Chapter 5 #2
"Story of this whole club, apparently." He clapped my shoulder, steadying, the way he had a dozen times since I'd ridden back into town. "You know, I always figured you'd make a good dad. Terrifying to everyone else, soft as butter with your own kid. Classic enforcer arc."
"That an educated guess or a prophecy?"
"Bit of both. I've got a good track record." He grinned, some of the weight of the moment easing under the familiar banter. "You ready for tonight?"
"No."
"Good. Nobody's ever ready for the actual moment.
You just show up anyway." He said it with the easy confidence of a man who'd clearly picked up some hard-won wisdom of his own since I'd been gone, though I didn't ask whose it was.
"Go home, clean up, don't show up smelling like an engine.
First impressions matter, even to six-year-olds.
Especially to six-year-olds, honestly, they're brutally honest about that stuff. "
I took his advice, though cleaning up did little to steady the nerves hammering through me by the time six o'clock rolled around and I found myself standing on Lena's porch again, hands shoved deep in my pockets, feeling more unsteady than I had walking into rooms with armed men on the other side of the door.
Lena opened it, and behind her, peering around her legs with open, unguarded curiosity, stood a small boy with dark hair and a stubborn set to his jaw that hit me like a physical blow.
My son.
"Hi," he said, entirely unfazed, studying me with the frank assessment only children manage. "Mama said you know about motorcycles."
Whatever careful speech I'd tried to plan on the ride over evaporated completely.
"I do," I managed. "I've got one outside, if you want to see it."
His eyes went enormous. "Really? Right now?"
"Right now."
"Mama, can I—"
"Go ahead," Lena said, something bright and fragile in her voice, watching the two of us with an expression I couldn't quite name — hope, maybe, or relief, or the particular ache of watching something you'd protected fiercely finally step out into the light.
Nico bolted past me down the porch steps toward the bike parked at the curb, already asking questions faster than I could answer them — how fast does it go, does it have a name, can he sit on it, is the leather seat actually leather or the fake kind — and I followed him down into the golden evening light, my chest so full I could barely breathe around it, watching my son circle my bike with the same wide-eyed wonder I remembered feeling the first time I'd ever seen one, a lifetime ago, in a life that had somehow led me, against every odd, to exactly this moment.
"It's real leather," I told him, crouching down to answer that question first, since it seemed to be the one weighing on him most. "Diesel would never let fake leather anywhere near his garage. Man has standards."
"What if it rains on it?"
"Then I cover it up. Very carefully. Like tucking it into bed."
"That's silly."
"It's extremely silly. I stand by it anyway."
He laughed at that, delighted, and something in my chest cracked open a little wider at the sound of it — my own laugh, almost exactly, echoed back at me from a boy I'd known for less than an hour.
"She's called Mirage," I told him, crouching down to his height. "Because for a long time, coming home felt like something I could see on the horizon but never quite reach."
"Like a magic trick?"
"Something like that."
"Cool." He said it with total, uncomplicated satisfaction, already moving on to more pressing matters, tracing a small finger along the chrome. "Can I sit on it? Mama said I have to ask you now instead of just asking her."
I looked up at Lena, standing on the porch steps watching us both, tears tracking silently down her face, and something in her expression told me she'd just handed me the first of what I hoped would be a thousand small permissions to come — the quiet, enormous gift of letting me finally be his father, out loud, in daylight, no more secrets standing between us.
"Yeah," I told him, lifting him carefully onto the seat, one hand steady at his back. "You can sit on it. Anytime you want."
He gripped the handlebars with both small hands, making an engine noise under his breath that made absolutely no sense mechanically and was somehow the best sound I'd ever heard, and I stood there beside him in the fading light, one hand still braced against his back to steady him, and let myself feel the full weight of the moment without trying to hold it together the way I'd been holding everything together for six long years.
"Is this the fastest one in the club?" he asked.
"Second fastest. Diesel's is faster, but don't tell him I said that."
"Why not?"
"Because he'll never let me hear the end of it."
Nico considered this with real seriousness. "I won't tell. I'm good at secrets."
Something in my chest tightened at that, gentle but unmistakable, and I glanced up at Lena, who'd come down the porch steps to stand a few feet away, watching us both with an expression that mixed grief and hope and something fiercely protective all at once.
"I bet you are," I told him quietly. "I bet you're very good at secrets."
We stayed out there until the streetlights came on, Nico narrating an increasingly elaborate imaginary road trip across the handlebars, and I answered every question he threw at me — favorite color, favorite food, whether I'd ever seen a shark, whether motorcycles could technically fly if they went fast enough — with a patience I hadn't known I had, storing away every single detail of him like a man finally allowed to start collecting what he'd been owed for six long years.
When Lena finally called him in for dinner, he slid off the seat reluctantly, already negotiating for a return visit tomorrow, and paused halfway up the porch steps to look back at me with the same frank, unguarded curiosity he'd greeted me with an hour before.
"Are you gonna come back?" he asked. "Tomorrow, I mean. Not just today."
"Every day," I told him, and meant it with everything I had. "For as long as you'll have me."
"Forever, probably." He said it simply, without any of the weight I felt behind the word myself, already turning to head back inside like the matter was settled beyond any need for further discussion.
He grinned — Lena's smile, my jaw, some impossible, perfect combination of us both — and disappeared inside after his mother, leaving me standing alone on the darkening street beside my bike, six years of grief and hope finally settling into something that felt, for the first time since I'd ridden back into Cala Sirena, almost like home.
I stood there a while longer after the door closed, just breathing, letting the enormity of the evening settle properly into my chest — a son, a name, a laugh that echoed my own, a whole future that had felt impossible three weeks ago now stretching out ahead of me, solid and real and entirely worth staying for.
Six years of running, and it turned out the finish line had been waiting right here the whole time, small and stubborn and utterly unaware of how completely he'd just rearranged my entire world.
I finally turned back toward the garage, my chest still full to bursting, already looking forward to tomorrow in a way I hadn't let myself look forward to anything in longer than I cared to admit.