11. Valeria
VALERIA
“I’m telling you, bro. My sister caught her baby daddy with an old tissue and BAM—child support for the next seventeen years.
” Lacey’s roommate Toby nods sagely, tapping the laptop screen opened to GenoLabs, the testing facility offering fast, discreet, and not technically legally binding paternity testing. “They’re the best of the best.”
“Thanks, Toby,” Lacey says, tossing her stuffed raspberry into the air.
“Anytime, bro.” He fist-bumps her on his way out of her bedroom.
She stretches long to kick her door shut and motions to the plastic bags on her desk.
“Okay, so that one,” she says, pointing to half of the blood sample I gathered, “I’m going to pretend is the baby’s sample. And I’m going to ignore any and all weird looks for giving a tiny speck of blood as a baby’s DNA sample.”
“Right.” I squeeze one of her dozens of fruit-themed pillows to my belly.
“And these,” she says, pointing to Dad’s toothbrush and Stefano’s toothbrush, “I’m going to pretend are the potential dad’s samples. And the last is yours, the ‘mom.’”
My sample is just a plastic bag that I spit into, but it should be enough for GenoLabs.
After I scraped off the blood from the shard of glass in Dad’s room, I spent hours searching the rest of the house for evidence—a strand of hair, a fingerprint, anything.
I found nothing.
Once my call to Annetta went to voicemail, I packed up my cash and clothes into duffel bags and suitcases and drove my piece-of-junk car to Lacey’s apartment.
I’ve always known Lacey would help me bury a body, but she proved it when I stumbled into her bedroom with all of my belongings, begging for her help with a bunch of random paternity tests, and her only response was to grab her laptop and call her roommate over for advice.
“Don’t you work at a lab?” she asks. “Why can’t you test this all there?”
“For lots of reasons that all end in me getting fired and almost certainly sent to jail. It’s a heavily monitored environment, and the tests would take a long time.”
“Lame, but okay.”
“Are you sure you can go to GenoLabs tomorrow morning? I can call out—”
Her stuffed raspberry bounces off my face.
“No,” Lacey says, sticking one perfectly manicured nail into the air. “One, you’re already paying out the ass for express results, and two, I don’t even have to go into work until the evening. And three, you’re going to pay me back.”
I nod. “Of course, I can pay for—”
She pounces, grabs my shoulders, and shakes me with all the wrath contained in her tiny body. “Not. With. Money. You. Idiot.”
I slap her off me, and she pulls back, scowling.
So much pint-sized anger.
“We’re best friends,” she says, “and I don’t know about you, but that means something to me.
I would take a thousand paternity tests to a lab in Timbuktu if you asked me, and I know you don’t like to open up because of your fear of vulnerability and your hurried child syndrome, but it’s time.
Spill the beans, Val. Why do you have all your stuff with you?
Why do you need all these tests done? And why the fuck do you have an engagement ring on? ”
My gut plummets with the horrible realization that I’d forgotten about my ring entirely. I twiddle it with my thumb. The fancy engagement ring is in one of my bags, buried in a sock in case I ever need to pawn it, but the simple one feels like it’s been on my finger for years.
“Valeria.”
“Okay, yeah, you’re right.” I take a deep breath.
Lacey knows my family is… difficult, but that’s all she knows. I’ve kept her in the dark because I’d never wanted her mixed up in any of my problems. She’s focused on getting her sisters through college and out of her dad’s home. She didn’t need another broken birdie to take care of.
My mind is racing, but also completely blank, like I’m sprinting on a treadmill in an empty room. I swallow hard.
She’s my best friend, and she deserves to know the truth, but if I involve her any further, she could get hurt, and she’s the one good thing in my life.
Lacey sighs, drags her computer chair toward her with her foot, and plops inside. She points to my hand. “Deep breaths, babe. Let’s start simple. Are you engaged?”
I think back to when Lacey told me what her father was doing to her. How I stroked her back all night and listened to her spill out all the poison she’d been holding onto for years.
She deserves the truth.
“Actually, I have to start earlier,” I say. “Lacey. My family is in the mob.”
Her jaw drops. She’s silent for several long seconds while my heart gallops like a spooked racehorse.
“Say something,” I whisper, my mind barreling toward worse-case scenarios.
She blinks slowly, her mouth moving before she finally says, “I knew it.”
“What?”
“Val, you’re so weird about your family, and you never say what they do. I always thought they were into shady shit, but I never thought they’d be in the mob mob, you know, like the ‘sleeping with the fishes say hello to my little friend’ mob.”
