Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Luca
The call goes to voicemail again.
Marco's voice is still in my ear from five minutes ago.
She went to the restroom. She didn't come out.
I checked, boss, I swear to God I checked — there's a service door.
He was breathing hard when he said it. He should breathe hard.
I told him things on that call I'll have to apologize for later, if there is a later, and then I hung up on him mid-sentence and started dialing her.
The tracker on her phone is one tap away. My thumb is over it when the text lands.
Coming home now.
I read it four times. She's alive. She's moving. She texted before I could even hunt her, which means she wants me to know she left on her own, and she wants me to know she's choosing to come back.
I walk the length of the living room. At the far wall I turn and walk back. The apartment is too quiet. Nina is at the compound, which is the one mercy in this, because whatever walks through that door in the next minutes, the girl won't see it.
I go through the list because that's what I do.
Vico wouldn't take her quietly; Vico wants an audience.
Cesare wants her delivered to him with ceremony, not slipped out a service door.
The Beka problem is settled, paid, closed.
Which leaves the name I've been carrying in my mouth for weeks like a cracked tooth.
Voss. Gone from Milwaukee two months. Fifty thousand in his pocket and nothing left to sell except the one thing I should have told her first.
The elevator hums somewhere in the building's bones. I stop pacing.
Keys. The lock turns, the door opens, and Gemma steps inside.
She's whole. No blood, no limp, no torn coat.
Her color is wrong, though. Pale face. Her eyes find me across the room and they're dry, which is worse than crying, because I have seen this woman cry and this isn't the face that comes before it.
This is the face that comes after. She's already done whatever crying there was, alone, somewhere I wasn't.
She closes the door behind her and sets the deadbolt without looking at it.
"Gemma." I'm already moving. Six steps between us, and I've covered four when her hand comes up.
Palm out. Arm straight. She doesn't back away from me. She plants herself and holds that hand in the air between us, and I stop as if it's a wall.
"From now on," she says, "you're not allowed to touch me."
"What the hell are you talking about?" It comes out low and rough. My heart is going fast now. "I've been calling you. Marco's tearing that place apart. Where were you?"
She doesn't answer where. She just lifts her chin and looks at me.
Straight in the eyes. Steady, and she holds it. She lets me see all the way down into what's sitting there.
She knows.
I've buried a wife. I know what losing looks like from the inside, the exact weight of it, and I'm looking at it now, upright and breathing, three feet away in a winter coat.
"Gemma," I say, and my voice cracks on the second syllable, "who got to you?"
"Does it matter?" she says. "Was any of it true?"
Gemma
Luca opens his mouth. I watch him find the first word, watch his jaw work around it, and I already know it doesn't matter what comes out.
"Don't," I say.
He stops. His hand hangs in the air between us, halfway to me, and then it drops.
"I asked if any of it was true, and that was a mistake, because your answer changes nothing.
Whatever you say now, I can't check it. I couldn't check anything you told me from the start, and I didn't try, because I did that once already with a man and I told myself you were different.
" My voice stays level. "You're not different. You're just quieter about it."
"Gemma." His voice drops low. "Let me fucking explain."
"You had time to do so." I keep my hand up between us.
My arm shakes at the elbow and I lock it.
"You had the roof where I cried into your coat.
You had the night after my nightmare when you slept on top of the blanket.
You had the morning after, and the counter with my papers on it, and the bed, every single time in that bed.
You stood in a kitchen making pancakes with my daughter and you knew.
You had so many moments, Luca. That's what I keep coming back to.
Not one moment. Dozens. You picked silence every time, so don't tell me you were waiting for the right one. "
He just looks at me.
"You want to hear the funny part?" I take my coat off finally, because I'm sweating under it, and I fold it over the back of the chair.
"I followed every order you gave me. I did all of it because I was scared for Nina, and I thought the danger was out there, in the cars watching the building, in the men with the accents.
" I look at him. "The danger was in my bed.
The danger was fucking me. Turns out the proof of consummation was a term of the contract, so I guess I held up my end without even being told there was an end to hold up. "
"That's not—" He steps toward me and I step back, and the step back stops him harder than the words did.
"Selling it, Luca. That's what it was. You sold me. For what — a dock in Milwaukee? A better number for Bruno? I've been broke for eighteen months, so I'd genuinely like to know the price. I'd like to know what I went for."
"Enough." The word cracks out of him, louder than I've ever heard him get.
I laugh.
"Enough," I repeat. "Sorry but I'm not done talking."
He drags a hand down his face. When it comes away, his eyes have gone wrong. Wet at the edges, and I make myself look at them anyway.
