CHAPTER 13
DANTE
Three captains come to see me in the same week, and all three versions of the conversation end at the same address.
Rafe Donato is the only one who says it in a room with the windows open.
“The family is bleeding,” he says. “Matteo’s selling the port to marry it, the Russo girl is stripping his house for parts, and half the men are asking why the consigliere does the thinking while the son does the posting on social media.
” He pours himself three fingers of my whiskey without asking, an old man’s privilege.
“You should have had it twenty years ago and we both know it. Say the word, Dante. I’ll carry it to the others. ”
“No.”
“The family—”
“The family is not a consolation prize for my cousin’s bad marriage.
” I take the glass out of his hand and set it aside, and I give him the truth because Rafe has earned truth.
“If I move on Matteo now, it will never be clean. Every man who joined me would believe he knew why — the wife, the boy, the insult. I would spend the rest of my life as the man who took his cousin’s house over a woman, and she would spend hers as the woman two men fought over.
She’s had enough of being the reason for things.
She’s never once been allowed to just be a person. ”
Rafe considers me. “You love her,” he says. It’s not an accusation. In Rafe’s generation it isn’t even surprising. It’s simply information, like the tide.
“I love her,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said it aloud in nine years, and it costs me less than I expected, which worries me more than the admission.
“And that’s why you won’t move.”
“That’s why I won’t use her,” I say. “Different thing. Learn the difference, because if I ever do lead this family, that’s going to be the whole job description.”
He leaves unconvinced but loyal, which at our age is the same as convinced.
The second captain is younger and blunter and comes through channels, and I send him home with a warning he doesn’t enjoy.
The third never reaches me at all — he gets as far as Pietro, who tells him the consigliere is not receiving revolutions this month and to go home and be grateful for the omission.
I note all three names. Not for punishment. For memory. The men who came to me when the family wobbled are the men who believe the family deserves better, and there’s honor in that, and honor misdirected is how civil wars introduce themselves. I’ve buried two uncles who learned that late.
I drive to the Shoreline because the custody paperwork needs her signature and because I am, in the end, only a man, and the Shoreline is where she is.
She’s in the kitchen when I arrive, barefoot, hair down, reading school forms with a pencil behind her ear, and the domesticity of it hits me somewhere I don’t inspect.
Nico is at the table building something out of cardboard and tape.
He shows me without being asked — a lighthouse, he informs me, “with a gun on top for pirates” — and I tell him truthfully that it’s the best-defended lighthouse I’ve ever seen, and he grins at me, and I feel the ground of my whole careful life shift another inch.
Getting Nico upstairs takes diplomacy. He has questions about lighthouses, then about pirates, then about whether Pietro really once ate a whole chicken “including the skeleton,” and by the time Rosa steers him up the stairs he has extracted a promise that I’ll come back and inspect the lighthouse’s defenses, which I give, which means I now have a standing appointment with a seven-year-old and his cardboard artillery.
“You’re going to regret that,” Lucia says.
“I’ve survived worse negotiations.”
“He’s seven. You have no idea.” But she’s smiling when she says it, and the smile does what her smiles have done to me for nine years, which is make the next hour of my life measurably harder to spend anywhere else.
After Nico goes up with Rosa, she makes coffee and we sit on the porch in the cold, both of us pretending the sea is interesting.
“He was good with you,” she says. “He doesn’t warm to people. He gets that from me — I vetted every one of his friendships like a border agent.” She wraps her hands around the mug. “Dante. Can I ask you something, and will you give me the truth even if it’s a bad idea?”
“Yes.”
“Have you wanted me? All this time. Since the wedding.”
There it is. Nine years of discipline standing on a porch in the cold, and a direct question, and I made a rule about rooms and honesty a long time ago.
“Yes,” I say. “Since the night you married him. You were standing in that garden in your dress, and everyone in that family was drinking to the deal, and you were so composed it took my breath. I remember thinking: no one here knows what they have. Nothing in nine years has proven me wrong.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” she asks. “One word, Dante. In nine years, one hint, one door left open. You knew my marriage wasn’t legal two years in. You could have—”
“Could have what?” I keep my voice level, because this part matters more than any other part.
“Told you your husband had lied to you since the altar, so that you’d grieve, so that you’d be free, so that I could be nearby when you reached for someone?
Wanting another man’s wife didn’t give me the right to make my desire your burden.
You believed you were married. A man who undermines a marriage he wants ended isn’t in love. He’s shopping.”