I groan, falling back into the dozens of pillows on her bed. “Lacey, please.”
She flops onto the bed next to me, a few pillows diving to the floor. “Okay, so you’re literally Tony Soprano. What else?”
I hold up my ring finger. “I’m in an arranged marriage.”
Her eyes light up. “Tell me everything.”
I spend the next several hours explaining all the ways my life has gone to complete shit.
The arranged marriage, my deal to stick it out with Nico for one year, my mom’s weird note, my dad going missing, the blood on the broken glass, and how I’m going to use the paternity tests to see if it’s Dad’s blood or someone else’s.
As Lacey’s roommates start waking up and getting ready for work, and all hope of sleep is lost, she heats up frozen burritos and makes coffee.
When I’ve answered her last question, Lacey doesn’t respond for several moments, her arms wrapped around a pillow and her empty coffee cup sideways on the bed as she stares at one of the Yellow Submarine posters on her wall.
“If you feel like being my friend is too dangerous, or too risky,” I say, my voice going shaky. I thought I’d feel better telling her all this, but I think I might throw up instead. “I understand. I won’t—”
“Oh, shut up,” she says. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily. I just need a moment to process—of course, this is the week I decide to quit sugar. Look, I always knew your family was shitty, but not that shitty. This makes even my dad look like a saint.”
“I don’t think there’s anything that can make your dad look like a saint.”
Lacey waves her hand through the air like she’s sifting through a record of our conversation. “So this guy—your fiancé. Nico. Val, it sounds like he makes you happy?”
“What could possibly give you that impression?”
“Your voice does this thing whenever you say his name that I’ve only heard you use that one time you called to tell me you got the forensic science job.”
I clear my throat. “My voice isn’t doing a thing.”
“It totally is. This is your version of squealing.”
I toss a pillow at her face, and she bats it away with a laugh.
“Well, it doesn’t matter because I can’t stay with him,” I say. “I have to get him to lose interest, or I need to run.”
“Oh.” Lacey’s eyes go glassy, and she grabs my hands. “If you need money, I have some saved up—”
“No. Absolutely not. I have that big engagement ring, remember? I can pawn it if I need to. I’ll be okay.”
“You know I’m here for you, no matter what.”
A wave of relief crashes over me, and tears prick my eyes. “Thanks, Lace.”
“Don’t you dare cry, or you know I’m going to bawl like a big baby.”
I laugh, swiping at my face. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Now, you better go get ready, or you’re going to be late for work.”
I glance at her mango clock. I need to leave for the train in an hour. We’ve talked all night. I should feel exhausted—and I do—but I also feel lighter than I have in a long while, maybe ever.
I grab Lacey and pull her into a hug. She smells like microwaved burritos and coffee and my best friend. She smells like home.
“A hug? This is getting serious,” she teases.
“Oh, shut up.”
At the train station, I’m halfway through an email to my future apartment complex asking please, would you consider allowing an earlier move in, when the back of my neck prickles. I look up from my phone.
It takes me a minute to place his name.
Giovanni. He arrived at the engagement party with Nico. Stefano said he came from New York too.
He’s one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen, with powerful broad shoulders contained in a tailored wool coat and windswept salt-and-pepper hair. The two coffee cups he’s holding look like porcelain teacups in his massive hands.
“Good morning, Valeria,” he says in heavily accented English. He extends one of the coffee cups to me. “Stefano told me what happened. I assume you did not sleep well.”
The train should be here in five minutes.
I take the coffee cup, but don’t sip from it. Giovanni notices and smiles patiently. It’s a sort of patience that radiates menace, like he’s waiting for me to finish my prayers before he slits my throat.
“It is not drugged, if that is your worry.” He takes my cup and drinks deeply from it before returning it to me. “There, see? I am not here to hurt you, Valeria. I only wanted a quick talk.”
I relax a little. “Okay. About what?”
“I have known Nico since he was baby. I have seen him grow from shy boy to hard-working man.”
The image of a shy, baby Nico involuntarily tugs at my heartstrings.
Giovanni continues, “I have never seen him act this way around a woman before. I saw how he looked at you at the engagement party.”
Heat rushes to my cheeks—Giovanni is wrong, of course. Nico looked at me like a man who knew an easy lay when he saw one. Like he told me—there was no reason searching for a new wife when he already had one at home.
Argument fizzes at the tip of my tongue, but I bite it back.
The more people think Nico cares for me, the safer Stefano and I are.
Better to stay quiet—self-important men like Giovanni tend to fill the silence, anyway.