33. Valentina
VALENTINA
The world does not end the way you expect it to.
I had always assumed that when mine finally came apart it would do it loudly, with sirens or gunfire or my brother's hand closing on my arm, because loud is the only way my family has ever done anything.
Instead it ended in a quiet room, in a steady voice telling me the truth I had been begging him for, and then it went on not-ending for three more days, which turned out to be the cruelest part of all.
There was no wreckage to climb out of. There was only me, still breathing, in a house that looked exactly as it had the morning before, carrying a thing too big to set down and too heavy to keep holding.
I could not make the two halves of him fit into one man.
That was what broke me, not the murder, not even Marco, but the arithmetic I could not solve no matter how many times I ran it in the dark.
Either Maxim loved me, the way he had finally said he had no right to and meant it anyway, or I had been the last piece of a revenge eight years in the building, the Ricci he could finally get his hands on.
I could not hold both at once. And the thing that gutted me was that the very same facts fit both stories without a single seam showing.
Every tender thing he had ever done for me read as love.
It also read, word for word, as a patient man being careful with a tool he fully intended to use.
I have been afraid of precisely this my whole life.
It was not the fear of being unloved; that would almost be simpler.
I have been afraid of being used by someone wearing love's face, and never being able to tell the difference until it was far too late to matter.
My father loved me and traded me to the Falcones like a parcel.
My brother kissed my cheek and kept a ledger with my name down in the asset column.
I had spent my whole life learning that in my family, affection and usefulness are the same currency spent two ways, and I had walked into this house swearing I would never again be a thing that gets kept only because it is worth keeping.
Now the one man who had ever made me feel like a person had told me, in his own unflinching voice, that he had begun by seeing me as exactly that: a piece, a move.
It was the fear I was born holding, confirmed at last in the mouth of the one person I had finally risked trusting to disprove it.
And there was the other grief, the one I had no right to and could not put down.
I was mourning my family. Not the real one, the one I actually have, the trafficker father and the murderer brother, but the one I had let myself half-believe in for as long as I could remember, the warm fiction where Marco was only ruthless and never truly evil, where my father was only weak and never complicit, where the Riccis were a hard and frightening family but at least they were mine.
That family died in the quiet room too. Marco had not only killed a stranger eight years ago.
He had killed the last brother I was allowed to keep, the one who still teased me about looking like our mother, and now I would have to grieve that boy while knowing he had never once existed.
I stopped going to the monitor room. That was the first thing, and he let me, which I hated and needed in exactly equal measure.
For three days we moved through the same wing like two people stepping around something broken on the floor that neither would name.
He did not push. He did not come at me with explanations or apologies or any of the soft landings he had so deliberately refused me the night he told me, and some bitter part of me wanted him to, just so I would have something solid to push back against. The rest of me knew that if he had, I would have trusted him even less.
June found me on the third afternoon, because June finds everything. She came into my room without knocking, still moving gingerly on the side where her ribs were knitting, took one look at my face, and sat down on the end of the bed like a woman who had decided to stay a while.
“You look,” she said, “like somebody just told you the floor isn't real.”
“You’re being generous.”
“Is it him?” She did not ask it gently. June does not do gentle when she suspects gentle will only help you hide. “Did he do something to you?”
“He told me the truth,” I said. “All of it.
The thing I kept demanding from him. It turns out you should be careful what you go digging for in a man like that, because some of it does not come back out of you once it's in.” She waited.
June is very good at waiting. It is the only time she is ever quiet.
“My brother murdered someone Maxim loved. Years ago. And the only reason Maxim ever came near me, the reason he walked into that gallery and took me at all, was that. Because of what my family is. I was not a person to him at the beginning. I was a way in.”
June was silent for a long moment, which from her is practically an aria. “At the beginning,” she said.
“June.”
“No, I heard you. I restore forgeries for a living, Val. I listen for where the weight lands in a sentence. You said at the beginning. You did not say at the end.”
“I can't tell the beginning from a performance anymore. That is the whole sickness of it. I can't tell if the end is real or if it is just the part of a long con where the mark finally stops fighting and calls it love.”
“You are not a mark.”
“That is exactly what a mark believes, right up until the trapdoor opens under her.”
June reached over and took my hand, which she almost never does, because June thinks touching is for people who have run clean out of better arguments.
“I have watched that man,” she said. “I have watched the way he looks at you when he is sure no one is in the room to see it.
