Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Luca
The road into the cemetery is all cracked asphalt and low stone walls, the kind of place that’s forgotten except on holidays and birthdays. Cypress trees throw long shadows across both plots that have been lovingly tended, and some that nobody has touched in years.
The gate’s hinge complains when I push it open, the same way it always has, and for a second, I’m just a teenager with a corsage in my hand waiting at Carlotta’s door to take her to Homecoming.
I don’t bring flowers. It’s the first time I’ve been able to bring myself here since getting out, and I don’t want to look like I’m sucking up.
She’ll know it. She’s always seen right through me.
The gravel gives under my shoes and pops like old knuckles. Names tilt on either side of the path—some crowded with plastic bouquets, some clean as a recently cleared table.
The air smells like cut grass and wet stone. A bee noses a cracked vase and decides against it. I count the rows until I reach the right one.
There she is. Simple white marble, a little cross I never would’ve chosen if her sister hadn’t insisted. The dates hit me like a sucker punch—numbers that shouldn’t sit that close together.
Someone’s been here; the dust lying on the top is fresh and light. For a second, all I can see is our bedroom instead of a cemetery—one hip propped against the dresser, laughing at me while she sees straight through whatever story I’m trying to sell.
I stop short. My chest tightens the way it does when a fight’s over and you realize how much you were holding your breath. The stone is smaller than I imagined, but somehow, it’s just right. She wouldn’t have wanted something big and gaudy.
I clear my throat, and the sound feels too loud in the silence.
“Ciao, amore,” I say, and my voice carries over the sleeping dead. I set my palm on the top of the stone, letting the cool seep into my heated skin. “Mi dispiace.”
I let the apology float in the air for a moment before continuing.
“I should’ve come sooner.” Wind moves through the trees nearby, rustling the leaves. “I know that sounds like an excuse, but… I couldn’t. Even after all these years, it never felt real, but standing here makes it so.”
My hand tightens into a fist on top of the stone.
“If I didn’t come, maybe I could keep lying to myself. Keep you in the house, next to me in bed, in my arms. Keep you anywhere but here.”
A breath shudders out of me. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t beside you at the end. I’m sorry I left you to carry a burden that should’ve been mine. I’m sorry I forced you to be strong every damned day.”
I look at the dates again because I can’t help it and because I hate them. “I wasn’t ready to see your name carved in stone. I’m still not. But I’m here. Finally, I’m here.”
I slide my thumb over the C in her name. It’s been made smooth by time now.
“I have something I need to tell you,” I say. “You probably already know, but I need to say it.”
Only the trees answer with their leaves dancing in the light breeze.
“Her name is Elena,” I say.
It feels like I’ve dropped a plate—there’s a crash and the inevitable mess that comes with it.
“She’s a federal prosecutor,” I add and nearly laugh bitterly. “What do you say to that? Well, I know what you’d say anyway. You’d laugh. You’re probably laughing.”
The wind picks up, moving my hair, as I stare at the letters in her name and picture her laughing face.
“She uh… she drinks a lot of coffee. Can’t make pasta to save her life. Literally.” This time I do laugh, thinking of Elena trapped in her apartment and relying on her cooking skills to survive.
But the laugh fades.
“She’s… she’s having my child,” I say softly. “It was never supposed to—”
I stop.
There are a dozen endings to that sentence, and all of them have become lies.
I start over. “It’s not like I never planned on being with a woman again. But I was never… I was never supposed to stand in front of your grave and say another woman’s name.
“I didn’t plan it.” That’s true, and also the weakest excuse I’ve ever made. “But I’m not— I wouldn’t take it back.”
My throat is dry as I swallow.
“You would want to know how I feel,” I say, because she always forced me to put a name to whatever frightened me. “I hated that about you, but also loved you for it, and I guess that’s marriage.”
I trail my fingers over the edge of the stone, the way I used to trail them over her cheek when I walked past.
“I care for her,” I murmur. “More than I meant to. More than is smart for either of us. I don’t know how far that goes yet.
I don’t know if I’m a man who can… do that again.
I didn’t think I was. In fact, I was sure I wasn’t.
I thought that part of my life was over, and I was comfortable with that because I had loved you enough for a lifetime.
