Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
“ S o, are you really here just for me and Sofia?” I asked as we started back up Court, this time heading past the school where I worked and up toward Cobble Hill and more restaurants.
I liked Carroll Gardens. It was a little nicer than Red Hook and close enough that I could walk home on nice days. I also liked the fact that there were still traces of its original Italian roots in a few remaining shops and fire escapes. It felt a little like Belmont too, the neighborhood in the Bronx where I’d grown up. Close to home, and yet far enough that I’d gotten away.
“I—for the most part,” Xavier said. “I was supposed to be opening a new restaurant in Paris, but I pushed that date. I’m prioritizing New York for the time being.”
“So it’s a work trip.”
I wasn’t sure why that bothered me so much. Obviously, he was a busy man, but I didn’t like the idea of Sofia as an afterthought.
Or yourself , my subconscious sneered.
Oh, shut up.
He sighed, looking up at the cloudy sky, then back at me. “It’s a reason to be here until I know what’s going on with the real reason to be here. If you get my reasoning.”
I laughed. “Um, not really.”
To my surprise, he chuckled back. Not quite a laugh. But it was in the neighborhood.
“Look, when I left before, I was angry. Justifiably, I might add. But I thought about it, and now I’m mostly…” He shook his head, like he was trying to sort out the words. “Curious, I suppose. Still gutted about all of it, of course. But, right. Yeah. I guess now I’m mostly curious.”
Curious. Well, that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.
“About what?” I asked.
“I want to know everything there is to know about her,” he continued as we walked. “I assume that will take time. So I made some. I’m a busy man, Francesca. But I won’t be too busy for my own blood. You see?”
I swallowed. What did that mean for me? Was he planning to hire some big-shot city lawyer to take custody away? Was he planning some kind of revenge that would undo the life I’d built for me and Sofia?
Looking up at him, the way he glowered at nearly everything we passed, I wondered if he was the kind of person for whom revenge was an everyday practice. Which made me wonder if he had any of the softness required to love a child.
“So, let’s start at the beginning,” he said.
“Which one?”
“You find out you’re pregnant. And you think I’m in London, engaged. So…what next?”
I closed my eyes for a moment, inhaling the scents of Brooklyn in the winter. Car exhaust, a few hints of wood burning fireplaces, and the thick overlay of ice and snow. It was a tactic I generally used to keep me in the here and now. Those weren’t really days I liked to think about. Most of them had been blocked out.
But I couldn’t be scared of them anymore. It was the past.
“Fear,” I admitted. “I was scared to death.”
Xavier was quiet for once, waiting for me to continue.
“I finished that semester—I only had a few weeks left, you see. And I intended to continue graduate school that fall. But by September, I was showing. A lot. My family knew, of course, and I needed to make some real plans. But then all that went to hell too.”
“Because she came early, right?”
“Almost two months,” I confirmed. “She was tiny. Two pounds, four ounces. Like a pack of chicken breasts, no bigger.”
He held his hands out in front of him, clearly imagining something that size cradled between them.
“She was in the NICU for another two weeks. I spent the first few sleeping there with her, but then they made me go home.” I sighed, resisting the urge to stop. The terror and confusion and fatigue of those days were rushing back with every word. “I cried every night until she came home with me. I was so, so scared. You can’t understand?—”
“Unless I was there,” he said quietly. “Yeah.”
I couldn’t argue with him. Guilt sprouted in my belly. But what would he have done?
“And after that?” he wondered.
“She came home eventually. We lived with my grandmother, holed up in the attic for about six months while she grew and got healthy. It was all right. Nonna fed me a lot and sometimes got up with me when she woke in the night. My sisters watched her sometimes so I could sleep. But it was clear I wasn’t going back to school or anywhere else for a long time. And so mostly it was just…us.”
It was hard not to tear up at those memories. Matthew had worked tirelessly to convert the old attic into a room where Sofia and I could convalesce apart from everyone else, hanging drywall, painting the subfloor and covering it with old rugs, laying a huge king mattress directly on the ground so we could sleep together safely since she hated the crib. Sometimes I had felt a little like Rapunzel, locked in a tower—especially when Sofia had colic. But mostly it was a safe space. A place I felt loved. A place where I could figure out what would happen next.
“When she was six months old, that’s when I applied to teach. I knew I couldn’t go afford to go back to graduate school on my own. Not with a premature newborn, and not as a master’s student without funding. And New York City schools have this program where you finish your degree while you work because they need staff so badly. And so, when I got the job in Carroll Gardens, Mattie—that’s my brother—got an apartment for the three of us. And then his house in Red Hook, where we live now. I got my master’s—in teaching, not English. But still, it’s something. And Sofia gets a home and a family.”
