One More Night With the Biker

On the night she finally runs, Caterina Bellini, twenty-four, loses control of her grandmother's Panda at a junction on the outskirts of Rome and hits the bike of Rocco Vitale, the club's enforcer.

Rocco is a man who counts his debts and keeps his word, and every year on the same October date he rides out alone to the shuttered ice-cream shop on Via Ostiense where his friend Isaac once swept the floor. He takes the injured stranger back to the club's workshop, where the club's doctor patches her up, and tells himself that one night is all he is giving her.

One night becomes a week, then a season. Caterina takes a job in a kitchen, learns the rules of a brotherhood built on loyalty and unwritten law, and finds a place at the long table. Rocco, who has never let anyone near, learns how to ask for permission before he touches her.

But her stepfather and her mother are not done with her, someone inside the club is leaking where she is, and the thing that happened to Rocco and Isaac ten years ago has a name that men still refuse to say out loud.

They build a life together through a wedding, a hallway mirror that breaks the wrong way, a hard winter and a man who finally goes to a therapist, while a kidnapping, a trial and a vote of the club tell them whether love can survive what each of them is carrying.