She turns and looks at me then, and I watch nine years and ten weeks and one terrible month move through her face, grief and gratitude and loneliness and something warmer underneath, and I know what’s coming a half-second before it comes, and I am not fast enough to stop wanting it.
She kisses me.
And God help me, for one second — one whole, indefensible second — I let it happen. She tastes of coffee and salt air and nine years of my own restraint, and every discipline I own goes quiet at once, and my hand finds her waist like it’s been waiting its entire life for the assignment.
Then I stop her.
It costs me more than anything I’ve ever done, and I’ve done things that keep priests busy. I take her by the shoulders, gently, and I put six inches between us, and I watch her face go from open to shattered in the time it takes to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” she says, pulling back, mortified, wounded. “God. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I— you said you wanted—”
“Lucia.” I keep hold of her shoulders until she looks at me. “Listen to me. I am refusing the moment. I am not refusing you. There is no version of that — none — where you are the thing being rejected.”
“Then why—”
“Because you kissed me ten feet from your son’s bedroom, three weeks after your marriage ended, in the middle of a war with your husband.
” I make myself say the rest of it, all of it, because she deserves the whole shape.
“If I take you now, I become a weapon you used against Matteo, or a shelter you ran into because the storm was bad. Either way, in six months you’d look at me and wonder if I was a choice or a reaction.
I won’t be a reaction. I’ve waited nine years; I can wait until you’re free enough that choosing me means something. ”
“And if I never choose you?” Her voice is raw.
“Then I had the honor of knowing you,” I say, “and the discipline of not ruining it. Both of those are mine to keep.”
“That’s a terrible answer.”
“It’s the only true one I have.”
“You could lie a little,” she says. “For morale.”
“I’ve watched what a charming man’s lies cost you. You’ll get the truth from me one day.”
She looks at me for a long time, and then she laughs — wet, unwilling, real — and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“You know what’s infuriating? You’re right.
I can feel that you’re right. I wanted to feel something that wasn’t grief for five minutes, and you’re standing there being right about it. ”
“I’ve been told right is my least attractive quality.”
“It’s in the top three,” she says, and then she goes pink, and we both pretend the cold is why we stay outside another hour.
We talk about nothing, which is to say everything.
She tells me about the gardener who defected over the roses, and I tell her — edited, consigliere-edited — about the captains, leaving out the part where my refusal had her name in it.
She asks how Chicago was, all those years ago, and I tell her about the winter the lake froze and the old man who ran my building and fed a one-eyed cat he hated.
It’s the most I’ve talked about myself since I was thirty.
At some point she starts shivering too hard to hide it, and I give her my coat — the second one this week; she has a collection forming — and she doesn’t hand it back, and I don’t ask for it.
“Thank you,” she says at the door. “For the truth. For stopping. For making it not about— all of it.”
“Thank me by sleeping,” I say. “You look like a woman holding up a building.”
“That’s because I am one,” she says, and closes the door smiling, and I stand on her porch in the cold for a full extra minute, twenty years younger and twice as stupid.
I leave close to midnight, and the drive back to the city is the loneliest I’ve made in years, which is saying something for a man who has made a career of lonely drives. I did the right thing. I will go on doing the right thing until it kills me or she asks me to stop.
At the house, Pietro is waiting with his coat still on and his face arranged into its bad-news configuration.
“Marco Russo had his lawyers in today,” he says. “Not about the wedding. They’re building a custody file on Lucia. Witnesses, statements — the staff at the mansion, two of them signed things. The play is to pressure her into signing over the properties by going at the boy.”
I stand fixed in my own hallway.
“How far along?”
“Far enough that he’s shopping for a judge.”
“And Valentina?”
“Valentina,” Pietro says, “is the one who suggested it. Marco’s man let it slip. The two signed staff statements describe her as present and distressed during—” He checks his memory. “—‘repeated confrontations initiated by Ms. Moretti.’”
I close my eyes. The slap, the corridor, the staff watching — every one of those moments is being rewritten tonight in a lawyer’s office into a pattern of instability, with the actual injured party cropped out of the frame. It’s elegant. It’s Valentina all over: cruelty delivered as paperwork.
I think about her on that porch, laughing with her eyes wet, finally safe enough to want something. I think about Marco and Valentina, two adherents of the same religion: words on paper obey whoever holds the room.
He’s about to learn what it means in rooms he doesn’t own.
“Get me the file,” I say. “All of it, whatever it costs. And Pietro — find out which judge, and find out what the judge loves.”
Some lines I won’t cross for her.
There’s a longer list of lines I won’t let anyone else cross, and coming for that boy is every one of them.