Chapter 27 #2
Finally, he says, “I told the school I wouldn’t be attending.”
The words feel flat in the air.
So simple.
So devastating.
My mind immediately fills in everything beneath them. The fear. The collapse of confidence. The old narrative swallowing the new one whole.
The return of that earlier version of himself, the boy who already believed he was too much of a problem, too much of a risk, too much of what everyone expected him to be to become anything else.
“And that was it?” I ask.
A small shake of his head.
“No.”
He looks over at me now, and there is something almost unwilling in his expression, as though he still cannot quite believe the next part himself.
“The school wouldn’t just take no.”
I blink.
“What do you mean?”
“After I turned down the acceptance, they called. Then called again. Asked if there was anything they could do. If circumstances had changed. If I wanted to reconsider.”
I stare at him.
This is not what I expected.
“Vito.”
He huffs out another breath, one of those almost-laughs with no humor in it. “Yeah.”
My mind moves quickly now, clicking pieces into place so fast I almost know the words before he says them.
“What did they do?” I ask.
“They offered to delay my acceptance. Defer, I think they called it.”
There’s a beat where I just look at him.
Then I say, because I can’t help it, “Wow.”
His mouth twitches faintly, suspicious of my reaction.
“No,” I say, sitting up straighter again. “Seriously. Vito, schools like Carnegie Mellon do not do that. Not without a damn good reason. They must have really wanted you.”
He shrugs, uncomfortable all over again. “I guess.”
I shake my head.
“You don’t get it.”
“Apparently not.”
“I mean it.” I am wide awake now, any trace of morning softness replaced by the electric sharpness of real understanding.
“That is not nothing. That is the kind of thing institutions do when they think someone is genuinely worth making room for.
You didn't just get a bachelor's degree, did you? You graduated with high honors.”
If anyone knows the way colleges operate when they really want someone in their program, it's me. He doesn't even have to respond for me to know the truth.
Vito Conti isn't just smarter than he lets on.
He’s brilliant.
He looks away again.
I know that look, too.
Praise slides off him in most areas. Especially the kind he cannot argue with by calling it politeness or obligation.
But I'm brilliant too, and it doesn't take me long to come to a whole new realization.
Not slowly, either. All at once, like a freight train.
Everything else we’ve been circling. The deadline. The timeline. The panic. The three months. The strange fixed point he keeps talking about as though it is a clock counting down to detonation.
I go very still.
“Three years,” I whisper.
He doesn’t respond.
“They delayed your acceptance for three years,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
I don’t need him to.
I can already feel the pieces locking together.
“Your father got out of prison over three years ago,” I continue. “This fall is the next start of the graduate program that allowed you a three-year deferment.”
His face tells me enough.
My heart picks up, not with fear exactly, but with that sharp, exacting sensation that comes when a case suddenly clarifies.
“That’s what the three-month deadline is for, isn’t it?” I say quietly.
His eyes lift to mine.
I can see the answer before he gives it.
“You have until July,” I say, “to tell them whether you’re going to go or not.”
He says nothing.
But silence, with Vito, is rarely empty.
This one is full. To the brim.
I stare at him, and for one long second, all the previous weeks shift and rearrange themselves around this new truth.
Not just the urgency. The shame, too. The panic. The fixation on being fit or unfit, on whether he can take over, on whether he is too impulsive, too reckless, too flawed to trust with power. All of it braided around this real, tangible fork in the road.
Not abstract destiny.
A decision.
A real one.
Maybe the first truly free decision of his adult life.
And he has responded to it by kidnapping a psychologist.
My God.
The absurdity of that would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
“That’s the deadline,” I say again, softer now, because I can see in his face that the fact of it still hurts. “Not some vague internal clock. Not just your timeline for fixing yourself. The MBA. Carnegie Mellon. July.”
He nods once.
Barely.
“Yes.”
There it is.
The answer I have been trying to get to for weeks.
And the second I have it, something inside me shifts.
Professionally, yes. Because now the work has an actual axis. A real problem. Fear of choice. Fear of self-determination. Fear of stepping outside the role he inherited and risking that the self he built in secret might not survive daylight.
But also personally.
Because this is not just about a man trying to calm some violent instinct before taking over his father’s empire.
This is about a man who secretly finished high school for his dying mother, secretly earned a business degree, secretly got into Carnegie Mellon, and then panicked so badly at the thought of choosing his own future that he built this entire desperate scenario around not having to face the choice alone.
He is so much more frightened than he wants anyone to know.
And now I know.
I don’t realize I’ve moved until I feel that I’m closer to him. Close enough that my hand has left his chest and settled against his jaw instead, fingers light at the side of his face.
He stills under the touch.
Not pulling away, but not leaning in either.
Just letting me.
“That is what this is really about,” I say.
His eyes stay on mine.
“I think it’s about a lot of things.”
“Yes,” I say quietly. “But that’s the center.”
He doesn’t argue.
For a man like Vito, that is as good as a confession.