Soren - 1 year
She thought I forgot her birthday.
She had way too much pride to say it, of course, but I kept catching her looking at me with scrunched brows as we made our way into our building.
Little did she know, I’d been planning this thing for weeks.
Fine, to be fair, Teresa had handled a lot of the specifics, but the idea itself was my idea. And the gift I’d been working on behind her back for months was all on me.
I said a silent prayer that when the doors slid open, everyone in the apartment was ready. And that Saff didn’t hear them before they could do the cheesy yell Surprise! thing.
“Soren, did you know that today—” she started.
My heart swelled a bit at that. The Saff she’d been just a year before would have seethed in silence, never would have brought it up, wouldn’t want anyone to know she could be hurt.
But over our time together, she’d learned that she didn’t need her walls, that she could trust me with her feelings, that we did well when we communicated what was going on inside us.
But before she could finish, the doors slid open, and everyone she knew and loved erupted in a cheer.
“Surprise!”
Old habits died hard.
And Saff’s hand went for the knife on her keychain before she realized it was her friends and family gathered around our apartment, there to celebrate the fact that she’d been born.
Saff’s eyes flooded as she turned to me.
“Happy birthday, darlin’,” I said, pulling her face against my chest because I knew she didn’t want everyone else to see the tears.
“I thought you forgot,” she said, voice muffled against my suit jacket.
“I know,” I said, my hand rubbing up and down her back. “Which made the surprise better. But I could never forget. I’m really happy you were born, Saff. That’s definitely worth celebrating.”
“I love you,” she murmured.
“I love you too.”
She gave me one hard hug before pulling away and walking into the apartment to greet her loved ones.
She was plied with some booze, tons of food, and then inundated with gifts that leaned heavily toward one of two directions: weapons, or office supply items. Because both things still perfectly suited her.
Once everyone had fully celebrated her, they started to head out and I snuck upstairs to the library to take her present out of its new home and gently place it back in the box that had arrived at the post office earlier that afternoon.
It had been picked up by T, who stuck it in the library for me, to help me keep the secret.
“I know, bud,” I said as he cooed at me, annoyed to go back in his shipping box. “Just two more minutes, I promise.”
With that, I closed the cardboard box and carried it out of the library.
“Close your eyes for me, darlin’,” I demanded.
“Hold on. Let me get to the couch,” she called, her voice a little high and airy, her excitement evident. “Okay. I’m ready.”
I carefully made my way down the stairs then set the box on the coffee table in front of her.
“Okay. Open.”
She looked up at me before she noticed the box on the table.
“No!” she said, eyes round, lips parted. “No, you didn’t.”
“I did.”
Of course, I did.
How could I not?
I constantly found her scrolling for rescue pigeons on her phone. She fell in love with each of them, telling me their stories, talking about how cute they were.
For the first few months, I’d tried to find her her very own New York City sick or needy pigeon.
Eventually, though, I had to go with the rescue she followed online.
And so, now we were a family of three.
Saff seemed about to burst out of her skin as she lunged at the box, then carefully pushed the lid down to loosen it.
“Oh, hey! Hey, baby,” she cooed at the black and white pigeon with a tiny splash of green on his neck. “Oh, I know you! You’re Dominic.”
Yes, he was.
“You were found on your side in an underpass in Chicago. You little survivor, you.”
“You can touch him. He’s friendly.”
“Can I?” she asked the pigeon as she offered her hands.
He tilted his head then stepped right into them.
“You’re home now, baby,” she told him as she carefully lifted him. “We’re going to give you such a special life. No more streets for you.”
Her eyes filled again.
“Thank you,” she said, sniffling hard as the pigeon hopped out of her hand to fly over to her shoulder. “We have so many things to buy.”
“He has an enclosure. Ledges. Food and water dishes. Soft beds. Seed. Red grit. Oh, and a few of those diaper things, so he doesn’t mess up the whole apartment.”
“You… planned.”
“I researched and planned for months.”
“This is the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”
I moved over to sit beside her as Dominic toyed with her hair.
“Does it make up for that baking… mishap?”
“Mishap? That was deliberate poisoning.”
“It was the tiniest pinch of nutmeg known to mankind.”
“I still tasted it.”
Yes, she had. Then demanded I remake the apple turnovers without it.
“I will never try to expand your taste buds again.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” she said, leaning into me.
Saff - 3 years
“There’s something wrong with this coffee,” I said, waddling out of my office to put my strawberry mug—one of ten I now kept stocked at my coffee station—down on my assistant’s desk.