I didn’t need anyone else—not that way, not again. ”
I look down at my shoes. A sign of weakness I’d notice in anyone else.
“You’re the love of my life, Carlotta, and that’s how it was always supposed to be.”
I look up. No. I may not be able to look her in the eyes, but I damn well won’t be looking down at my shoes like a coward.
“I have feelings for her. They’re complicated, and I can’t put a name to them yet, but it’s something.”
There, I said it. “It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to another woman since I lost you.”
I take a deep breath.
“I’m not proud of saying that here at your grave, on your stone, but I won’t hide it. Not from you.”
My mouth tilts into a bitter smile.
“I was never able to hide anything from you anyway.”
My hand presses flat to the stone until my knuckles turn white and ache. When it hurts enough, I step back.
“She’s going to have a baby,” I say, still stunned at it.
I picture Elena in her kitchen, making a mess of flour and cheese, frustration coloring her voice. I picture her in the dark of her bedroom, looking up at me with those big blue eyes.
“When I got out, I had plans.”
The words stick in my throat. I can’t say them out loud. Not to her.
“After that, I planned on living quietly. Passing my legacy on.”
Now I laugh for real.
“I know it would shock you to hear me say that. Me? Living quietly? But you don’t know what it’s like behind bars, Carlotta. You don’t know silence and loneliness until you’ve been there. I spent years minding my own and keeping my thoughts to myself.”
I take in the view in front of me—stones popping up with names and dates, a fig tree with no fruit, the river winding off in the distance.
“I need guidance. Not just about Elena.” I suck in a breath. “About Lucia.”
The name feels foreign on my tongue. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud in I don’t know how long.
It releases the breath in my lungs like I’ve been holding onto it for years.
“I haven’t said it in so long,” I admit, ashamed. “Like, if I avoid saying her name, I could make her something different, not my little girl.”
The last time I saw her was in the courtroom that day. Lucia sat on the stand and spoke about me to a jury. Her voice was strong and clear. To everyone else.
But I knew her better than that.
I knew what was going on inside her. It was all in her eyes. She only looked at me once as they took her back into the marshal’s custody, and I never saw her again.
It wasn’t a long look. Not defiance. Not even hate.
It was a look of sorrow.
The look of a little girl who wanted to go back home but knew she never could.
And it broke me.
“You cried,” I say out loud. “In the car after, and I wasn’t there to see it. Antonio told me, but he didn’t have to. I could hear it in your voice before they took me away.
“And again, when you came to see me the first time. You begged me to let her go.” I clear my throat. “I did. I always intended to, but I didn’t tell you. I don’t know why I couldn’t just give you that. The reassurance that I wouldn’t go after her. My pride was too big. Maybe it still is.”
I scoff. No maybe about it.
“I wasted so much of the time we had left letting you think I had a plan. The endless arguments that could’ve been spent on something else. Maybe she would’ve come h—” My voice breaks on the word, but I have to push through.
“She could’ve been there for you, even when I wasn’t. She could’ve been there for Vito and Nico, Caterina. But she wasn’t. And it’s because of me.”
I shove back from the gravestone and pace away, restless and disgusted.
“I pushed her away. I pushed her to those prosecutors. That boyfriend of hers. When he died, I should’ve been there for her. I should’ve comforted her.” My voice carries, loud and angry, across the empty field. “I should’ve assured her it wasn’t me. I had nothing to do with it!
“But I couldn’t do that, could I? I used it to prove a point. To pull her back in line. I let my daughter think that the boy was dead because of me. That’s where this started. She never looked at me the same way again.”
The anger in me dies down to a whisper. “I pushed her away. Maybe you would’ve gotten better with our oldest daughter here by your side, Carlotta. And you could’ve lived to see your children grow up and have babies of their own.”
I spin away.
“Why don’t you hate me!” I shout. “Why didn’t you blame me? Why did you stand by me? I didn’t deserve it!”
I walk to the fig tree and lean against it, letting out my breath slowly before walking back to stand in front of the white gravestone.
“She’s in Las Vegas,” I say. “I found out that she was in Las Vegas, and she was carrying a child. Your grandchild. She made a new family there.”
The words are bitter in my mouth as I force them out.
“I made a mistake,” I say, and the understatement of it is almost astounding.
