23. Prodigy Moretti
PRODIGY MORETTI
As I walked into my mother’s kitchen, I could still smell the coffee she and Marcus had had that morning. Marcus was standing in front of the refrigerator, looking over his shoulder with a bottle of water in his hand. “There he is.”
“What’s up, old man?”
He laughed and pulled me into a hug. Marcus had been in my life long enough that hugging him didn’t feel forced.
He wasn’t my biological father, but he had been the man at parent-teacher conferences, basketball games, doctor appointments, birthdays, graduations, and every moment where a boy usually looked around for his dad.
He had shown up. That mattered, even when I had questions about the man who hadn’t.
“Your mother’s out by the pool with Renee.”
I nodded toward the patio doors. “So, she’s hanging with her real significant other.”
Marcus chuckled with a shrug. “Been that way since before I got here.”
“My mama and Renee been married longer than you and my mama.”
“Don’t I know it. I’m just the man who pays bills and gets invited to lift heavy things.”
I laughed, then pushed open the patio doors.
The sun hit me first, bright, hot, and already disrespectful even though the day had barely gotten started. My mother sat on a lounge chair near the pool with sunglasses on and a champagne flute in her hand. Renee sat beside her, legs crossed, sipping from her own glass.
“Morning,” I greeted.
Renee smiled first. “Hey nephew.”
“Hey, Auntie.”
My mother turned her head toward me. “Hey, son.”
“Hey, ma.”
Her smile softened, then slipped. “What’s wrong?”
That woman could read me too well. I hadn’t even sat down yet.
I took the chair across from her. “I just got off the phone with Jamir.”
My mother removed her sunglasses slowly. “Who is Jamir?”
“This tech guy. He’s good. Better than the PI I hired.”
When Jamir was mentioned during the Street Kings’ last meeting, I realized that he could help get the answers I needed much quicker.
So, I fired my PI. Jamir could find inside information most people wouldn’t even know existed.
A PI could ask questions, but Jamir could find the answers before the wrong person realized somebody was looking.
He was expensive as hell and told me I would still have to have some patience because Cartier business came first, but he assured me he could find the answers no one else could.
“He said he can find Renzo faster if there’s anything digital to trace, like old records, fake names, accounts, property, phone data, anything.”
The gitty haze that my mother had completely vanished. Renee noticed and put her attention on the pool.
“Prodigy,” my mother sighed, “Let it go. That man left.”
“You believe that?”
“I know that.”
“No, you accepted that.”
She sighed, saying, “Your father ran from responsibility. He ran from fatherhood. I know you don’t want to hear that, but searching for a man who chose to leave will only reopen wounds that took years to close.”
“They never closed.”
She sighed again, running her fingers through her long, black tresses.
“His disappearance never made sense,” I reminded her.
“Because you remember him through a child’s eyes.”
“I remember patterns.”
“Prodigy—”
“No. I remember him. I remember him walking me to school. I remember him taking me to the park. I remember him checking my homework and sitting on my bed until I fell asleep at night when I was scared. I remember him being involved every day until he vanished.”
My mother looked away, frustrated but trying to be sympathetic.
“Men lie about love all the time,” I said. “They’ll tell a woman anything to get what they want. But children remember patterns. A man can fake a weekend. He can fake a few gifts. He can’t fake showing up every damn day for years and then disappear without the pattern changing first.”
Renee sat quietly, sipping her champagne, watching our conversation without giving her opinion, respectfully.
“Did he pack bags?” I asked my mother.
“No,” she answered unwillingly.
“Did he empty accounts?”
“No.”
“Did he move different before he left? Did he stop calling? Stop coming home? Stop wanting me?”
Her lips pressed together. “He was under pressure. I don’t know why. His attitude just changed. He seemed more stressed. That’s why I know that he left because he didn’t want the responsibility. We were broke and young. You think I’m trying to stop you because I don’t care?”
“I think you accepted an answer that never made sense.”
Her eyes watered, but she didn’t let one tear fall. “Because sometimes accepting an answer is the only way you survive it.”
“That don’t make it true.”
“No,” she said quietly. “But it made it possible for me to keep breathing. It made it possible for me to get out of bed. It made it possible for me to raise you without falling apart every time you looked at the door waiting on him to come back.” She set her glass down on the small table beside her.
“You think you were the only one who lost him?”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. Every time you bring him up, you look at me like I buried him myself. I loved your father, Prodigy. I loved him when we were young, stupid, and thought love alone could protect us from the ugly parts of life. When he disappeared, it broke something in me I never got back.”
“Then why don’t you want to know what happened to him?”