Her name was Gina, and she was an old girlfriend of Teresa’s who’d taken twenty years off of work to raise six children. To say she was capable of handling any catastrophe—whether real or made-up thanks to my own overreacting—was an understatement.
“The coffee is just fine,” she said with a wave of her dainty wrist, sending no fewer than four gold bracelets jangling.
“It tastes funny.”
“Maybe your taste buds are funky.”
I could always tell Gina was bullshitting me when she started shuffling things around on her desk. Just like she was right then.
“What’d you do to my coffee?”
“Made you a fresh cup like the intuitive, capable, and kind assistant I am,” she said, that accent of hers getting thicker as she spoke. “Heaven forbid I do my job.”
“Gina…”
“What?” she barked, tone fake-exasperated, tossing her long wavy brown hair.
“Why does the coffee that has tasted the exact same for the past few years suddenly taste different?” It was milder, less bitter.
“Listen, I’ve been in your shoes six times, miss ma’am. And that last time, I did it with five kids already tugging at my apron strings. But we still have to make smart decisions about what we put in our bodies.”
“Didn’t you tell me that during your first pregnancy you ate nothing but garlic knots and brownie batter ice cream?”
“Yes, well, you know better, you do better. I am imparting my hard-earned wisdom on you.”
“It’s decaf, isn’t it?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at her.
“You drink too much coffee.”
“I’ve cut down.”
“Your ‘cut down’ is a normal person’s consumption after being awake for forty-eight hours straight.”
“Decaf is gross.”
“Caffeine can cause small babies.”
“Well, this baby,” I said, pressing a hand to my stomach, “is measuring large for this stage in development.”
“Because its daddy is a giant. Look, you’re in the home stretch now. And this is the worst time to be drinking extra caffeine. So, just stick it out with the decaf for the next couple of weeks. If you’re tired, take a nap. That’s why that handsome man of yours had a sectional delivered to your office the moment the stick turned blue.”
“I can’t nap. I have—”
“A little human being growing inside of you who needs a healthy, low-stress momma. And a very capable assistant to pick up any slack. I’m looking for an excuse not to go home.” At my raised brow, she rolled her eyes. “My Christopher had to get a tooth filled today. Which means he’s basically acting like someone has strapped him down and pulled all his teeth. I can’t deal with him when he’s like this.
“You know he once had a cold. A little baby cold. And refused to get out of bed for ten days. Ten. He smelled like a damn locker room. I had to sleep in my daughter’s room. Then toss the sheets. There are some stinks that no amount of perfumed laundry detergent can get out.
“What were we talking about?”
“Naps.”
“Right. So waddle yourself back into that fancy office of yours, put on some calming music, curl up on the couch, pull down that fuzzy blanket, and get some rest.”
“It’s only eleven.”
“And yet you’ve yawned three times just during this conversation.”
“You’re worse than Soren,” I grumbled. “He insists on walking behind me each time I go up the stairs. Every single time.”
“That’s a good man you have there. Besides, those steps are a deathtrap. I’ve been saying that from the beginning.”
“We’re having someone in to put up sides.”
The whole apartment was being picked apart with a fine-tooth comb by a baby safety expert. Seeing as neither of us had much experience with babies, we were being paranoid about getting every inch of the place baby-proofed.
We’d also taken parenting classes, birthing classes, and CPR and first aid classes.
Though a part of me really, really regretted the birthing documentary we watched. I was pretty sure I would have preferred to go into my own delivery just blissfully unaware of… all that.
“Well, thank God for that.”
“Thank God for what?” Soren asked, stepping out of the elevator.
“Our step plan.”
“Good. You’re here. Convince this woman of yours to take a nap, will you?”
“You were restless last night.”
“You try having someone use your bladder as a trampoline and see how well you sleep.”
“All the more reason for a nap,” Gina insisted.
“I have to agree.”
“Ugh. You guys teaming up against me is annoying.”
“See? She’s grouchy because she’s tired,” Gina said, nodding.
“It’s just my personality.”
“Come on. Let’s get you off those feet,” he said, glancing down at the slippers I was wearing because my feet had started swelling enough that I couldn’t fit in my old shoes anymore.
“Fine,” I grumbled.
I wouldn’t admit it to the two of them, but I was actually pretty tired. Which was nothing new. I’d been bone-deep tired my entire pregnancy. But I’d decided that it was a fair price to pay for the fact that I didn’t have my head in a toilet for three months like a lot of the other women in the family I knew who’d gotten pregnant around the same time.
“She switched me to decaf,” I told Soren, kicking off my slippers.
“She’s been slowly transitioning you to decaf for weeks,” he told me.
“You’ve been complicit in her tampering with my food?” He sat down on the sectional, avoiding eye contact. “Oh, my God. You’ve been doing it too.”