Xavier was quiet for a long time, digesting my story. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, especially with his unreadable, stony expression.
“You never thought of…”
I turned at the corner of Court and Union, outside an Italian restaurant named after Marco Polo. “Of what?”
Xavier looked queasy, like he didn’t want to say it. Immediately I knew.
“Oh,” I said. “Of getting rid of her, you mean?”
He nodded slowly.
I shrugged. “Well, no. I didn’t, to be honest. I mean, I could have. But…no.”
It was hard to explain. Yes, we were Catholic. So, nominally, we didn’t believe in abortion—though to be honest, I didn’t know anyone, my family members or otherwise, who weren’t pro-choice. This was New York, after all. And I could also understand fully—maybe even more now than before I had Sofia—why a woman would choose not to sacrifice her own body, life, and essential wellbeing for a pregnancy. Motherhood was unbelievably difficult, and I was only four years into it. I loved my daughter more than my own life, but raising her was the hardest thing I would ever do.
The truth was, at any other time, with any another man, if I’d gotten pregnant by literally anyone else…yes, I would have done it just to save my own life and protect my future. Even then, sitting in the bathroom, staring at that damn test, the thought flickered through my mind quicker than lightning. But it was expelled just as fast.
Because she was his. Maybe Xavier had never felt that way, but at the time, I believed he loved me like I loved him. An all-encompassing, life-consuming, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love that I might never see again but had been blessed to find in the first place. Yes, he’d broken my heart, but even then, what we had felt sacrosanct. And in Sofia, something of that love had survived.
But how do you tell someone who doesn’t believe in love that that is exactly what saved his child?
“I loved her,” I said simply. “Even then. Even before she was hardly…anything. I loved her. And I wanted her. And so that was my choice.”
“Even though it cost you so much? School, career, independence. I don’t suppose most twenty-seven-year-olds in this city are more worried about changing nappies than nightclub entry.”
Again, I shrugged, then crossed the street without answering, Xavier close behind. At this point, there was no use worrying about what might have been. This was my life now. You couldn’t go back.
As we passed a bookstore, I stopped and gazed inside at the shelves and shelves of beauties. My first loves, really.
“I used to take Sofia here when she was a baby,” I said. “They had a story hour. She had no idea what was going on, really, but it was a reason to get out of the house. And it was a place where, I don’t know…I guess it was a place where I still felt like myself.”
He looked hard through the window like it would reveal something important to him. I was tempted to go in, but my watch informed me I had maybe twenty minutes before I had to pick up Sofia. Then, poof, back to pumpkin land. I’d have to save the red wine for home.
“Who knows about me?” Xavier asked as I turned down a quieter street toward Cobble Hill.
I glanced at him, then back toward the beautiful brownstones that lined this particular street. So quintessentially Brooklyn.
“My family,” I admitted. “Meaning, my grandmother, my sisters, and my brother.”
“But not Sofia?”
I shook my head. “No. We all agreed it would be better to wait until she was old enough to handle it.”
“Handle what?”
I shot him a glance. “Do I really need to explain it again?”
Something like guilt crossed his fine features. “No, I don’t suppose you do. So, your family hates me, then?”
I tipped my head back and forth. “I suppose it depends on who you ask. My younger sisters don’t really think of you at all, to be honest. They’re too absorbed in their own lives. But Lea—that’s my oldest sister—probably thinks you’re the devil incarnate, and she’s a bully. She’d be able to corral the others to her side in a jiffy.”
“That’s three. What about the fourth? And your brother?”
I twisted my mouth around. “The fourth is my second oldest sister, Kate. We’re close. And lucky for you, she has a more nuanced view of things. She isn’t likely to judge you until she actually meets you. Mattie, though…”
“He was the dark-haired bloke with you at the party?”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“The one who looked like he wanted to tear me a new one?”
I bared my teeth guiltily. “I’m afraid so. He’s the oldest, and on top of raising me and my sisters after our dad passed, he took Sofia and me in. He’s probably the one you have to worry about the most if you really want my family to like you.”
The idea of Xavier and Mattie meeting face-to-face made me kind of queasy. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly, I wanted my brother to like Xavier. I wasn’t even sure I liked Xavier anymore.
Sofia. It must have been for Sofia.
Xavier whistled. “So what you’re saying is, I can’t exactly pop by for tea.”
I chuckled. The idea of Xavier popping anywhere was just plain funny.
“It’s not your fault completely. I have some explaining to do. But they’re all very…” I sighed, trying to come up with the correct word. Pushy didn’t even cover it.
“Protective?”
“I would say controlling. Nosy. And completely unaware of boundaries. There’s a reason I had to leave my grandmother’s house.”
