14. Chloe
14
CHLOE
E va led me to the vast, high-ceilinged room where a pool and hot tub awaited. It was situated back here in the mansion that several of the Constellas seemed to call home.
I was stunned. Rooted in place at the door to the greenhouse-like space, I dropped my jaw and stared.
I grew up on the “right” side of the tracks in Beckson. It was small-town life, but with my father as a judge and my mother as a PhD-holding former professor, I was born into wealth and privilege—both of which my parents lorded over me and everyone else they came in contact with. From a young age, I was expected to know there were two kinds of people in the world, the haves and the have-nots, and only select individuals could be worthy of my time.
Meeting Franco in junior high showed me how wrong they were.
Seeing this place that Dante Constella owned demonstrated how the supposedly inferior caste of people my parents looked down upon were really loaded.
“Damn.” I blinked and tried to let it sink in that this wasn’t a dream. I was here, in this mirage of luxury. It felt like a fever dream. After witnessing the bloodbath at the deli, being on the run, and fearing for my life from those shooters, it seemed surreal to be here with nothing more than the expectation to unwind.
Eva laughed lightly. “It’s impressive, huh?”
“More than.” I huffed a weak laugh.
“You haven’t met Olivia yet,” Eva said, smiling at an adorable blonde toddler.
“I…” I smiled at the little girl. She was so cute in her teeny bathing suit, tugging a lady by the hand to reach the pool sooner. “Oh. She’s precious.” I hadn’t grown out of the baby fever stage yet. Caleb had just turned nine, so old now, and I missed the baby days. Trying as they were, I savored them.
“This is Liam’s daughter?—”
Nina waddled up, interrupting Eva. “Your daughter. Eva. You’re just waiting on the adoption papers to be finalized, but that’s just a technicality.”
“Mama!” Olivia said as she held her arms up so Eva could pick her up.
“Sounds like she thinks you’re her mama,” I said, smiling at the cute child as Eva picked her up.
“Swim, Mama. Swim!” Olivia pointed at the pool, and we all laughed.
“She’s a tyrant,” Tessa said as she joined us. “Practically a dolphin already.”
Eva gestured for me to follow her and Olivia into the shallow section. “As soon as Liam came here with Olivia, Dante suggested having her swim back here. It was already cooler before the holidays, so I think it’s safe to say that she’s made this her pool room.”
I shivered in delight at the warm water. “Ooh. It’s heated.”
Nina held on to the rail as she eased in, aiming for a chair in the shallow end. This was no ordinary pool, but a custom made one. “Yes. Heated enough to mimic a hot tub but not so hot that I can’t enjoy it.” She grinned, leaning down onto the chaise.
“Dante insisted on starting Olivia with swim lessons as early as possible,” Nina said. “But I don’t think any of us could have realized how quickly she’d be obsessed with it.”
I saw how she loved the water, swimming out independently without Eva holding her, but within reach. Caleb would have loved to have a place like this to swim when he was younger, but I only could take him to public pools when they were open and I had time off work.
Seeing Olivia reminded me so much of Caleb, and my heart panged with sadness. I missed him. He was the light of my life, but in the context of the last few days, I was so damn grateful that he was away on spring break.
But if I am stuck here after the end of his break… I wasn’t sure what I could do. If I asked Franco about how I could leave this so-called witness protection program, I’d need to explain why. And telling Franco about the son I never shared with him…
I cringed slightly, not liking this chain of thoughts.
“He can’t wait to be a daddy again,” Nina said, rubbing her stomach.
She looked ready to pop. “How far along are you?”
“Thirty-six weeks.”
“Almost there,” I said, smiling. Being with these women and Olivia wasn’t something I would’ve imagined with the ideas and preconceptions I had of what the Mafia lifestyle was like. My parents spent so many years trying to brainwash me into thinking that Franco and his family were thugs. Gangsters. Lowlife criminals who only wanted to take drugs, party, and kill.
This family scene before me was cozy. Surrounded by wealth, yes, but these women weren’t awful. Nina and Tessa were engaged and happily settled. Eva had adopted this adorable little girl who seemed so happy and carefree. They weren’t oppressed and forced to be slaves or servants to their men. They weren’t stuck in bedrooms as concubines and told what to do.
They were just… members of a family, hanging out and splashing around.
“Chloe?” Eva said as she swam closer to me and sat on the ledge under the surface. Tessa played with Olivia on the other edge of the pool. “Can I ask you something?”
I nodded. I was guarded, but she had been nice enough so far.
“Did you run from the deli and not call the cops because you worried it could’ve been Wes who ordered the attack?”
I sighed and nodded. “Yes. I didn’t think to grab my purse when I ran out of there. I just wanted to escape and live. But even when I stopped at that motel, it didn’t cross my mind to call for help. Because it could lead him to me.”
The other women swam up close. Olivia floated on a kiddie raft as she poured cups of water into a funnel toy with spinners.
“Hey, no gossiping without us,” Tessa said.
“We’re not gossiping,” Eva said and rolled her eyes. She glanced at me. “No secrets among us. I told them what you said about your a-hole of an ex.” She covered her mouth to whisper the almost-bad word.
“I figured as much.”
“That we’d talk?” Nina said.
“You all do seem very close,” I commented. Oddly, I wasn’t mad that they knew about my situation.
“If we’re not close already, we will be once we start getting married. Nina will be my stepmother-in-law,” Tessa said, which earned a laugh out of Nina. “And Eva will be my cousin-in-law.”
