Chapter Twelve
Vito
I’m still frustrated from the session this morning.
Frustrated enough that I can feel it sitting under my skin hours later, unchanged by time, heat, or distance.
I expected this whole thing to go a lot faster. Not because I thought Teresa would wave a hand and solve me in one conversation.
I’m not an idiot. I know things like this take longer than three months. Longer than a year, probably
Longer than most men like me would ever willingly give them.
But given the timeframe, I thought she would speed things up a bit.
Instead, all I got were basic questions and not much else.
Useful questions, maybe. Sharp ones. Questions that reached under what I said and touched places I didn’t like having touched.
But still basic. Intake questions disguised as something deeper because she doesn’t have the luxury of a normal setting and neither do I.
Anger. Violence. Sleep. Family. Pressure. She circled it, yes. She saw more than most people would have. More than I expected on the first day, if I’m being honest.
But she did not get to the center of it.
And I did not give it to her.
So here I am, restless and irritated—at her, at myself—and no closer to an answer than I was before I dragged her here.
Maybe I made the wrong choice.
Maybe she isn’t the right person for this.
Maybe I was wrong about all of this.
Maybe I acted impulsively, just like everyone says I do.
The thoughts are intrusive, and ugly, and unwelcome.
There’s a thin line of panic in me at the thought that all of my planning might have been for nothing.
I stop in the middle of the weight room and grip the bar hard, the metal biting into my palms. Sweat is already running down my spine, sticking the back of my shirt to me in the aggressively cold air of the hut outfitted as a gym.
The room is air-conditioned, colder than the rest of the island by design, but it still feels stifling today. Maybe because the frustration in me is bigger than the room.
Maybe because there is no amount of conditioned air that can cool off what Teresa started poking at this morning.
I re-rack the bar with more force than necessary.
The clang echoes.
Maybe I had acted impulsively.
No.
That part isn’t true, no matter what the rest of it is.
I thought about this for months before doing it.
Months.
I weighed every option and possibility.
Every reasonable path, every unreasonable one, every version of doing nothing, and every version of trying something smaller first.
I ran through what would happen if I approached her openly, if I tried to find a way into her schedule indirectly, if I trusted somebody else to recommend someone similar.
Every path led back to the same problem.
Teresa was the right choice.
Teresa was the only choice that made sense.
And ever since that night in the warehouse, I haven’t been able to live with doing nothing.
The thought drags me there no matter how hard I fight.
The warehouse.
The smell of damp concrete and old metal. The echo of boots and shouting. The blood in my mouth, somebody else’s on my hands. Nico telling me we have to stay together. Me walking away anyway.
Walking away.
I close my eyes for half a second and see it too clearly.
Nico could’ve died because of it.
That fact has lived inside me every day since.
Could’ve died.
Not abstractly. Not in the dramatic way families like mine talk about risk because risk is already woven into everything. Not one of those possibilities everybody files under that’s the life.
He could have died because of my stupid decision. Because I chose the wrong move in the wrong second and left him exposed.
If Nico had died that night, I never would have forgiven myself.
And my family never would have forgiven me either, no matter what they said to my face.
That truth doesn’t need much examination.
I know it the same way I know the weight of a gun in my hand or the feel of a room before violence breaks out.
Some things are simply true whether they’re spoken aloud or not.
I grab a towel off the bench and drag it over my face, then toss it aside.
My father expected better of me.
That part isn’t new. He has always expected better of all of us in one way or another, though not always in the same direction.
Expectation is the air around men like him.
Around men like me, too, if I’m being honest.
But I had never seen disappointment in his face the way I did that night.
Not anger. Not contempt.
Disappointment.
That was worse.
I’ll never forget what Nico looked like dropping him off at home that night.
Covered in bruises and cuts, barely able to open his jaw, barely able to walk. Blood dried at the corner of his mouth. One eye swelling shut. The slow way he moved as he eased out of the car.
I was going to go in with him, help him, clean him up, stitch him up. But he didn’t want it.
Even in his state, he would rather have dealt with it on his own than gotten my help.
Luckily, Erica—married now—was there waiting for him, and she’d taken care of him.
But that image of him never leaves my mind.
It is there when I try to sleep.
It is there when I wake up.
It is there in the split second before anger rises in me now, as if my mind has decided to feed it back to me every time I get even close to the same kind of blind certainty that caused it in the first place.
