Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty Seven
Teresa
He goes still at that.
Not frozen exactly. Just quieter in a way that has already become familiar to me. A small withdrawal. A pause that means I’ve touched something real.
He does not answer right away.
The room is soft with morning light now, warm but not yet hot, and the sea beyond the windows keeps up its constant hush.
We are still tangled together under the sheet, his arm around me, one of my hands resting over the tattoo on his chest with his mother’s name worked into it.
It would be easy, in a room this quiet and in a bed this warm, to let the question go. To smooth over the pause with something else. A kiss, maybe. A softer subject. Another layer of avoidance dressed up as care.
But the pause itself tells me the answer.
I lift my head a little and look at him properly.
“You never told them,” I say.
His jaw shifts.
I know immediately I’m right.
He lets out a breath through his nose and looks at the ceiling instead of at me. “No.”
I stare at him.
Not because I don’t believe him. Because I do. Too easily. Suddenly, horribly easily.
“You never told them,” I repeat, quieter this time. “Any of them?”
He is quiet for another moment. Then, so low I almost miss it, he says, “I never even told them I graduated high school.”
Something in my chest twists.
I push myself up onto one elbow so I can see his face better. He is still looking upward, one arm tucked behind his head, the other still around my waist like some part of him doesn’t know how to let go of me even while he’s saying things he never intended to say to me.
He looks young like this.
Not literally young. He still looks like Vito—broad and scarred and hard-bodied and too beautiful for his own good. But there is something stripped back in him at this moment.
Something that makes the man and the boy overlap.
“You never told them you finished high school,” I say again, trying to make sense of it. “And then you secretly got a bachelor’s degree.”
He gives one shoulder a small shrug. “Apparently.”
I almost smile at that, but the ache is too fresh.
“How?” I ask. “How did you keep that from them for four years?”
“Same way I do everything else,” he says. “Quietly.”
That answer does not satisfy me. No. Not at all.
“Vito.”
He glances at me then, briefly, as if the answer should be obvious. “I did as many classes online as I could. Drove to campus when I needed to. Worked around it.”
The simplicity of the answer only makes it more staggering.
I study him in silence for a second.
All I’ve ever heard about Vito Conti, all I’ve ever observed before being dragged into his life in the most extreme way possible, points to a man everyone assumes is heat and force and instinct.
A man built for enforcement. For action.
For danger. Not a man quietly taking business classes at Rutgers and finishing a degree in secret while living a double life no one around him was allowed to see.
And yet.
Maybe that is exactly what makes sense of him.
“Why?” I ask finally.
He shrugs again, but this time there is less ease in it. “I don’t know.”
It is not a lie. I can tell.
But it's not completely the truth either.
Maybe he has told himself reasons. But the real answer is still more emotional than practical, and he doesn’t want to look directly at it yet.
I do.
Of course I do.
Because the answer is already forming in my mind.
He is embarrassed.
Not of the degree itself. Not really. But of what it means in the context of his family, his role, the image of himself that he has been handed and expected to wear. In his world, Vito is muscle. The heir, yes, technically. The oldest son. The one meant to take over eventually.
But not the strategist, not the scholar, not the one anyone pictures quietly earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Those images do not fit together in the mythology around him.
He sees himself through that mythology more than he realizes.
And the college degree does not fit the man they have told him he is.
I don’t say all of that out loud. Not yet.
“Were you embarrassed?”
His mouth tightens a fraction. “Maybe.”
“What? Did you think they’d laugh?”
Again, he just says: “Maybe.”
The word sits flat between us.
“You thought they would?”
“I thought they might.”
“And if they didn’t?”
He shrugs one shoulder against the pillow. “Then I didn’t want to find out I’d been stupid for assuming.”
The room is quiet again.
That is not the real issue, I think.
The real issue is that if he had told them, he would have had to find out.
And finding out is more dangerous than never testing it at all.
Then I say, very softly, “That’s a lonely way to do something that important.”
He closes his eyes for a second.
“Yes.”
I imagine just how lonely it is. Not only having no one to share your accomplishments with, but what about graduation?
Did he even go to his commencement? Wear a cap and gown?
Does he have a picture of himself in a cap and gown hidden somewhere in his house?
