Epilogue II
VIOLET
"Mama, does the teacher know about Dragon?"
"I'm sure the teacher knows about dragons in general, bug."
"Not dragons. Dragon. Specifically. And he’s not a dragon, he’s a dinosaur. Does she know that he needs to sit on the desk and not in the backpack because he doesn't like the dark?"
"We can write her a note."
"A note." Patrick considers this with seriousness and skepticism. He’s starting to get hip to the ways of adults.
"Then you'll tell her yourself. You're very good at explaining things."
Patrick’s standing in the kitchen of our brownstone in the West Village—a three-story on a tree-lined block that we bought eight months ago because Gianni said the loft was no place to raise two children. Too cold, too distant, he’d said.
The kitchen is warm and cluttered, the scent of the pancakes Gianni made still lingering in the air. He’d insisted, saying it’s the first day of school and first-day-of-school breakfasts should be special.
Patrick is six now, his gorgeous red hair still curly, his eyes still bright and green.
But he’s longer in the limbs and sharper in the face.
The last of his baby softness is giving way to the angular features of a boy.
And a boy who’s going to look like his mother far more than his father.
Though, truth be told, I hardly consider Lance his father in any meaningful way.
Lance has been nothing but a bad memory—and a fading one at that, in a life where the good memories are quickly replacing the bad.
Patrick’s new shoes are plain white sneakers—he informed us three weeks ago that light-up shoes are "for babies," a declaration that Marco, still his BFF, wholeheartedly disagreed with.
"What if nobody wants to sit with me?" Patrick asks.
He's trying to sound casual. He's failing. His hands are fidgeting with the backpack straps, adjusting and readjusting them, and I recognize the gesture because it's mine—the nervous habit of a person who processes anxiety through their hands.
"Then you sit by yourself and read a book," I say, crouching to his level. "And by lunch, someone will come over and ask what you're reading, because interesting people attract other interesting people. And you, Patrick Russo, are the most interesting person I know."
"More interesting than Dad?"
"Don't tell him I said that."
"Don't tell me what?" Gianni appears from the hallway with Emily on his hip.
She's two—dark hair, green eyes, the unholy combination of her father's intensity and her mother's stubbornness, wrapped in a tiny body wearing a yellow dress and one shoe.
The other shoe is somewhere else in the house, as it always seems to be.
She’s holding a fistful of Gianni’s shirt collar and is babbling something that sounds like “more pancake,” which would stand to reason—she has her mother’s appetite, after all.
Gianni in the morning, in our kitchen, in jeans and a henley with a toddler on his hip and pancake batter on his sleeve.
No three-piece suit. No mahogany desk. No empire.
Just a man holding his daughter and pouring coffee one-handed and looking at me across the kitchen with that particularly loving expression I can’t get enough of.
"Ready?" he asks Patrick.
"I think so." Patrick straightens his backpack straps one final time. "Dad?"
"Yeah, buddy?"
"If I don't like it, can I come home?"
Gianni sets his coffee down. Crouches—the same motion from the first morning he met Patrick, one knee on the floor, eye level—and puts a hand on Patrick's shoulder.
"You're going to like it," he says. "And if you don't, you come home and tell me exactly what's wrong, and we'll figure it out together. That's how we do things. Yeah?"
"Yeah." Patrick nods, solemn and certain. It’s the nod of a boy who trusts the man in front of him without reservation, because that man has spent two years earning it.
"Good," Gianni says. "Let's go."
The walk is four blocks and beautiful as it gets in New York. Brownstones, sycamores, the morning light of the West Village in September—golden and clean. Patrick is between us, holding my hand on one side and Gianni's on the other. Emily is in the stroller, her eyes wide as she takes in the city.
At a glance, we look like any other family walking to school on a Tuesday morning. There’s still security here and there—Spackman insists—but it’s invisible. And danger hasn’t come close to our lives since that awful month years ago.
The school is a redbrick building with big windows and a blue iron gate and a hand-painted sign that says Welcome Back in letters decorated by last year's students. The courtyard is full of parents and children—backpacks and lunchboxes and the high, nervous energy of the first day back.
Patrick stops at the gate and looks at the courtyard. At the other kids. At the door he has to walk through without us on the other side.
I crouch. Take both his hands. "You've got this, bug."
"I know."
"Dragon's in your backpack."
"I know."
"And we'll be right here at three o'clock."
"I know, Mama." He’s acting exasperated, but his hands squeeze mine, and the squeeze says what he’s not speaking with words.
He hugs me. It’s tight and brief in the way a kid hugs his mom when he really needs a hug but also doesn’t want the other kids to see.
