Chapter 12 #2
He looked at my face, then at the coat, then back at my face. He smiled, and for a second, I thought about the way I must look—overheated, hair a mess, cheeks already flushed. It should have been embarrassing, but it wasn’t.
He said, “Better, yes?”
“Not what I was expecting,” I said. “I thought it would smell like fertilizer.”
He cocked his head. “It does, if you go to the cactus room.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Not yet. But you better toe the line, young lady.” He was still smiling. He offered me his hand, and I took it. He squeezed once, then let it go, but I kept it. Our fingers laced together like we’d done it a hundred times before.
We walked past the check-in desk—no one paid, no one checked, no one cared.
The lobby was painted a sickly shade of teal, but past that the space opened up into a cathedral of green.
The ceiling arched thirty feet overhead, glass shot through with iron, every surface beading with mist. A ramp circled up, winding through beds of ferns and palms, orchids in every color hung from black metal wires.
We walked slow. The floor was pocked with old water, moss clinging to the edges. The temperature went up a degree with every ten paces. I was sweating under my shirt by the first turn.
“This is incredible,” I said.
Pietro nodded, but he was watching me, not the plants. “My father used to bring me the botanical gardens in Palermo,” he said. “He loved nature.”
I squeezed his hand. “Did you like it?”
“Me? No! I hated it. All I wanted was to go to the movies. But now, I appreciate it more.”
We kept walking. I let the air fill my lungs, warm and wet, and for a minute, I thought about what it would be like to just lose myself in this, to be a person who went to gardens for fun, who had memories of childhood not soaked in secrets and math.
We stopped in the Palm House. The light was different in here—filtered through a thousand fronds, deep green, almost blue.
The leaves dripped, shedding water onto the dirt.
The trunks were thick and hairy, banded in scars.
There was a banana tree in the center, its fruit bunched up high in a web of mesh.
I reached up, traced the edge of one leaf with my finger. It was waxy, cool to the touch.
Pietro watched me, his face softer than I’d ever seen it.
I said, “You ever think about being somewhere else? Like, just leaving everything behind?”
He shrugged. “All the time. But I don’t think I’d be happy there.”
“Why not?”
He gave me a look, like I was missing something obvious. “Because I’d still be myself.”
I laughed. The noise bounced off the glass, bright and surprising. “That’s dark.”
He said, “But true. I’d miss my family, too. Even though they drive me berserk.”
I liked this, the way he didn’t dress things up. No pep talk, no empty optimism. He said it like it was the weather—bad sometimes, but survivable.
We stood under the banana tree for a while, just breathing. I felt the heat under my collar, the sweat on my lower back, the weird tingle in my stomach that had nothing to do with temperature.
He was so honest. I wanted to share with him. Something that made me feel ashamed. Something I had never told anyone else.
I said, “I want to tell you something.”
He turned, both hands on the rail, but didn’t crowd me. “Tell me.”
“I worked at Halberd for four years,” I said. The words came out easier than I expected. “I suspected what they were doing for fourteen months before I went to the FBI.”
He said nothing. I could hear the drip of water, the distant shouts of kids from another room.
“I kept telling myself I needed more data,” I said. “Or that if I waited, maybe someone else would speak up. But nobody did. People lost their pensions because I was slow.”
He looked at me, just looked, and I could see him cataloguing it, storing it away.
He said, “That’s not your fault.”
“It is,” I said. “I’m glad I testified, but Daddy, I didn’t do it soon enough. I was scared.”
He nodded. “You’re brave.”
I shook my head. “I’m not. I was terrified.”
He smiled, the sad smile. “That’s what makes you brave. You do it anyway.”
The heat pressed in, sticky on my skin, but the conversation made it tolerable. For once, I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop.
We walked on, into the Fern Room. The air in here was different—cooler, somehow, but thicker. Moss blanketed everything, even the walls. A little stream cut through the dirt, ringed in stones. There were benches, but nobody sat; it was too beautiful to be still.
Pietro slowed, then stopped. He looked at the water, then at me.
He said, “It’s my turn to tell you something.”
I said, “Yeah?”
He breathed out, long and slow, like he was letting go of something heavy.
“When I was twenty-four,” he said, “I worked for my family. I was undercover at the port in Catania. I was working my way into this other organization, so we could bring them down. They were bad people. Drugs. Guns.” He paused a moment.
