CHAPTER 44
"I thought I'd cry when he died. I didn't. I cried later—but it was for what was beginning, not for what had ended."
VALENTINA MORETTI
I didn't cry leaving Villa Salina.
I thought I would. My whole life I'd imagined that day—the day I'd look into the face of the man who destroyed my family. I thought I'd cry, or scream, or feel something big and clean, like revenge completed, like justice.
But what I felt, in the back seat of the car, with Mondello passing by the window, was something mixed and dirty.
Relief that hurt. Emptiness. A hole where the hatred used to live, and the hatred had gone away with him, and left the hole empty without saying what to put in its place.
"Bella mia."
"Sì."
"The documents."
I looked at the cloth bag in my lap. Operazione Levante. Conti Esteri Zurigo. Trasferimenti Cayman. Everything that could destroy the Rossi name, in my hand.
"I'm going to turn them in," I said. "To the prosecutor's office in Palermo."
"You could use that. Blackmail. Power. What's left of his empire…"
"I don't want his empire, Luca." I gripped the bag. "I want him erased from the papers. I want the state shutting down what's left. I want the name Salvatore Rossi turned into a case file, not a legend."
He nodded slowly.
"Brava."
"And the doctor. Tito Fasano." I looked at him. "Bianca said he'll testify if we offer protection."
"Raffaele's already handling it." He took my hand. "Witness protection. He tells everything he saw over the seven years, closes your father's coffin with letterhead."
We passed my mother's house before leaving Mondello.
The real house.
The one on the beach, white, with the window of the room where I was born in the August heat. Where Mamma played Chopin on Sundays, where the vanity with the secret drawer was, and the painting of Saint Sebastian on the wall.
I didn't go in. I just asked the driver to slow down in front of the house.
I looked at the front of it for ten seconds.
Goodbye, Mamma, I thought. It's over. He's gone. You were right about everything.
The car drove on.
We got to Posillipo at night.
The house was silent, but alive—different from the war silence of the weeks before. Donna Beatrice was waiting for us at the door. She squeezed my hand without saying anything, in her way.
The nonna would come back from Capri the next day.
In the room, after the bath, I decided to tell him.
"Luca. I need to tell you something."
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, no shirt, drying his hair with the towel.
"I know," he said.
"You know what?"
"Since Capri, bella mia." He set the towel down.
"You're different. You eat little, you're queasy in the mornings, you don't drink the espresso anymore.
Your hand goes to your belly when you think no one's looking.
" He almost smiled. "I saw my mother like that once.
I was eleven; seven months later, Raffaele was born. "
My eyes welled up.
"You knew. And you didn't say anything."
"Neither did you." He held out his hand. "You didn't tell me so I'd let you into Villa Salina. I didn't tell you I knew so you wouldn't know I was going to get you out of there before the end."
I laughed with my eyes full of water.
"We're a disaster," I said.
"We are," he agreed.
And then he did something I didn't expect.
He knelt in front of me, on the floor of the room. The Don of the Naples Camorra, the man who'd killed my father with a dagger six hours before, knelt in front of me and rested his forehead against my belly.
"Ciao," he said, low, to my belly. "It's me."
I cried.
This time it wasn't grief, it was relief.
It was the first time we made love with nothing on our backs.
No attack. No blood. No Salvatore alive on the other side of the sea. No secret between the two of us. No eve of war. No goodbye.
Just us.
It was slow. It was tender in a way Luca hadn't been before—slow, careful, with his hand open on my belly the whole time now, no disguise, no pretending it was there by accident.
He kissed me like a man who has the rest of his life to do it. In no hurry at all.
"Slow," I murmured, out of habit.
"My whole life, bella mia," he said. And this time it wasn't just that night.
It was a real promise.
It's the first time, I thought, in the middle, his forehead against mine. The first time I make love with no weight on my back. No hatred. No fear. No death tomorrow.
When it was over, he pulled me to his chest, my head over the tattoo, and his hand stayed on my belly. We were quiet for a while, listening to the sea down below.
Then I picked up the phone.
It was two in the morning, but Francesca answered on the third ring, because Francesca, like me, never slept right a day in her life.
"Bella?" Her voice, thick with sleep. "Madonna, what time is—"
"Fra."
"What happened. Are you all right?"
"It's over," I said. "My father. It's over, Fra."
"You're alive," she said, finally. "And him?"
"No."
Another silence. I heard her take a deep breath, in her way, holding something back.
"Cazzo, bella," she muttered, and her voice was choked, but she made a joke anyway, because that was how she'd been saving me since we were fourteen.
"So you've become the first mafiosa in the world to be widowed of her own father.
And look, I have to tell you, with the life you lead, I'd already given up on seeing you make it to thirty. "
I laughed out loud, my eyes full.
"Fra. There's one more thing."
"What?"
"I'm pregnant." The scream she let out from the other side of the sea woke half of Palermo, I'm sure of it. "You're going to be godmother," I said, laughing, crying. "Did you hear me? Godmother. No arguing."
"I wouldn't argue if you paid me," she said, crying too now, not hiding it. "Bella, you did it. You walked into that house and came out whole."
"I came out whole," I repeated, low.
We stayed on the phone for a while without saying anything. Just breathing, both of us, from different sides of the sea.
Then she hung up, because it was two thirty in the morning, and promised to come to Naples as soon as I let her.
And there I was, whole, with a child inside me and a man who loved me beneath me.
It's over, I thought.
No—it's not over. It began.