I spend my days telling real from fake under terrible light, and I know which one that is.
But I am not the one who has to believe it.
You are. And right now you can't, and that is not a defect in you, Val.
It is a wound. Wounds don't lose arguments. They just take their time.”
The one time he and I truly spoke, it was nothing, and it was everything.
I came into the kitchen at the wrong hour and he was already there, and we both went still, like two animals that had caught each other's scent in the dark.
He said my name. Only my name, in the particular way he says it, and for one treacherous second my whole body leaned toward him before my mind caught up and hauled it back by the collar.
“Don't,” I said.
“I wasn't going to.”
“You were going to say something true and quiet and make me feel it in my chest. Don't. I can't tell anymore which of my feelings are actually mine and which ones you built in me on purpose.”
He absorbed that the way he absorbs everything I throw at him, without flinching, which only made it worse. “That's fair,” he said. Then he set down what he was holding and left me the whole kitchen and walked out, and I stood there despising how badly I had wanted him to stay and fight me for it.
Underneath all of it, my body had begun coming apart in a quiet mutiny of its own.
I had been so far inside my own head that I barely noticed, and when I finally did, I had an explanation ready, because I always have an explanation ready.
I was exhausted in a way that sleep did not touch.
I would stand up too fast and the room would tilt and go gray at the edges.
Smells turned traitor on me. The coffee I have loved my entire life went thick and wrong in my throat, and twice the smell of cooking I normally adore sent me quietly out of a room with my hand pressed over my mouth.
I was queasy by morning and hollow by noon, could not keep food down, and could not have told you why.
Baba Nadia saw it before I did, because nothing moves through her kitchen that she misses.
She set a plate in front of me without being asked, plain bread and clear broth, food for the sick, and when I looked up she was watching me with an expression I could not place, something old and knowing and very nearly soft, which is not a thing that woman's face does.
“Eat the bread,” she said. “Dry. Small bites. It settles the worst of it.”
“Settles what?”
She held my eyes a beat too long. “A body under strain,” she said at last, and turned back to her pots, and I was too tired and too heartbroken to wonder why a woman who has buried half a war would look at one queasy girl as though she had just recognized something she had decided not to be the one to say out loud.
I told myself the obvious thing, because the obvious thing was kind.
My body had been running on pure terror and adrenaline for three months, ever since a man in a dark coat walked into a gallery and dismantled my whole life and then, far worse, handed me a new one I was now standing here watching burn.
You cannot live that long with your nervous system screaming and not have it send you the bill in the end.
Grief does this. Fear does this. I had read it somewhere, or I told myself I had.
The body keeps the score, and mine had a great deal left to settle.
It was the neatest, saddest, most reasonable explanation in the world, and it let me go on avoiding the one small piece of arithmetic that I, of all the counting women alive, had somehow not yet sat down and done.
It crested on the third night, or maybe the fourth, in the small hours when the house finally went quiet enough that I could hear myself think.
I woke up sick, truly sick, and made it to the bathroom just in time, and then I could not get back up off the floor afterward, and a part of me did not even want to.
The tile was cold under my legs. I pressed both palms flat against it and stayed there, a grown woman folded up on a bathroom floor at three in the morning inside a fortress full of people who would die for me on a single word from the man who took me, more completely alone than I have ever been.
I grieved all of it down there on the floor.
I grieved Katya, a girl I never got to meet, who had my eye and caught my brother's worst luck.
I grieved the family I had invented and the brother I had loved and the father who sold me and the version of myself that had walked into this place certain that, whatever else turned out to be a lie, at least she knew the shape of her own heart.
I grieved the man down the hall most of all, and that was the cruelest part, because I could not even decide if I had the right to, could not tell whether I was mourning a real love or only the most beautiful cage anyone had ever built for me, the kind that comes with drawing lessons and warm hands and a door left standing open so the prisoner forgets it was ever locked at all.
And then, because I am my mother's daughter and her mother's before her, because the women in my family do not get to lie on bathroom floors forever no matter how thoroughly the floor has earned us, I planted my hands and I breathed and I said the thing I have said to myself in every bad room of my whole life.
Out loud, barely above nothing, to the cold tile and the dark.
“Get it together, Val.”
And I had no idea at all. With my forehead pressed to the floor in the worst hour of the worst night I had ever lived, I did not know that I was no longer speaking to just one person. For the first time in my life, when I told myself to hold on, I was saying it to two.