“Women, too. There was a warehouse, and one morning they brought in a group of girls from Ukraine. I knew what was going to happen to them. I could have done something. I don’t know what, but something.
Even if I had blown my cover, even if I ended up getting killed, I should have done something right there and then. ”
The words hung there, cold as anything.
He went on. “I got word up the chain, but not fast enough. By the time the police hit the network, most of them were gone. The girl who looked at me—she was never found. I’ll never forget her.”
He stared at the ferns, at nothing.
“After Catania, I promised myself I would never let another vulnerable woman down,” he said, voice almost a whisper.
It hurt, hearing it. Not because I thought less of him, but because I saw the way it bent him out of shape, the way he was marked by the guilt, just like me.
He looked at me then, eyes shining with a kind of resignation I recognized from my own face.
“You think I’m a bad person? That I let them down? I shouldn’t have told you.”
I said, “You can tell me anything. You’re not a bad person. You’re a human being.”
He nodded, but he looked away, down at the bench, then at the floor, then at me again.
We moved into the Orchid House. The air was sweet, almost cloying, thick with the perfume of a hundred flowers.
The benches in here were wood, curved to fit the small space.
We sat side by side, coats abandoned on the bench next to us.
My hands were damp, and I wiped them on my jeans, but it didn’t help.
I put my hand out, palm up. He took it, no hesitation.
I lifted his hand, pressed it against my cheek. He closed his eyes.
We sat like that, quiet, for a long time. The only sound was the drip of water and the faint hum of air.
I said, “I think we’re the same.”
He smiled, but didn’t open his eyes. “We’re not. You’re so much better than me.”
“No,” I said. “You are perfect.”
We stayed that way, side by side, silent in the green light, until the world outside faded into something unreal.
After sitting peacefully together for what felt like hours, we left the glass house blinking, half-dazed by the sun and the leftover heat trapped in our shirts. My hair was damp at the scalp, my skin felt like I’d just walked out of a fever. Pietro didn’t even look rumpled. I hated that, a little.
We didn’t say anything for a minute. I let the cool air sting my face, the cold washing off the sticky bloom of orchids and confession. Outside, the park was nearly empty, the kind of cold that made your jaw ache.
He looked at me sideways. “Hungry?”
I nodded. My stomach was in knots, but I wanted to eat. I wanted to see him eat, too. I wanted everything to keep happening.
We walked up Michigan, then west, past a row of shops, to a block of old stone buildings half-shadowed under the el tracks.
The Italian place was sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a pharmacy, nothing special from the outside.
The sign was just a painted board: Osteria Messina.
Inside, it was warm, yellow-lit, and loud.
The waitress didn’t bring menus. She just came to the table, smiled at me, then addressed Pietro in Italian.
He replied in the same, his accent going thicker, slower.
I recognized words—pane, vino, antipasti, qualcosa di speciale—but it was like listening through water.
The waitress replied in a burst of dialect so fast it could have been code.
He smiled, nodded. “Si, grazie, due volte,” he said, and she left. I stared at him.
“What did you do?” I said.
He grinned. “Ordered for you.”
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“You’ll like it,” he said. “Trust me.”
The wine came in a carafe, dark and opaque, nothing fancy. He poured half-glasses, watching me over the rim. I took a sip—earthy, not sweet, the kind of wine that left a stain on your tongue. I liked it more than I wanted to admit.
He raised his glass. “To greenhouses in winter.”
I clinked his. “To banana trees.”
He sipped, then said, “You should have seen your face under that dome.”
I rolled my eyes. “Shut up. You looked like you were going to cry.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes the world is beautiful.”
It didn’t sound like a joke.
The waitress came back with a basket of bread and a plate of olives. I dug into the bread, buttering it, then eating it too fast. Pietro just watched, grinning.
I said, “Are you going to eat or just stare at me?”
He broke off a piece, slow. “I like the way you eat. It’s honest.”
I flushed. “That’s because I’m actually starving.”
He took my hand under the table, held it. “Good. You should always say when you need something.”
I wanted to say something back, something true, but the door opened and the rush of cold hit us both. Two men came in, laughing too loud, smelling of cigarettes and cologne. They sat at the bar, called for Fernet, and the room felt more like a place people lived in.