Then he turns to Gianni. The hug is different—longer. Patrick wraps his arms around Gianni's neck and holds on. Gianni closes his eyes, just for a second. His hand on the back of Patrick's head, the same gesture he's made a thousand times.
"Have a good day, buddy."
"You too, Dad."
Patrick lets go, then straightens his backpack and turns to the gate. He walks through, then stops at the door, turns back, and waves. Dragon's rubber head bounces in the side pocket of his backpack.
Then he disappears inside.
I stand at the gate and hold it together. But behind my dark sunglasses, I’m most definitely not holding it together. Gianni wraps his arm around my shoulders, and I lean into him as Emily reaches up from the stroller and pats my cheek with her small, sticky hand.
"Mama cry," Emily observes.
"Mama's fine."
"Mama cry."
"Mama's having an emotional response to a developmental milestone. It's normal."
"She's crying," Gianni confirms.
"Thank you both. Very helpful."
We walk home slowly. Emily falls asleep in the stroller, the morning excitement finally catching up to her. The September light filters through the sycamores, and the street is quiet, and for a few blocks the world is just this: a man and a woman and a sleeping baby, walking home.
"So," Gianni says. "I have something to tell you."
"The last time you said that, you proposed."
"This is almost as good."
He reaches into his inner coat pocket and pulls out his phone and hands it to me. On the screen is an email from a name I recognize, because every damn writer in America would recognize it—the editorial director of one of the big five publishers in New York.
I stop walking.
"They read the manuscript," Gianni says. "The whole thing. Cover to cover. Their senior editor called Ferrara's office yesterday—apparently the literary agent he connected you with sent it out three weeks ago and didn't want to tell you until there was a response."
I'm reading the email. My eyes are moving over the words, but my brain is lagging three steps behind, because the words on this screen are saying things like extraordinary debut and deeply compelling and we'd like to schedule a meeting to discuss acquisition.
"They want to publish it," I say.
"They want to publish it."
"My book."
"Your book."
"The book I accidentally emailed to the company distribution list."
"The very same."
I look up at him. He's watching me with that expression—the one from the first day in his office, the one with dark eyes, patient, certain.
"Violet. This is a major publisher. This is a real deal—advance, marketing, national distribution. Your name on a book in every bookstore in the country."
"My name," I repeat.
"Your name. Violet Russo."
I press my hand over my mouth because I can't fall apart on a public street at nine-fifteen in the morning. Except I can. Because I'm not hiding anymore.
"I was a staff writer at Undercurrent when I was twenty," I say.
My voice is shaking. "I was publishing essays in national magazines before I was twenty-two.
And then I met Lance, and he told me I wasn't talented enough, and I believed him.
For three years I believed him. And then I ran, and I hid, and I wrote a novel on a pull-out couch in Sunnyside because writing was the one thing he couldn't take from me, even though he tried. "
Gianni doesn't say anything. He just stands there, holding the stroller handle, letting me have the moment.
"And now a major publisher wants that book," I say. "The book I wrote about you.”
"What can I say? I suppose I’m something of a muse."
I laugh and I throw my arms around his neck and hold on.
“The meeting’s tomorrow at ten a.m. Ferrara took care of all the logistics.”
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
I pull back and look at him. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For reading the book."
He smiles. The real one—not the almost-smile, not the controlled curve at the corner of his mouth. The full, rare, unguarded smile I've seen maybe a dozen times in two years of marriage and that still makes my chest ache every time it appears.
"It's a great book," he says. "I always knew it would be."
We walk home while Emily sleeps, the city humming around us.
At the brownstone, I carry Emily inside and put her down in her crib. She sighs, turns on her side, and pulls her stuffed rabbit against her chest. I stand in the doorway of her room and just watch her breathe.
I walk up to my office on the second floor, my new office, the one I’m still getting used to, and just look at it.
There’s a desk and a window looking out onto the street, bookshelves packed with colorful spines. The newest addition is the framed cover of Undercurrent Literary Review that Kylie found in storage and mailed to me with a note that said Big things grow from little things. You’ve earned it all.
I sit at the desk. Open the laptop. The manuscript is there—the final version, the one the publisher read. The title page. My name.
Violet Russo.
Part of me wants to read it. But I don’t. Why would I? I’ve already lived every word.
I close the laptop and walk back downstairs to see Gianni making coffee in our kitchen. He looks up when I come in, love and desire and everything all wrapped up in one look. Emily’s monitor crackles softly on the counter. For a moment, everything is exactly how it needs to be, where it belongs.
"So," he says. "What do you want to write next?"
I smile.
"I'll let you know when I figure it out."
The End