Chapter Twenty Eight
Mario
Dinner with my sons should be simple.
It used to be simple.
When they were young, it was loud and messy and never as dignified as Anna wanted it to be.
Matteo would read at the table if she let him.
Tomasso would talk enough for both of them.
Anna would pretend to be stricter than she was, pointing her fork at them and telling them they were not being raised by wolves, while I sat at the head of the table and let them all fill the house with noise.
Now they are grown men, and there is still noise, but it is different.
Deeper voices. More inappropriate jokes. Work threaded between bites of food. Men instead of boys, though I still see them as boys sometimes, without meaning to.
Tonight, I sit at the head of my dining table and hear almost none of it.
Tomasso says something about Edoardo being too serious for his own good.
Matteo answers without looking up from his wineglass, dry enough to make his brother laugh.
Food is passed. Wine poured. Plates cleared and replaced. The staff moves quietly around us, and my sons converse like men who are still little boys inside sometimes.
I am not present.
Victoria was not in the office again today.
No meeting. No call. No appearance in the building. Nothing through the corridors, nothing through her associates, nothing that gave me even a glimpse of her.
She sent work. Documents marked up, questions routed through Benjamin Harper, notes crisp enough to make it clear she was not incapacitated.
Not incapacitated.
Just absent.
Just silent.
Just somewhere I am not.
My hand tightens once around my fork, and I force it to relax.
I am not going to her apartment.
I have told myself that many times since noon.
I am not going to stand outside her door like a man with no pride and demand that she open it. Or simply break it down.
I am not going to demand to know why she has not come back to the office. I am not going to tell her she needs a doctor when she has already told me she does not.
I am not going to ask why she looked sick, left sick, stayed home sick, and still refuses to give me any real explanation.
I lift my wine and take a drink.
I realize then that it’s quiet.
Both of my sons are watching me.
“What?” I ask.
Tomasso leans back in his chair. “You have been staring at the same piece of lamb for almost two minutes.”
Matteo’s gaze flicks to my plate. “Three.”
“I was being generous,” Tomasso says.
I set down my glass. “I was thinking.”
“Yes,” Tomasso says. “That was the concerning part.”
Matteo does not smile, but there is a slight movement at the corner of his mouth.
I look between them.
They are too comfortable in this house.
Too comfortable with me.
Good.
That is how it should be.
That is not how it was at my father’s table.
Still, there are days when the sight of them across this table affects me in ways I do not expect. Matteo with his mother’s stillness when he is listening. Tomasso with her mouth when he is amused.
They are mine.
But they are hers too.
Every day, still.
“What is it?” Matteo asks.
“Nothing.”
Tomasso snorts.
I turn my head toward him.
He lifts both hands slightly. “I said nothing.”
“You made a sound.”
“I am a living man. It happens.”
Matteo takes a sip of wine. “You have been distracted since we arrived.”
“I run several companies.”
“You have run several companies for years,” Tomasso says. “Decades, even. Usually, you still notice when someone asks you a question.”
“I noticed.”
“What did I ask?”
I look at him.
He grins.
I pick up my knife. “You asked whether Edoardo has ever had a spontaneous thought in his life.”
Tomasso’s grin widens. “Fine. You were listening.”
“Unfortunately.”
Matteo looks at me for a long moment.
He has always done that. Even as a child. Tomasso pushed at the world until it pushed back. Matteo studied it first. He watches, listens, gauges. He knew when Anna was tired before I did. He knows when I am angry before I say a word.
Tonight, his quiet is too precise, too meaningful.
“What?” I ask him.
He does not immediately answer.
That should have prepared me.
It does not.
“You’re thinking about Mamma.”
Everything in me goes still.
Tomasso’s smile disappears.
The mood in the room shifts.
My sons are watching me, and my dead wife has taken her seat in the empty space across from me.
I set my knife down carefully.
“No,” I say.
Matteo’s eyes stay on mine.
A lie, then.
We all know it.
There are many things my sons will allow me. Authority. Distance. Silence when it serves something.
Not this.
Not anymore, apparently.
Tomasso looks down at his plate, then back at me. “Papà.”
The word is quiet. In a way Tomasso so rarely is.
It only makes it land harder.
I lean back in my chair.
There are topics we do not touch in this house. Not because I forbade them. I never had to. Grief makes its own rules when it enters a home. Everyone learns where to step. Everyone learns which doors stay closed.
Anna has been behind one of those doors for ten years.
No.
Not Anna.
Anna is everywhere.
Her death is behind the door.
