Chapter 8
“ I got you a hot chocolate.”
It’s a simple phrase, but when Jax handed me the disposable gas station cup this morning, I stared at him like he’d just sprouted wings and was about to start crowing. His brows knitted in confusion, and he moved his pink sucker to the other side of his mouth. The poor guy was probably wondering if I’d lost my damn mind. But that phrase, so casual, yanked me back to a memory—one I’ve been running from for years.
It was as if the words were carved into my brain, lying in wait for the right moment to resurface.
I hear my father’s voice now, as if he’s standing right beside me, saying the exact same thing.
“I got you a hot chocolate, il mio tesoro.” My treasure.
I can see him so clearly in that moment, his hands steady as he placed the cup on the glass dining room table—the same table that once felt enormous to my child-sized perspective. Back then, everything seemed oversized and overwhelming. The table, him, his promises—they were all larger than life.
But now, as an adult, the table is just a table.
Everything that once felt so grand has shrunk in the cold light of reality. And that man, my larger-than-life hero, became small that day.
Something shifted in that moment. I don’t know what it was, but that cup of hot chocolate—it changed things. Before he handed it to me, he was a giant in my eyes. Afterward, he became small. The pedestal I’d placed him on cracked and crumbled, leaving me with a man who wasn’t all I thought he was.
And I—I wasn’t his treasure anymore. At least not in the way he’d once made me feel.
He became the man who failed me, and now he’s just a man who is dead. Another man from my past that I’ll bury there, along with the ghosts of three others I thought I buried four years ago.
Jax stands there now, waiting for me to come back to the present. The hurt in his eyes is unmistakable. He thinks I’m offended or angry at him for some inexplicable reason. For something I don’t even understand myself.
He pulls the cup back, his expression resigned. “Sorr?—”
“No, Jax. It’s fine.” I force a smile, trying to brush it off. But the words don’t feel like they fit anymore. The smile doesn’t feel like mine. “I just... I remembered something.”
We’re back in the SUV now, the hum of the engine filling the silence. Trees blur past the window, their shapes distorted by the rain streaking the glass. The weight of the quiet between us feels suffocating, the air thick and heavy.
I catch my reflection in the window—haunted, distant. The ghost of a little girl stares back at me, small and alone, just like she was then. Just like I was then.
“Il mio tesoro,” I whisper, the words barely audible even to myself. They carry more weight than they should. More pain. More distance between me and the woman I am now.
It’s strange, isn’t it? The way memories work. The more I think about it, the more I realize I can’t remember what happened before that moment—before the shift. I don’t remember life before he became that small man.
But I still remember that night with the hot chocolate.
The memory is like a lone photograph, faded and incomplete, yet vivid in its own way. I haven’t thought about it in years. A lump forms in my throat, and I swallow it down.
There’s nothing before that memory. No Delaney. No Mom and Dad. No Christmas mornings or chasing birds on the beach in summer.
Time didn’t exist until that hot chocolate was set down in front of me.
It must have been around the time my mom disappeared. I was six when the lightning flashed in the dark sky and took her away from us. Just like the flashes in the sky now, dark clouds reflecting the somber mood this memory has left me with.
A burst of lightning outside jolts me, pulling me from my thoughts. My gaze stays fixed on the rushing landscape as rain pelts the window. The storm feels eerily familiar, a reflection of the one in my memory.
It’s strange, the things you forget and the things you remember when you’re a kid. The mind locks away details, only to release them years later, through the lens of adulthood.
While the memory of the hot chocolate is isolated, I remember the night my mother went missing with painful clarity.
I clutched my teddy bear tightly to my chest, watching the rain push against the tall living room windows. The room felt like a fishbowl, cold and dark. Lightning streaked across the sky in silver veins, each strike making me flinch.
My father opened the sliding door to the balcony, and I can still feel the breeze pricking my skin. I brush my arm now, trying to wipe away the phantom sensation.
He was on his phone, the other hand pressed to his hip. He wore a suit, as always, though his white shirt’s sleeves were rolled up, the top button undone. It was the most informal I’d ever seen him, yet it made him feel like a stranger.
He didn’t shut the door completely, and his words carried inside on the wind. “What do you mean there’s no contact with the boat?” His tone was sharp, each clap of thunder fueling his anger. “Find her.”
Then he saw me. He knocked on the window, snapping his fingers twice to get Rosia’s attention. She usually left hours earlier, but she stayed late because of the storm.
Rosia nodded, ushering me away from the window and toward my room.
It was always like that after that night.
I didn’t know what to think. I thought I’d done something wrong by overhearing his conversation. I thought his anger was directed at me. And when they found my mother’s boat two weeks later, capsized, and empty, I thought his rage was grief.
But now I wonder...
What if he wasn’t just sad? What if he was guilty?
What if it was his “work” that led to her death? The storm, the two weeks of waiting, the lie about the boat—it all seems clearer now, knowing what I know about him.
Was it the mafia that took her life because of him?
Maybe the same vendetta that took her life is the one that finally claimed his.
Even as I think this, there’s a strange detachment, like the storm outside is mirrored inside me—chaotic, yet distant. A storm that isn’t mine to own.