65. Chapter 56
Lorenzo
A week after the fire
The DA’s office is beige, cold, and unwelcoming. The conference table we’re all gathered around is old, laminated wood, the edges of it bubbling after years of coffee stains.
And it’s at that old conference table that I tell the detectives and the DA everything.
Not just some things.
Everything.
My attorney, a sharp-tongued, tired-eyed woman named Agathe Beauregard, whom Carlo found for me within an hour of me telling him my plan, warned me that a full confession was a gamble: full confession and full cooperation in exchange for a plea deal that won’t bury me in the prison system for the rest of my life.
But I don’t hesitate. Even if they don’t accept the deal, I know what the right thing to do is.
I’m tired of giving into the darkness, and it’s time all these dark Diamante secrets come to light.
Two weeks after the fire
The charges, when they’re finalized, are about as bad as I expected them to be: conspiracy to commit murder (Giovanni’s murder, to be specific), racketeering, money laundering, assault, extortion, and mail fraud.
I feel that I deserve more, but Agathe tells me to accept what they decide.
She negotiates a careful deal: eighteen months, with credit for time served during the investigation, in exchange for a full testimony against Giovanni and my mother, and total forfeiture of every remaining Diamante asset that hasn’t already been converted to legitimate money.
I willingly surrender it all rather than having it seized by the state, and it’s my idea to convert the funds into a charitable trust. The money from that trust will funnel back into the very same parts of the city my family used to exploit, funding urban renewal, youth centers, and rehabilitation clinics.
It’s a start, but even with this, I hardly feel like it’s enough to change the terrible things my family has done.
Two months after the fire
Visiting hours at the prison run two to four on Wednesdays. Carlo’s is the first face I see across the plexiglass when I sit across from him and smile.
“How you holding up, kid?” he asks.
That makes me laugh. “I’m hardly a kid, Carlo.”
“You’ll always be a kid to me.”
I shrug as well as I can with my cuffs. “I’m doing fine. Food’s terrible, but what do you expect? Some of the old enforcers who are locked up in here tried to rough me up last week, but the guards got there in time.”
My eye is still black and blue, though.
“You know, Pepe is still furious at me. He thinks I should’ve warned you sooner about what I suspected about Giovanni.”
“We’ve been over this, Carlo. You did what you thought was best.”
“Still. I should’ve trusted you.”
Sometimes I wonder how things would be different if I had known from the start what my father was planning. Would all of this have been avoided?
But there’s no use wondering about what could’ve been.
“It’s okay, Carlo. Let’s talk of happier things. The foundation. How’s it going?”
“The paperwork is moving right along. Agathe filed the initial trust documents. Pepe wants to be on the board—I’m assuming you’ll say yes to that.”
“Absolutely. Tell him I’m grateful.”
“I will. He’s itching to visit you.” Then he hesitates. “Speaking of visiting. Your mother wants to see you. Before her own hearing, that is.”
I look away. “I’m not ready for that yet.”
“That’s what I told her.” He has the grace not to push me. “She said she understands.”
Five months after the fire
The letter from Agathe is four cramped pages, most of it dry legal boilerplate. On the third page, there’s a paragraph I have to read three times before I fully believe it.
The trust documentation, finally, has been approved by the court.
The Diamante Family Foundation is now fully incorporated.
The initial funding transfer of $4.2 million went through this week, covering the first three converted properties.
Pepe has joined the board, as he wanted, and the team has been drafting the mission statement per my instructions: community investment in neighborhoods historically affected by Diamante-linked dealings, with a dedicated fund for the city’s first responders.
This, I think, is almost enough.
But something I’ve learned in prison is that restitution and redemption are ongoing states of being.
Nothing I do now will ever erase what my family did—what I did.
But erasing it isn’t my job. You can’t erase the past, or run from it.
All you can do is try to build a better future, and that’s what I hope to do.
Eight months after the fire
Prison has started to feel normal. I learn that I can survive without control over every aspect of my life. In here, most things are truly beyond my control. My schedule, my food, the walls that surround me while I sleep.
This lack of control is the cost of my restitution.
When you have no control over your environment, when so many of your choices are taken away from you, there’s a cost. Suffering, maybe, but certainly an erosion of the self.
I see it in myself. I see it in my fellow inmates, especially those who’ve been trapped in this system for a lifetime until it eats away at everything that once made them who they were.
Eight months in, I write to Agathe, requesting that we add a dedicated prison reform branch to the gestating foundation.
Everyone, I tell her, deserves a chance at redemption.
She writes back agreeing—and remarking on how much I’ve changed.
You don’t know the half of it, I think.
One year, six months after the fire
I am released on a gray, unremarkable Monday. The city is thick with fog. They give me the same clothes to wear that I wore when I turned myself in: a plain blue suit, a white shirt, brown shoes.
My body has changed in the time I was in prison. My clothes don’t fit me quite the same way they used to; the pants are looser around the waist, the shirt and jacket tighter around the shoulders. I haven’t had much to do over the last eighteen months except work out, write to Agathe, and think.
And I’ve done plenty of thinking.
“You look like a new man,” Carlo says when he picks me up outside the gate. No longer a consigliere, he has stepped into his new role as chairman of the Diamante Charitable Foundation quite well.
“Is that a good thing?” I ask, giving him a wide smile.
“Judging by that smile, I’d say it is.” We embrace, and he holds me for an extra second. “It’s good to have you back.”
“It’s good to be free.”
He opens the passenger door for me. “The Foundation offices are ready whenever you want to see them. We can go there, or I can take you to your apartment. Whatever you prefer.”
“Let’s see the place,” I say. Carlo nods approvingly.
We drive silently. What is there to say?
I am a changed man, now, and I don’t yet know what to talk about in this new version of myself.
This lighter version. Carlo seems content to sit in the silence as the gates to the prison shrink behind us, eighteen months of my life compressing into a gray, retreating rectangle.
Whatever comes after this, I decide—if anything will come after this at all, anything beyond a life in boardrooms, a life spent trying to make up for all the awfulness that came before me—it will have to be earned. Earned from nothing. Built completely anew.
I look out the car window at the city as it moves past us, the city I’m finally free to walk around in again. For the first time in my adult life, I let myself feel, cautiously, something like hope.