It was true. I loved my family. Sofia and I trudged uptown every Sunday so she could grow up with her cousins, eat her great-grandmother’s food, attend Mass, and know her people. But that didn’t mean I wanted to go back to five different people busting into my room (or landing) at any given moment. I only had one now who did that. And she had the excuse of being four. What was theirs?
“Kate knows everything, but she keeps to herself,” I told him. “My brother knows you were involved with someone else. The rest of my family knows I had a fling, and like an irresponsible college girl, got knocked up. But that’s it.”
Xavier frowned. “You don’t think they should know I’m here now? Maybe I should meet them all. Get it over with.”
The idea of Xavier crammed into Nonna’s kitchen for Sunday dinner, peppered by questions from all five of my siblings, plus any of the cousins, aunts, uncles, and neighborhood friends who would probably show up once word that “Frankie’s man” was back on the scene was too much to bear.
I grimaced. “Believe me, that’s all you want them to know for now. Unless you’d like about a hundred Italians and Puerto Ricans to show up at your restaurant every day to henpeck you, critique your food, and demand why the hell you haven’t married me, that is.”
That got him. The abject horror on his face made me laugh out loud.
“Perhaps a bit later,” he agreed. “After I’ve met…her.”
I didn’t have to ask who he meant. It was telling enough that he struggled even to say her name. Still, he was trying.
“Right. Well. Perhaps.” I stopped outside a large brick building and turned to Xavier. “This is where I leave you today, I’m afraid.”
He frowned in confusion. “What? Why? I thought you had more time to talk.”
“I did. About twenty minutes, which I spent walking here with you and talking. And now, if I don’t get in there within the next ten, Sofia’s preschool will fine me a small fortune per minute I’m late.”
He started, like a cat who had just seen a bird, then swiveled his head back and forth between me and the door next to us, which was clearly marked “Happy Faces Preschool” between two picture windows mostly covered by closed white curtains.
“She’s—she’s in there?”
“She is. Xavi, I trusted you enough to walk here, but now you need to go. It’s not the time. We have other things to discuss. A timeline, for instance. What is expected of you if you really want to be a father. What it means. You understand?”
He looked suspicious. “So you still want to keep me away. Francesca, I already told you. I’m not going to be kept from my own daughter. It’s not happening.”
I frowned, resisting the urge to argue with him. I didn’t like being dictated to any more than my four-year-old. But this was no place for an argument, and I didn’t want to escalate things further.
So I tried a different tack.
“Look. That’s her.”
I pointed to a break in the curtain, through which Sofia’s capable little form was extremely busy packing plastic fruit into a play refrigerator.
Xavier bent down next to me, then watched a long time, completely rapt until she finished her task, then trotted off, waving some sort of stuffed banana at another child.
“I forgot,” he said.
I smiled. “That she looks like you? Yeah, spitting image, I’m afraid. No DNA test needed.”
“No, it’s not that.” He stood straight and seemed to take a long time to adjust his scarf while he continued watching the shadows of children still evident through the curtains. “It’s only, well—I only saw her the one time. And…she’s quite beautiful, isn’t she?”
I softened. I couldn’t help it.
“Xavi.” I touched his arm, which was currently trembling at his side.
When he turned back to face me, his eyes were as wide as the river just beyond us.
“What you said…about the lawyer…” I glanced toward the preschool, then back at him. “If you send someone to tear Sofia’s family apart, it will kill her. Ruin her sweet innocence. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Slowly, and with a few more glances back toward the covered window, he nodded.
I reached out and squeezed his gloved hand, pulling his attention back toward me. And then I took a deep breath and did something I never thought I would do again.
I begged.
“Xavi, please. Leave the lawyers out of it. For her sake, if no one else’s. I know I should have told you about her. I know that. But if you can take things slowly, let things come naturally…if you can give us that, I’ll make it right. I promise.”
Again, that blue-eyed gaze darted back and forth between me and Sofia’s shadow, now dancing behind the curtain. I didn’t like the idea of using my daughter as a bargaining chip, but here we were. Here I was. Doing what needed to be done for her safety and security.
Or was it for mine?
“All right,” he said. “On one condition.”
I gulped. “What—what’s that?”
“You come to dinner this weekend. We’ll sort out the details of the future then. No running off. No games. Just the truth. Can you do that?”
Solemnly, I nodded. “I need to check on childcare, but I think so.”
Relief flooded through me, followed by a different kind of tension. One that was curiously like…excitement. Kate would have to babysit. I wasn’t giving her an option.
“And, Ces?” he asked as I was about to enter the preschool.
I turned back. “What?”
A sly black brow lifted. “Wear something nice. This time I pick the place.”
I had a hard time catching my breath, and it had nothing to do with nerves. “As—as you like.”
A hint of a smile rose to those full lips. “I do. I will.”