I can’t blame my father for not wanting to pass on his legacy to me.
Not after that.
Not after watching his oldest son, his heir, deliver another son to the door looking like death because he made a stupid decision.
I roll my shoulders and move to the cable machine, set the weight, and start again.
Pull.
Release.
Pull.
Release.
The muscles in my back and arms burn quickly.
I needed to do something to fix it.
That is still true, no matter how frustrated I am today.
Because I can’t allow myself to continue like this.
That night proved it.
Not the anger. Not the violence itself. I know what life I was born into.
I know what is expected of me. I know there are things I have done, and will do, that would sound monstrous to people who get to live outside of this life.
That isn’t the point.
The point is that if being in this family means that I will occasionally be putting them in danger by my actions, then the best thing for everyone is for me to step away.
The thought aches in me the second it fully forms.
It always does.
Because for all the distance that has existed between us, for all the years where closeness felt more functional than real, they are still mine.
They are still my family. And I am theirs.
I don’t know if I can say I’ve always been really close to my family.
Not in the warm, easy sense other people mean when they use that word.
After my father went to prison and my mother got sick, yes, we stuck together. We kept everything going. We kept the machine moving, kept the house standing, kept the younger ones shielded where we could, kept the business rivals from sensing weakness.
But the personal part of us shut down for a while there.
Or maybe it was always thinner than I wanted it to be, and those years just stripped away whatever illusion remained.
We were family.
But in blood only, too often.
Duty. Name. Obligation. Protection. Even love.
All of that was there. But the softer part, the human part, the part where people reach for each other because they want to and not because they must—that was harder to find.
Maybe impossible sometimes. At least for me.
And even though Giovanni had taken over when our father, Don Luca, went to prison, I was still the heir.
The oldest son, but too young then to run the family.
It had been my job to keep us all together, though, as I got older.
It was never said in those exact words, but it was always there.
In the way people looked at me. In the way the younger ones took cues from me, even when I didn’t want them to.
In the way every family crisis eventually became a test of whether I could hold up under pressure.
And I failed at it.
I know that.
No amount of excuse or explanation changes the fact that my brother could have died that night in the warehouse because of me.
I let go of the handle and step back, chest heaving now, the air of the gym suddenly feeling used up despite the steady cold blowing through the vents.
Still frustrating.
Still not enough.
I move to the bench, then the rack, then the floor.
Weights. Push-ups. Pull-ups. Reps until my arms tremble and my lungs burn, and sweat drips off my jaw to the rubber mat beneath me.
The air-conditioned room should help, but it doesn’t. It only makes the anger in me feel trapped.
So I take it outside.
The heat hits me hard the second I leave the building.
Wet, brutal heat. The kind that wraps around your body instead of merely touching it.
My shirt clings to me within minutes, useless, and I yank it off as I head for the path.
The island spreads around me in white glare and dense green. Palm shadows cut across the ground.
The ocean beyond, blue enough to look false in the harsh afternoon sun. None of it matters.
I run.
Not for distance. Not for pace. Just to drive myself forward until thought strips down to rhythm and impact and breath.
My feet hit the packed path, then sand, then stone, then path again.
I circle the island in the heat, shirt off, sweat tracking down my chest and back, sun burning into my shoulders.
The air feels thick enough to drink. My heartbeat pounds in my ears so hard it blots out everything else for a while.
I run myself ragged.
By the time I finally stop, my legs feel hollowed out and my lungs raw. Sweat slicks every inch of me.
My vision pulses slightly at the edges from exertion and sun.
I stand at the edge of the beach, bent over with my hands braced on my thighs and drag air into my body like I’m trying to outrun something internal and failing.
I kick off my clothes, then straighten and walk straight into the sea.
The water takes the heat off in stages.
First, my feet. Then my calves. Then my thighs, my waist, my chest.
I go all the way under.
For one suspended second, there is only pressure and salt and silence.
When I come back up, water streaming down my face, I stand there chest-deep in the sea and stare toward the house in the distance.
Toward the cabanas.
Toward the life on this island that shouldn’t exist and does.
Toward Teresa.
I brought her here because I needed the right answer.
Now all I can think is that maybe the right answer is going to be a lot uglier, slower, and harder than I planned for.
And maybe I deserve that.