Nico

Priya Raman is twenty-one and she was playing the second cello part at a private party in a restaurant in Queens. That's all. Then she walked into the coatroom to find her gloves, and the four men at the table stopped talking, and one of them said her name, and the oldest man in the room stood up and told her to come with him. Nico Sabatini is fifty years old. He owns restaurants, three of them, and a wholesale produce business, and everybody at that table owed him a favor. He doesn't hurt her. He hides her, in a small house at the edge of the ocean, with a piano, a fridge, and a man on the door who used to cut Priya's hair when she was nine. She has an audition in eleven weeks. He brings her rosin every Thursday. What happens in the eleven weeks is not something either of them can say out loud, and at the end of it, one of them has to leave first.