“I have,” he admitted, reaching for me. “And until today, you didn’t even notice.”
“Is there anything else you’ve been doing behind my back?” I asked as I settled against him.
“I’ve been setting up a trust for this little one,” he said, placing a hand on my belly. “And sending out Thank You cards for all that stuff clogging up the library.”
I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Getting the wedding ones out just in time for a bunch of baby stuff to come rolling in,” I said as his free hand hit that spot in my lower back he knew had been killing me since my belly went from bump to basketball.
“You know, Gina and T would be all too happy to help with all that sorting and such. They’re really excited to be aunties.”
They were.
It was sweet, actually.
The two of them were working on my baby shower with personal input from Lore, Cinna, Elizabeth, and all the other girls from the family.
“We’re going to be overflowing with help when the baby comes,” he said.
“Thank God. Because we have no idea what we are getting into.”
“You opened two businesses in a year, darlin’, you can do anything.”
“Well, that’s true.”
I was surprised how easily I hung up one hat and put on another. Especially when this particular hat didn’t allow for a lot of brass knuckles and kicking guys in the balls.
I guess that part was easily enough explained.
I no longer needed to hold onto my anger. I didn’t have to physically fight for respect.
And the same ambition that moved me up the ranks in the mafia helped me start to build my own little legit empire.
It had never been about wanting to be in the mob, per se. It had been that becoming a part of the Lombardi family had been the only path off the street, the only way I could grab and hold power and find the safety that came along with a family and wealth.
And while, no, I could no longer claim I was a mafia capo, I wasn’t exactly entirely out of the organization either. Renzo was moving money through Alibi and my other two businesses as well.
I didn’t even take a fee for washing it.
It was my way of saying thank you to Renzo for the chance he took on me. And all the shit he put up with from me over the years when I’d still been working through my past trauma, my anger, and my fear.
Was I still short-tempered and prone to overreacting? Sure. But time and love had softened my sharpest edges so I no longer ripped open anyone who tried to reach out to me.
I was the same woman I’d been before Soren. Just someone who was more comfortable with a softer life.
Which was good since we were bringing a baby into the world.
We hadn’t been planning on it. At least not yet. But I’d started on a new birth control pill and, well, it just hadn’t been as effective as the last one.
Soren pulled the blanket down over me and his hands went to my scalp, rubbing it the way he knew I liked.
“Maybe a nap is a good idea,” I decided with a big yawn.
Soren’s laugh shook beneath me before his lips pressed to my head.
Soren - 14 years
“Uh-oh,” I said, pausing in pulling groceries out of a bag on the kitchen island.
Saff was making her way into the apartment at noon on a Wednesday with our daughter beside her.
“Are you sick?” I asked the little girl who was a copy-paste of her mother, except that we both figured she was going to be taller than her mother within a few more years.
“Suspended,” Saff explained.
It wasn’t every day your eleven-year-old got suspended. But, like I’d said, our little girl was just like her mother.
“Oh, yeah? For what?”
“Well, officially, bullying,” Saff said.
I narrowed my eyes. “And unofficially?”
Because my daughter might have been a lot of things—stubborn, opinionated, strong in her convictions—but she was no bully.
“She made a boy cry.”
“Why?”
“He said girls should be in the kitchen when Milly said she’s going to be a doctor,” our girl said, chin lifting, refusing to be sorry for defending her friend.
“How’d you make him cry?”
“Well, let’s just say she told him that he would never amount to anything in life and would probably live with his mother forever because no girl was ever going to love him,” Saff told me.
“You said I can’t hit someone unless they hit me first,” our girl said. “So, I used my words .”
With that, she grabbed a bag of chips and practically skipped upstairs. Where she would likely free Dominic from his enclosure, put him in his diaper, then let him sit with her while she read for hours.
“In our defense, we really have hammered home how she needs to use her words,” Saff said, wincing. “How could we know that her words could completely dismantle someone’s identity?” She reached for her own bag of chips, pulling it open. “And, to be fair, she probably wasn’t wrong.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But we should probably explain that she has to get her point across without reducing someone to tears.” At Saff’s narrowed eyes, I added, “So she at least doesn’t get kicked out of school.”
“Fine. But I’m not grounding her.”
“Like it would be any kind of punishment to make her stay in her room. Where everything she loves is.”
“True,” she agreed. “So, are you cooking?”
“Chicken parm. You gonna keep me company?”
“I have a better idea,” she said, putting the bag of chicken back into the fridge.
“What’s that?”
“We order pizza and read that new book that came in yesterday.”
“I like the way you think.”
XX