Chapter 4 #2
Halfway home, I stopped at the little shrine set into the wall near the old chapel, the one every local passed a hundred times without noticing, candles guttering in small glass jars, faded photographs of people long gone tucked into the stone.
My grandmother used to stop here every Sunday without fail, crossing herself, murmuring something under her breath I was never quite close enough to hear.
I didn't consider myself especially devout.
But I stood there a long moment anyway, in the fading afternoon light, and let myself ask for something I couldn't quite put into words — courage, maybe, or forgiveness, or just the simple mercy of getting through tomorrow without breaking something that couldn't be mended.
An old woman tending the candles glanced over at me, kind-eyed, unhurried. "You look like you're carrying something heavy, cara."
"I am."
"The wall's good for that. Leave a little of it here if you can.
" She smiled, gap-toothed and warm, and lit one more candle without being asked, setting it in an empty space like she was making room for whatever I needed to set down.
"Whatever it is, it gets lighter once it's said out loud.
Heavier things get carried alone. That's just how weight works. "
I thanked her, though I wasn't sure what exactly I was thanking her for, and kept walking, her words settling into the same place in my chest where all of Juliet's advice had landed, quiet and steady and impossible to argue with.
I picked Nico up from school, and he chattered the whole walk home about dinosaurs and submarines and a boy named Matteo who'd apparently eaten a crayon on a dare, and I listened, and laughed in the right places, and held onto every ordinary detail of it like it might be one of the last easy afternoons before everything changed.
"Mama, do you think dinosaurs could drive submarines if they were still alive?"
"I think that's a very specific hypothetical."
"It's important, though." He said this with total seriousness, hopping over a crack in the sidewalk like it was a matter of principle. "Because if they could, that changes everything about the ocean."
"How does it change everything about the ocean?"
"Because then the ocean would have dinosaurs in submarines, and that's basically a different ocean than the one we have now." He looked up at me like this was self-evident, and I had to work very hard not to laugh at the gravity of his logic.
"That's a fair point."
"I know." He grinned, satisfied, and reached for my hand as we crossed the street, small fingers wrapping around mine with the total unthinking trust of a child who had never once had reason to doubt that his mother would keep him safe.
That trust sat heavy in my chest the rest of the walk home.
I thought about what Juliet had said — that I'd kept him safe, fed, loved, thriving — and I wanted so badly to believe that was enough to balance out the six years of silence, but some part of me kept circling back to the same fear.
What if safety and secrecy had never actually been the same thing?
What if I'd told myself they were, for six years, because it was easier than admitting I was also protecting myself — my own careful, contained life — as much as I was protecting him?
I didn't have an answer. I wasn't sure I'd have one even after tomorrow.
We made dinner together, Nico standing on his step stool at the counter, solemnly stirring a pot of pasta sauce with more concentration than the task strictly required.
"Can I taste it?"
"Careful, it's hot."
He blew on the spoon with exaggerated caution, tasted it, and made a face of such profound culinary judgment that I nearly dropped the wooden spoon laughing.
"It needs something."
"What does it need?"
"I don't know. More something." He considered the pot with real gravity. "Papa would know. He probably knows about sauce."
The spoon nearly slipped out of my hand.
It wasn't the first time he'd said it — Papa was a fixture in his imagination, built out of the handful of vague, careful answers I'd given him over the years whenever he asked where his father was, answers that had always stopped just short of a lie and just short of the whole truth too.
He's far away, doing important work. He loves you, even from far away.
Someday you'll understand more. I'd told myself those answers were kind.
Standing in my kitchen watching my son confidently invent a version of his father who knew things about pasta sauce, I wasn't so sure anymore.
"Maybe," I said carefully. "I don't actually know if he's good at sauce."
"I bet he is. I bet he's good at everything." Nico said it with the total, uncomplicated faith of a child who'd never had reason to doubt the story he'd built for himself, and it broke something open in my chest, gentle and devastating all at once.
I put him to bed early that night, worn out from dinosaurs and submarines and pasta sauce criticism, and sat on the edge of his bed a long moment after his breathing evened out, the way I did most nights, memorizing the shape of him in the dark.
"Tomorrow," I whispered, "you're going to have a real answer instead of a made-up one. I hope that's the right choice. I hope I'm not about to break something that can't be put back together."
He didn't stir. Six years old, entirely unaware that his mother was standing at the edge of the biggest decision of both their lives, and some small, fierce part of me was grateful for that — grateful he got one more ordinary night before everything shifted, one more evening of dinosaurs and submarines instead of complicated truths about fathers and secrets and six years of silence.
I went downstairs and poured myself a small glass of wine I barely touched, and sat at the kitchen table with a blank piece of paper and tried to write down what I wanted to say, the way Juliet had gently suggested, something to hold onto if the words failed me in the moment.
I got as far as Tomas, there's something I should have told you six years ago before I set the pen down, because no amount of rehearsal was going to make tomorrow easier.
Some things you just have to walk into.
I sent the text before I could talk myself out of it, fingers steadier than I expected.
Me: Tomorrow. Same time. I'll tell you everything. I promise.
The reply came back within a minute, three words that somehow steadied me more than anything Juliet had said all afternoon.
Hawk: I'll be there.
I sat with my phone in my hands a long time after that, staring at those three words, feeling the shape of tomorrow settling over me like weather rolling in — inevitable now, unstoppable, and for the first time in six years, something almost like relief threading through all the fear.
I thought about the candle the old woman had lit, small and steady in its glass jar, and about her voice telling me that weight gets lighter once it's said out loud.
I hoped she was right. I hoped tomorrow proved her right, because I didn't have another six years of carrying this alone left in me, not really, not underneath the careful, capable face I'd worn for so long that I'd nearly forgotten what it felt like not to wear it.
I turned off the lamp and sat a while longer in the dark kitchen, listening to the house settle around me, the same familiar creaks and quiet sounds that had kept me company through six years of solitary evenings. Tomorrow, for better or worse, that solitude was ending.
Whatever came next, at least it wouldn't be a secret anymore.