13. Giovanni
— ? —
Giovanni
I had killed men for less than standing on a sidewalk and crying.
That was what I was thinking while tears ran down my face in the middle of a Georgia afternoon, while tourists walked past with their ice cream cones and their vacation sunburns and their complete fucking obliviousness to the fact that Giovanni Ferraro, don of New York, head of the Ferraro crime family, the man who had negotiated ceasefires at gunpoint and watched men beg for their lives without flinching, was coming apart over one word.
Nico.
I had a son.
I had a son, and I had missed four months of his life, and I hadn’t even known he existed until I saw a photograph in a regional architecture magazine that I only found because my mother had been leaving copies on my desk for weeks with pages dog-eared and I’d finally, finally looked.
Page four. Kylie on scaffolding. Laughing.
And in the corner of the frame, barely visible: a stroller.
***
The year I deserved started with her rings on my desk.
I’d come back early from Boston and found the study door open, the lamp on, her father’s murder file spread across the desk where I’d hidden it for two years.
On top of it, stacked with the precision of a woman making a statement, her wedding ring and her engagement ring.
The divorce papers beside them, unsigned but present, a promise.
I called her nineteen times that night, and she answered the last one and said the things I couldn’t argue with and hung up on the most feared man in New York, and I stood in that study with her slap still stinging on my face, wanting it back, because it was the last thing she’d given me.
Then I set about becoming a person, which turned out to be harder than any work I’d ever done, and I’d done work that left men in the ground.
Some of it was undoing damage. Six weeks before she left, Dante had warned me the Albanians were asking whether my wife was a pressure point, whether she mattered enough to be worth taking.
So I’d told him to put it out that there was no chemistry, that she was a political marriage and nothing more, that I kept her because the Jordans were useful.
Armor, I called it. The worst lie of my life, told to protect her and never once told to her, and she caught a version of it through a study door and it helped kill us.
I’ve thought about that more than I’ve thought about anything.
Some of it was grief. I sold the brownstone, but before I listed it I made myself spend one night there alone, in the rooms where she’d waited three years for a husband who was always somewhere else.
I stood at the window she must have watched for my headlights from and counted the cars that weren’t mine, and made myself feel one night of the thousand I’d sentenced her to.
Some of it was just surviving the missing.
There’s a voicemail she left me the first year, thirty-one seconds, laughing at something I no longer remember, saying my name at the end, warm and careless.
I told myself I’d ration it. I never managed.
And there’s a drawer of letters I wrote her and never sent, one a week, because the therapist I’d been blackmailed into seeing told me to write to someone who mattered, and Kylie was the only name I had.
I put Bianca out, too, the week I learned she’d taken my father’s sins and aimed them at my wife and called it mercy.
The apartment, the allowance, the last thread of my father’s debt, severed in an afternoon.
And I took the operation apart at the root and built something legal in its place, brick by legal brick, because I’d finally understood the one thing my father never had.
I couldn’t ask Kylie to love a criminal. Not twice.
My mother watched all of it. When I finally asked her if she knew where Kylie had gone, Rosa looked at me the way she had when I was six and had broken something I couldn’t put back together.
“You can’t cry your way back to that girl,” she said.
“Show me the man first, then we’ll discuss geography.
” I never asked again. I did the work instead.
***
Dr. Okafor has an office that smells like lavender and disappointment.
The first appointment was Dante’s idea. His exact words were: “You’re scaring everyone. The staff, the captains, me. Either you talk to someone, or I’m telling your mother what really happened with the warehouse situation in March.”
Blackmail. My own consigliere blackmailed me into therapy.
I went.
Three sessions before I said anything real. Four sessions before I stopped lying. Five sessions before I sat in that chair with the terrible throw pillows and the watercolor paintings that were supposed to be calming and actually started doing the work.
Session twelve was the one that broke me.
“Tell me about silence,” Dr. Okafor said. She had a way of asking questions that made them sound simple when they weren’t. “In your family. What did silence mean?”
“Silence was how you survived.”
“Survived what?”
I stared at my hands. The same hands that had held my wife, signed her divorce papers, killed men who needed killing. Hands that had learned from my father’s hands, what they could do, what they’d do, what they meant when they moved toward you.
“My father didn’t believe in talking about problems,” I said finally. “He believed in fixing them. Silently. Efficiently. If something was broken, you fixed it. If someone betrayed you, you handled it. If you were angry, you controlled it until the anger was useful.”
“And love?” Dr. Okafor’s pen went still.
“What about it?”
“What did love look like in your house? How did your father show it?”
Another long silence. The throw pillows seemed to be judging me. The watercolors seemed to be judging me. Everything in this fucking office seemed to be designed to make me feel the full weight of the things I couldn’t say.
“He fixed things,” I said. “That was his - he fixed things. The car when it broke down. The fence when it needed painting. The hall table when-”
I stopped.
“The hall table?”
The memory came at me sideways. Kylie, frustrated, complaining about the drawer that stuck and the leg that wobbled.
Kylie, leaving things on that table, her keys, her mail, the small debris of her daily life, not knowing that I found them every night when I came home.
Not knowing that I spent an hour at 3 a.m., quiet as a ghost, fixing the drawer so it would open smoothly, tightening the leg so it wouldn’t wobble, straightening the things she’d left there before I went to bed.
Five years. Five years of fixing that table, over and over, because fixed was the only dialect of love my father left me fluent in.
“Giovanni?” Dr. Okafor’s voice was gentle. Patient. “Who taught you that silence is love?”
I stared at my own hands for a long time.