The night she died.
The paramedics in my home.
My wife on the floor.
All the blood.
My vision narrows for half a second, and I am back there before I can stop it.
Slick marble under my shoes.
Someone speaking too quickly.
A housekeeper crying in the corridor.
Matteo and Tomasso not home, thank God. Thank God for that, at least. They were seventeen, too young and too old all at once, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that Anna would be furious if there was blood on the rug.
That was one of my first thoughts.
Not prayer.
Not hope.
Not even denial.
Anna will be furious about the rug.
Then I saw her.
And there was no room left in me for anything.
“Papà.”
This time, it is Matteo.
I look up.
Both my sons are watching me.
Not with suspicion. Not with pity.
With something worse.
Understanding.
Matteo’s face is pale under the warm light. Tomasso’s jaw is tight, his eyes too bright.
Matteo speaks first.
“What happened was not your fault.”
For a moment, I cannot answer.
It is not that I do not understand the words.
It is that they do not belong at this table.
They do not belong in his mouth.
We have spent ten years not saying them, and now my son offers them to me across dinner like he has been carrying them for too long.
My throat tightens.
“You do not know what you are talking about.”
“Yes,” Tomasso says. “We do.”
My gaze moves to him.
His shoulders are squared now, not in challenge exactly, but close.
“We were not children,” he says.
“You were seventeen.”
“Exactly.”
“Still children.”
“Old enough.”
The words cut.
Because he is right.
I had told myself I had protected them by sweeping it under the rug. That the official story, the sealed details, the private funeral, the absence of public explanation had spared them something.
I had told myself a great many things.
Matteo sets his glass down. “We knew the doctors were worried.”
There is only silence, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s not actually the room but me.
I stare at him.
“Who told you that?”
“Mamma,” Tomasso says.
That breaks something open in me.
“She told you?”
“She did not sit us down and give us a medical lecture,” Tomasso says, voice rough. “But we figured it out.”
Matteo nods once. “She said the pregnancy would be difficult because of her age.”
“She said we were not to worry,” Tomasso continues. “Which meant there was something to worry about.”
I look down at the table.
The food is still there.
Cold now.
Anna would have hated that too. She hated wasted food. She hated cold meals.
She would hate that grief for her was the reason for the wasted food.
My Anna.
My impossible, stubborn Anna.
After the twins, they told us she would likely never carry another child.
The pregnancy had been brutal. The birth worse. Too much blood then too. Too many doctors moving too quickly. Too many warnings delivered in careful voices after everyone survived, and we were supposed to be grateful.
We were grateful.
God, we were grateful.
She held both boys in that hospital bed, exhausted and white as the sheet, a big smile on her face and a prayer on her lips.
I believed that was the end of it.
Two sons.
A wife alive.
It was more than enough.
Then, seventeen years later, she stood in our bedroom with a test in her hand and looked at me like she was twenty-one again. Terrified. Laughing. Crying from joy or fear, she didn’t even know.
Pregnant.
At nearly forty.
Impossible, except it was not.
Dangerous, except not impossible.
The doctors were cautious. That is the word doctors use when they are trying not to frighten a man with money and power like mine.
Cautious. Careful. High risk.
Possible.
Possible if she rested.
Possible if they monitored closely.
Possible if nothing went wrong.
I hated the word possible.
Anna loved it.
She wanted that child.
She knew the risks. She listened to every doctor. She followed every instruction. She did everything right.
And still.
Still.
“I should have stopped it,” I say.
The words leave me before I decide to speak them.
Both my sons go still.
I have never said that aloud.
Not once.
Tomasso’s face changes.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No,” he says again, sharper now. “You do not get to do that.”
My eyes lift to his.
His anger is sudden and fierce, and for a second, he looks so much like her that I cannot breathe.
“She wanted the baby,” he says.
“I know what she wanted.”
“Then you know you couldn’t have stopped her.”
“I was her husband.”
“You were not her jailer.”
The words strike hard enough that I almost stand.
Matteo speaks before I can.
“She chose it, Papà.”
I look at him.
His voice is quieter than his brother’s, but no less firm.
“She chose, knowing the risks. She chose with the doctors. With you. With all of us.”
“All of us?” I ask, my voice rough with grief.
Matteo holds my gaze. “Yes.”
I say nothing.
“You think we did not want that baby, too?” Tomasso asks.
There is something in his voice now.
Not accusation.
Pain.
Old, buried, furious pain.
“You think it was only yours to lose?”
My chest tightens.
“No.”