"I don't know what happened to you," I say, quieter now.
"Whatever it was that made you like this.
Scared of everything that isn't a gun. I saw it and decided I'd go slow with you.
Not push. Let you open when you were ready, because I thought under all of it there was a person who felt things for me.
Actual things." My throat closes and I wait it out.
"I was wrong. That's fine. I've been wrong about people before.
I just thought I'd gotten better at it."
"Gemma, I feel—" His accent surfaces under the words, the Italian breaking through the way it does when he's tired, and even that I catalogued once and kept. "Christ. Everything I feel for you is real. The reason it started doesn't fucking change what it is now."
"Maybe. I can't tell anymore, and that's the problem. I can't tell, and I'm done guessing." I pick my coat back up. My hands work fine now — steady, the way they get when the deciding is over. "So here's what happens. I'm going to the Orsinis."
His whole body shifts. "The fuck you are."
"I already talked to Kristen. She'll keep Nina at the compound until I'm done." I put one arm in a sleeve, then the other. "I'm going to sit in a room with Cesare and say what I need to say to him. That's between him and me. When I'm finished, I pick up my daughter and we leave."
"They'll never fucking let you walk out of there—"
"And here's the part you should listen to.
" I stop at the door and turn, and I make sure he sees my face when I say it.
"I'm not telling them what the Sartoris did.
Not Bruno's deal, not the contract, none of it.
Because I can't live in a world where Nina's friend loses her mother, or Antonella's baby loses a father, or you—" The sentence dies.
I let it. "I won't be the reason people get hurt.
That's the difference between us, I think.
I had leverage for five minutes and I'm choosing not to use it. "
Luca crosses the room. He doesn't touch me. His hand stops a foot from my arm and hovers there, shaking.
"Please," he says.
Just that.
"You won't see me again," I say.
Luca
She takes her coat.
I know how this goes. I've watched people decide things in front of me my whole life.
There's a point where the decision is made and everything after it is noise.
Gemma passed that point somewhere between the front door and the counter, back when she held her hand up and told me not to touch her.
Whatever I say now lands on the floor between us and stays there.
So I don't argue. I do the only thing left.
"I'll drive you."
She buttons the coat.
"You're not walking into that fucking house alone," I say. "You don't know what's in it. You don't know Vico. You don't know what Cesare wants from you, and I'm not letting you find out with nobody at your back."
"Letting me." She says it without heat. She isn't fighting me. Fighting would mean I still count.
"Gemma. Let me get you there. I'll stay in the car. I'll stay in the fucking street. You won't see me. Just let me be close enough to pull you out if it goes wrong."
She finishes the last button. Then she turns and looks at me, and her eyes are the same gray they were the first night, in that motel, when she stood between me and her daughter with a sneaker in her hand.
Except that night there was fear in them.
Tonight there's nothing at all, and the nothing is worse.
"I'm leaving on my own," she says.
"Gemma—"
"If you want to do something," she says, "go say goodbye to Nina."
The words go through me. Clean entry, no exit. I've been shot many times but no bullet did what that sentence does.
She picks up her bag from the chair. She opens the door, steps through it, and pulls it shut behind her with a soft click.
I stand there. The apartment holds its breath with me.
I cross to the window. Below, the street is wet and orange under the lamps. She comes out of the building. A cab pulls in. She gets in, the car takes the corner and is gone.
Go say goodbye to Nina.
She's already planned it. She's already decided she and I are done, that whatever happened in this apartment gets folded up and put away with everything else I ruined. She's not wrong to decide it. That's the part I can't stand. She's not wrong.
My leg gives first. The thigh buckles and I let it. My knees hit the floor hard enough that the pain shoots up into my hip.
Then it comes.
It comes up out of my chest without asking permission.
I haven't made this sound since a morning outside Naples when the sky was still dark and the smoke was already gray against it.
Men I'd known my whole life held my arms so I couldn't go back through the door.
Six years. Six years of nothing, of work, of being the tool they send when nothing else works, and now I'm on my knees and I can't breathe right. My face is wet.
I press my fist against my mouth. It doesn't help. Nothing helps. The sounds keep coming, low and torn, and I let them, because there's no one here to see what I am when the walls come down.
Twice. That's the count. Twice in one life a woman has walked out of my reach and taken everything with her, and both times the road back to it runs through me.
Elena died because I wasn't there. Gemma left because I was.
Because I stood in here night after night with the truth in my mouth and swallowed it, told myself I was protecting her, told myself I needed time.
I don't know how long I stay down.
When I finally lift my head, the first thing I see is the drawing on the refrigerator. The house. The garden. The fish.
Go say goodbye to Nina.