“He did,” I said finally. “My father. He taught me that love was what you did when no one was watching. That it was actions, not words. That saying it made it weak.”
“And what did that teach your wife?”
The question hit me like a bullet.
“It taught her nothing.” My voice had gone hoarse.
“Because she never knew. She never knew I was doing any of it. She just thought - she thought I didn’t care.
She thought I was absent, checked out, gone.
And I was standing right there the whole time, fixing things in the dark, never saying a word, because I thought that was how it worked. ”
I’d never said it out loud before.
I’d never understood it before.
Dr. Okafor let the silence stretch.
“You were loving her in a language she couldn’t hear,” she said finally. “And she was asking for love in a language you’d never learned to speak.”
I sat in that terrible chair with the lavender smell and the judging throw pillows, and I felt something crack open in my chest that had been sealed shut for decades.
“I missed her,” I said. The words splintered on the way out. “Every day, for three years, she was right there and I missed her. I was so busy fixing things and managing threats and protecting her from everything I could see that I never - I didn’t-”
“You didn’t show up.”
“No. I didn’t.” I put my head in my hands. “She needed me to show up, and I sent money and security and silence instead, and I thought I was being a good husband. I thought-”
I couldn’t finish.
Dr. Okafor didn’t make me.
***
The magazine got there before my courage did.
I’d been planning to find her. Eventually. When I was ready, when I’d changed enough, when I could stand in front of her and be the man she’d deserved all along instead of the one she’d left.
But I kept finding reasons to wait. One more therapy session. Another letter I wouldn’t send. Another month of proving to myself that I could be different.
And then the magazine appeared on my desk, another copy left by my mother, another dog-eared page, and I finally looked.
Page four.
The same photograph. The scaffolding, the laugh I’d never once earned in three years of marriage. And in the corner of the frame, the detail I hadn’t let myself understand the first time: a stroller.
***
Now I was standing on a sidewalk in Savannah with tears drying on my face, and my wife, my ex-wife, was looking at me like she wasn’t sure whether to let me into her building or call security.
“I want to see him,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Please, Kylie. I know I don’t deserve anything. I know you owe me nothing. But please. Let me see him.”
She stood there. The monitor at her waist crackled again, my son, crying, needing her, and I watched her make a decision.
“You can see him,” she said. “But Giovanni-”
She waited until I met her eyes.
“This doesn’t fix anything. This doesn’t mean we’re okay. You seeing him doesn’t mean you get to be part of our lives. It means you get to meet your son. And then we talk about what happens next.”
“Anything.” I’d agree to anything. I’d sign anything. I’d do whatever she asked, whatever it took. “Whatever you want. However you want to do this.”
She turned and walked into the building.
I followed.
***
The room was small. A site office, converted, drafting tables and blueprints and the organized chaos of a project in progress. In the corner, a stroller. In the stroller, a baby.
My son.
“You can pick him up,” Kylie said. Her voice was controlled, careful. She was watching me like I might break something. “Support his head. He’s only four months old.”
I’d held babies before. My cousins’ children, the grandchildren of captains in the family. I knew how to do this.
But this was different.
This was mine.
I reached into the stroller and lifted him, carefully, so carefully, cradling the back of his head the way I’d seen fathers do in movies, on streets, in the normal world I’d never been part of.
He was so small. So impossibly small, this tiny furious creature who had my blood and my name and four months of life that I’d missed completely.
He had black hair. Dark, like mine was as a baby.
He had his mother’s nose. The same shape, the same delicate curve.
And when he opened his eyes, sleepy, annoyed at being disturbed, they were blue. My father’s blue. My blue. The Ferraro blue that had marked every don in my line for four generations.
“Nico,” I said, and my voice broke on his name.
He made a sound, half cry, half complaint, and I pulled him closer. Cradled him against my chest, this baby I hadn’t known existed until an hour ago, this son I’d have burned the world down to protect.
I was crying again.
I didn’t care.
“He likes being held close,” Kylie said. Her voice was softer now, less guarded. Maybe she hadn’t expected this. Or known what it would do to me, seeing him. “And he responds to voices. If you talk to him, he’ll calm down.”
I tried to say something. Anything. But my throat had closed up completely, and all I could do was hold my son and cry and feel the entire architecture of my life rearrange itself around this moment.
Everything I’d done, the therapy, the letters, the work, it had been supposed to be for Kylie. To become the man she deserved. To earn my way back to her.
But now there was this.
Now there was him.
And I understood, with a clarity that felt like being reborn, that I was going to spend the rest of my life making sure this child never felt what I’d made his mother feel. Never doubted that he was loved. Never wondered if his father was coming home.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. Quietly, just for him, my voice rough and broken. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. That I didn’t know. But I’m here now, Nico. I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Kylie made a small sound. I looked up and saw her standing by the door, arms crossed, face complicated.
“We need to talk,” she said. “About what happens next. About - all of it. But not now. Now you should just-” She gestured at the baby in my arms. “Just be with him. For a while.”
I nodded. Couldn’t speak.
She left the room. Gave me privacy. Gave me this moment with my son.
I stood there for an hour.
Maybe longer.
When I finally put him back in the stroller, asleep now, exhausted by the crying, making the small snuffling sounds that babies make. I pulled out my phone with hands that were still shaking.
Dante answered on the second ring.
“Boss. Everything okay?”
“Sell whatever needs selling.” My voice was even now. Certain. “I’m not coming back.”
A long pause.
“Giovanni. What are you-”
“And find out who owns the building across from the Marlowe Theater.”