I raised my brows. “That’s a layered connection. How’d that happen?”
One by one, they shared how they’d come into the Constella Family. Nina was rescued by Dante when she was lost in a bet to a biker leader. Tessa was also saved by Romeo when she was raped. And Liam entered the family, bringing Olivia with him, when he joined as a soldier and fell in love with Eva.
All their stories punched out more bricks in the wall that I was supposed to keep up in assuming this Mafia family was all bad. Deep down, I knew the Constellas couldn’t be criminals. I always knew that Franco was in the family, and it hadn’t stopped me from falling in love with him. Had I not gotten pregnant when I was supposed to come to New York with Franco, I would have toughed through the garbage my parents told me and come to be a Constella Mafia wife ten years ago.
Now I saw what I was missing out on. The Constellas were a Mafia Family, but still a family . Dante, Romeo, and Liam hadn’t hesitated to protect their relatives and their women. That didn’t make them evil. It made them heroes.
“I can’t believe you knew Franco when he was younger,” Tessa joked. “I imagine he was just as much of an exercise-junkie hard-ass then as he is now.”
I smiled. “He was always working out,” I said.
Eva and Tessa asked me a few more questions about how I knew Franco back when we were younger, but I didn’t have to suffer the pressure to speak much for long. Olivia, bless her sweet, little heart, saved me. She started to fuss because it was time for a snack. One of the house staff came by, and the lure of her offer for apples and crackers beat staying in the pool.
“I’ll come grab her in a few minutes,” Eva said. “Thank you.”
Fortunately, no one asked about my past with Franco again. I bet they were really eager for the gossip, but the slight shake of Eva’s head told the other two not to bring it up.
Thank you, Eva. Thank you. She was aware of our past, or at least whatever Franco told her about why I left. She seemed to get it that my history with Franco was a complicated and messy topic that I wasn’t ready to get into at the moment. She said coming to this room and swimming would be a chance to unwind, and she was sticking to that offer.
“I am so nervous that I’ll have to have a C-section,” Nina griped as she settled back on the chair. “Every appointment I have, they say that my pelvis is tilted.” She winced as she got situated, clearly at the stage of nothing feeling comfortable.
“But if you have a C-section, won’t that prevent you from stretching out your hoochie and being loose?” Tessa teased.
Nina splashed at her. “Argh. I don’t want to hear about that, either.”
“It’s not so bad. It all goes back to normal.” The second the words left my mouth, I froze. I locked my body in place and didn’t exhale, tense and freaking out that I blurted that. Of all things to toss out casually, that shouldn’t have been it.
They took notice, looking at me with raised brows.
“What?” Tessa asked.
“You have a child?” Eva asked.
Shit. Shit. Shit. I had to backtrack out of this. They couldn’t know that I had a son—the son I never told Franco about. I worried enough that he’d never forgive me for hiding that from him, no matter how justified I thought I was in my choices regarding that secrecy. With these women giving me such a warm and easy welcome into their little group, I couldn’t risk their hating me and not forgiving me for my past as well.
I cleared my throat. “I… gave birth,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. “But the baby didn’t make it.”
Technically, both of those statements weren’t lies.
I had a miscarriage when I was dating someone in college, but no one needed to know about that. It was the first time I had sex after leaving home, after having Caleb. I hadn’t cared about the man, but I wanted to see if I was able to move on from the memories of Franco plaguing me, if I could be intimate with someone else. Newsflash—I didn’t. The sex meant nothing, I didn’t even come, the condom broke, and I lost that baby. It was enough to turn me off from wanting to date. It also confirmed the impossibility of casual sex helping at all. It was just before I met Wes, and once he entered my life, I had zero chances of wanting to find a man again.
“Oh, my God.” Tessa set her hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s terrible, Chloe,” Nina said, frowning. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
None of them pushed to know if it was Franco’s baby, but I grew more nervous under Eva’s careful stare. She nodded, pressing her lips together in sorrow. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said sincerely, but I felt like she had to be wondering and thinking.
If she got it in her head that I was talking about Franco’s baby that I lost, she was wrong. I supposed the miscarriage counted as a baby I lost, and I had given birth—to Caleb. Even though I meshed the two truths together, it still worked as a lie.
The baby in the miscarriage hadn’t been carried long enough to be considered a viable pregnancy to begin with. I was still so young, and it just didn’t work out. While the event saddened me when it happened, I figured it was fate’s way of letting me know it wasn’t meant to be. So many women suffer miscarriages all the time, and when I learned I was one more number, a statistic among many, I moved past it.
I could not tell these women the truth.
I did know a thing or two about childbirth because I had a child. I had Franco’s son. Caleb was the reason I joined the conversation and tossed out that the whole stretching fear was more of a myth. That was my experience I referenced, not the early-stage miscarriage with the one-night stand in college.
But they couldn’t know the whole story. They couldn’t have this raw truth. I refused to let them learn my deepest secret before I could tell Franco.
As I lowered my gaze to the water, I drew in a deep breath.
I had to tell him. We’d had sex twice now, and while I still had no direction of guessing what could happen next, I couldn’t let this guilt grow and increase pressure on me when I was selfish to want him so intimately. It wasn’t fair to either of us to carry on like this with my huge secret looming large between us.
I had to let Franco know my hard truth, and then, only then, would I be able to accept that we could truly start over with a clean slate of complete honesty between us.
If he’d even want me after I tell him that I hid his son from him.