The thought of it makes me want to cry, but I know if I do, he'll shut down.
He opens his eyes and locks them on mine. I want to ask more about it, but I gently shift the subject, knowing when to ease up.
“You could apply to go to graduate school.”
He actually flinches.
It is small. Barely there. But I feel it under my hand where I’m still touching him, see it in the brief tightening around his eyes.
Embarrassed.
The confirmation lands with such clarity that I almost want to laugh at the absurdity of it. Not because it is funny, but because it is so painfully human.
This man can order people killed. He can take down armed men in a fight. He can stalk a woman, kidnap her, and bring her to a private island because he is too desperate and too scared to do the normal thing.
But the idea of graduate school embarrasses him.
I soften my voice without even thinking about it. “Vito.”
He looks at me again, wary now.
“You could,” I repeat. “You liked it. You were good at it. You got through a whole degree in secret while living this—” I stop myself before I say double life, because that sounds too weird. “While managing everything else. You could apply.”
He looks away.
After a while, he quietly says, “That was the plan.”
For a second, I just stare at him.
Then I push up more fully, sheet sliding down a little around me, and forget to care.
“That was the plan?” I repeat. “You mean after Rutgers?”
He nods once.
Something in me lights up immediately. Not just professionally.
Personally too. Because now we are getting somewhere.
This is a real thing. A living thing. Not some abstract “I’m impulsive and need fixing” nonsense.
This is an actual life choice. An actual fear.
An actual dream, which is somehow much more frightening to him than bullets or blood or violence.
“Where?” I ask.
He hesitates.
That hesitation tells me it matters.
“To Rutgers?” I ask because I cannot imagine him reacting like this if the answer is simply more of what he already did.
“No.”
I wait.
He drags a hand over his mouth, then mutters, “Carnegie Mellon.”
I blink.
The words take a second to sink in.
Then: “Carnegie Mellon. Like Tepper? That’s their business school, right?”
He winces like I’ve said something incriminating.
“That’s an amazing school,” I say, unable to stop the sharpness of my surprise. “So why didn't you?”
“I did,” he mutters.
He applied, but he's not acting like someone who got in. Maybe he didn't. Maybe that's what this whole thing is. He put himself out there, took a chance, and failed. That's how he'd see it anyway.
“Well, why don't you try again?” I encourage.
“I got in.”
I freeze.
“So you're going? That's what this three-month deadline is, then. Classes start in August, and you need to be back before then.”
His expression does something strange—half guarded, half almost ashamed.
“No, it was years ago. I didn't go.”
Slowly, I deflate back into the bed, confused.
“Vito,” I say, and I know I sound a little stunned because I am. “I can’t believe you didn’t go.”
He lets out a humorless breath. “Yeah.”
The tone of it checks me. Reminds me this is not a triumphant story. Not yet.
I settle a little closer again and lower my voice.
“But you were going to?”
“I was.”
“What happened?”
His face changes then.
Not shut down. Not all the way. But something in him retreats to brace for impact. I know that look now. I hate that I know that look now.
And I know the answer before he says it.
Not the details. Just the subject.
His father.
Of course.
Everything keeps circling back there, doesn’t it?
He stares at the ceiling again and says, “They told us my father was getting out early.”
There it is.
The room goes quieter somehow.
I sit with that for a moment, letting it thread itself through everything else he has already told me. The years with Luca in prison. The sudden space that must have opened in that absence, not because life became easier, but because some force pressing down on him was temporarily gone.
Giovanni stepping in. Vito growing into responsibilities, maybe even into parts of himself he didn’t fully know were there. The room to try things. To imagine things. To quietly prove to himself that he was not only what he had been told he was.
And then Luca comes home.
And just like that, he is a child again.
Not literally, but in the deep emotional architecture of the family. Back in the place where his father sees him as impatient, reckless, and difficult.
A problem to contain rather than a man who had stretched into something larger in his absence.
I can see it so clearly, it almost makes me ache.
He needed the prison years more than he knows.
Not because he wanted his father gone.
Because with his father gone, he had room to become himself.
And the second Luca came back, all that room collapsed.
“What happened?” I ask again, more gently this time.
He is quiet for a beat. Then two.