“Because knowing might hurt worse.” She wiped under one eye fast. “What if he left because he wanted to? What if he really did decide we weren’t enough to keep him here? What if I spent all these years building a life around a scar, and you dig him up just so he can cut me open again?”
“And what if he didn’t leave?” I asked.
Her lips parted, but no words came.
“What if somebody took him from us?”
My mother shook her head, staring into the pool, fighting back tears.
“I know this hurts you. I know me searching for him keeps dragging you back to a place you’ve been trying to bury. I know you got a husband now, and I respect Marcus. I love Marcus. But Marcus being good to us doesn’t erase the fact that Renzo was my father.”
My mother looked down at her hands.
“And if I find him,” I said, “you might have to face why he left. Or why he couldn’t come back. I get why that scares you.”
Her eyes lifted to mine.
“But I’ve been scared my whole life too, Ma. Scared that everybody I love can disappear without warning. Scared that if I love somebody too hard, they’ll leave before I even understand what I did wrong.”
“Prodigy,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry that this opens your wounds,” I said. “I really am. But I can’t keep bleeding from mine just because everybody else learned how to cover theirs.”
She stared at me with hurt all over her face.
I hated doing that to her, but I still meant it.
“I have to find him,” I said. “Whatever the truth is, I have to know.”
“And what happens if you find him and he tells you exactly what I’ve been saying for eighteen years? What happens if you learn he did leave you?”
“Then at least I’ll know.”
“And if knowing destroys you?”
I stood. “Not knowing already did.”
Her shoulders sank with sympathy.
“I gotta go,” I said.
“Prodigy.”
I didn’t stop.
I walked back through the patio doors and into the kitchen with anger pulsing through my body.
My father’s disappearance had always been the first abandonment I couldn’t explain.
Every woman I loved, every person I feared losing, every goodbye that happened before I was ready, triggered that same abandoned feeling.
People left. Sometimes they died. Sometimes they walked away. Sometimes they vanished, and everybody expected you to accept whatever story hurt the least.
I couldn’t do that anymore.
Maybe I couldn’t let this go because it was the one thing I could do something about. I could have put this much effort in finding Arielle, but I thought it was pointless if I still wasn’t convinced that I could give her everything she wanted.
Marcus stood near the island when I came in. “Wait.”
“I’m not in the mood,” I barked.
“I said wait.”
I stopped near the entryway.
“You think this search is only opening something in you, but it’s opening everything your mother had to survive. Every question you ask her drags her back to a version of herself she barely made it out of.”
“I’m not trying to hurt her.”
“I believe you. But hurt don’t always care about intention.”
His words conjured up the guilt I’d been trying to ignore, because I knew my search wasn’t only hurting me. It was forcing my mother to bleed from a wound she had spent eighteen years covering.
“I’m not doing this to hurt Ma.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why does it feel like everybody wants me to leave it alone?”
“Because your mother had to force herself to move on,” Marcus said. “That don’t mean she got over it. It means she had a son to raise and a life to rebuild. Every time you bring Renzo up, it takes her back to losing him all over again. She never stopped loving him.”
“That bother you?”
“No, it humbles me. Because I knew when I married her that I wasn’t replacing some man she hated. I was loving a woman who had already been broken by a man she lost.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“That’s why I’m telling you to be careful with her,” Marcus went on.
“Not because you’re wrong for wanting answers.
You’re his son. You deserve to know. But this isn’t just about you; it’s about your mother too.
Every answer you find is going to affect her too.
Don’t forget she’s human while you’re chasing the truth.
She’s your mother, but she was his woman first. If you find him, whatever reason he gives you, she’s going to have to live with it too. ”
The anger in me shifted into guilt. Not enough to stop me, but enough to remind me that I wasn’t the only person hurting over Renzo. I looked at the man who had raised me and felt the unfairness of loving him while needing answers about Renzo.
“I appreciate you,” I said.
His expression changed from defensive to being touched.
“You raised me. You showed up. You loved me as your son, not some step kid you had to tolerate because you married my mama. I know what you did for me.”
He looked down for half a second before his eyes came back to mine.
“But I still gotta know,” I said. “It’s something in me that won’t rest until I know why he left. Or if he left at all.”
“I understand,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody else does.”
“More people understand than you think.”
Just then, the alarm notification started to go off on my phone. I fished it out of my pocket, swiped at the notification and unlocked the phone. I saw that the alarm was going off at the location Novi was staying.
“I gotta go.” When Marcus looked disappointed, I added. “We’ll talk later. I gotta check on something.”
I left the kitchen before he could say anything else.
I opened the door and stepped back into the heat with my thoughts louder than they had been when I came in.
I still needed to find Renzo. But now I couldn’t pretend the truth was only going to affect me.