“I let my anger and bitterness get the best of me. I told myself I could fix things if I could only get her back home. I told myself that she’d come home because I asked, because there was a time when that would have been enough. ”
Adrian Connolly was good at being what he was asked to be.
He didn’t improvise. He just did what he was told.
I didn’t say the words “don’t hurt her” because they’ve never needed to be said when it came to my blood.
I didn’t say “don’t frighten her” because I was stupid enough to think my name would make her feel safe.
“I told him to bring her home,” I murmur. “He heard ‘by any means necessary.’ And I know he did. I knew it, but I didn’t correct him.
“He tried to take her.” I rub my hand over my mouth.
“He put his hands on our daughter, our pregnant daughter, because I never told him otherwise. I was too prideful to pick up the damn phone and speak to her myself. Or I could’ve sent someone else.
Antonio, he was her favorite uncle. Caterina, her mini-me. ”
I exhale through my nose.
“I didn’t. I didn’t even tell them. By the time they found out how badly I had fucked up, it was too late. Nick Dixon swooped in and bought up the prison. I could’ve even dealt with that. But then he told me that Lucia wasn’t my daughter anymore. That he was her family now, and she didn’t need me.”
I soften my voice. “It did something to me, Carlotta. It brought out the monster that Lucia thought I was. The one everybody thinks I am.”
I picture Lucia as she was the last time I saw her. Before she started looking at me with suspicion and fear in her eyes.
She was just my little girl, running around the yard, teasing her brothers, staying up way past her bedtime so she could sneak back down to the kitchen and take the last cannoli.
How she would giggle when I caught her, and the price of my silence was the other half of the cannoli.
“I have been living for the day I’d get out of prison and pay him back for that,” I tell her.
“I wake up and think about it. I go to sleep and think about it. When I eat, I think about it. When I sit still too long, the pressure builds under my skin and I can’t keep from imagining how I will show Nick Dixon that he’s not protected by his money, not where I’m concerned. ”
But now,” I say, and I look down at Carlotta’s name again, “there is more than myself to consider.”
I picture Elena the way she was the last time I saw her—hair scattered across the pillow, a light flush still on her cheeks as she slept deeply—before I had to sneak away in the early morning light.
“I can’t do what I was going to do without her looking at me like I’m a monster,” I say. “She is a prosecutor. A good one. She believes in rules and boundaries and the law, in righting injustices and making a case against wrong. She’ll know.”
I push my hand through my hair. “Even if she can’t prove it. Even if she can’t put me behind bars for it. She’ll know, and she’ll look at me in exactly the same way Lucia did all those years ago. With fear and disgust. And Lucia will look at me that same way again, too.”
The wind blows again, and the sound of a siren beyond the wall grows and fades just as quickly.
“I keep telling myself to let it go. Let the world think I’m exactly what they want me to be: manageable.” I rub my jaw and feel the rasp that I didn’t bother to shave this morning. “How long can I keep that up? Hmm? How long until the real me comes out and chases her away?”
I blow out a breath that tastes like this morning’s espresso.
“And Lucia?” I ask. “What do I do with her? What do I do when a part of me wants to call her and tell her that I’m still her father?
To come home. We’ll fix this. And the other part of me wants to end the man who stands with her, and knowing that if I do that, she will never in this world forgive me? ”
I look up at her name again and ask her what I always asked her when I was the least useful version of myself. “Tell me what to do.”
Of course, there’s no answer. That was never how this worked. Even when she was sitting across from me at the table, her answer was always: What do you want to be true when you wake up tomorrow? Be brave enough to choose that.
I put my hand flat on the top of the stone one last time and bend until my forehead touches the marble. It’s cold, and it takes the heat out of my skin. I stay there long enough to smell dust and rain and whatever flowers died here last.
“Help me,” I say against the stone.
The wind hushes and then comes back. A cloud crosses the sun. Somewhere, a bell rings twice and then stops.
I straighten, and my back complains. I smooth my palm over her name one more time: Carlotta. I take a step back, then another.
“Ti amo,” I say, because I said it every day I could and I said it every day I couldn’t, even if it was only in my head.
Then I turn and walk back down the row, counting the steps past the fig tree with no figs, past the stones nobody visits anymore.
The gate scrapes when I push it. The road on the other side hasn’t changed. The world hasn’t either.