight.
Then he reached down, took my father’s heavy canvas tool bag from my hand, and turned toward the dark cedar house on the hill.
"Teresa put the tea on twenty minutes ago," he said, holding his left hand out to me, his fingers open, long, and steady under the wide blue sky. "She said if you weren't on this boat... she’d make me go to Chicago and bring you back by your coat collar."
May you like
I took his hand. His skin was warm, hard, smelling of salt air and split birch.
We walked up the gravel path together, toward the white porch, the silver-gray shingles, and the blue ocean stretching out behind us into an unbroken, wide horizon that held no walls, no iron bars, and no shadows of the dead.
