Chapter Sixteen
"HOW WAS SCHOOL?"
"It was good." Louis buckled his seatbelt with both hands, as he'd been taught, and looked out the limousine window at the school gates sliding past. "How was your day, Mama?"
"It was good."
And that was the whole conversation, there and back, most days now.
Neither of them were lying.
Because both of them always wanted to see the good in the bad, even in times it felt impossible.
Aislinn watched her son watch New York go by, this brand-new city with its brand-new school where nobody knew them, where his blazer was the right size and the right label and had never belonged to anyone else first, and she thought her heart would break at how perfectly it fit him.
He used to swim in his clothes. He used to narrate the entire school day without being asked, every slight and triumph and lunchroom scandal, until she knew his classmates better than her own coworkers.
Their life now, the penthouse they lived in, everything was beautiful. And they were grateful, so very grateful.
But...
That was what hurt the most.
They wanted to be grateful and content, but right now it just hurt so, so much for Louis and her, to have this life without...
Don’t think about it.
Just don’t.
She still had Louis. That was the sentence she started every morning with.
She still had Louis, and Minna came by twice a week with groceries she didn't need to bring and legal updates Aislinn didn't fully follow, and Minna had promised, in the plain unadorned voice she used for things that were simply true, that they would never lack for money and never be unsafe again.
She had to be grateful for the little things.
And she was. She was grateful the way you're grateful in a waiting room, sincerely, and while listening for footsteps in the hall.
She was just sad.
Like her little boy was trying not to be.
It came out over dinner, finally, on a Thursday, over roast chicken neither of them was eating. Louis set down his fork, aligned it with the edge of his plate, and asked the question she'd watched him hold in his small body for almost a week.
"He's not coming back, is he?"
"He's coming back." She said it without letting herself blink. "He promised. We can trust him, so we'll trust him."
"Is he mad at us?"
"No, of course not." She reached across and covered his hand. "But right now, he's sad."
"Why?"
She looked at her son, her brilliant, terrifying son, who read rooms like other children read comics. "You really don't know?"
"I kept my promise, Mama." His chin came up. "I didn't hack."
Oh, her heart. "Thank you. You're a good boy."
"But I'm sad, too." His voice finally wobbled, only a little, only at the end. "I miss him."
"So do I. I miss him a lot, too." She moved around the table and gathered him in, chicken forgotten, and he let himself be seven for a while, his face pressed into her shoulder, the both of them holding the same missing person between them. "But we just have to wait."
And so they waited.
They waited through the rest of October, and then through November, weeks turning to months with the sky over the city going grayer and the doorman learning both their names, and Aislinn learned the particular discipline of waiting, how a day could be survived one school run at a time, one dinner at a time, one prayer leading to another.
Louis stopped asking about him somewhere in there. He just stopped, the way children do, folding the question away into wherever children put the things that hurt, and Aislinn didn't know whether that made her feel sad or relieved, and hated that she didn't know.
At night, after his door was closed and the rabbit was standing guard and the penthouse had gone as silent as money could make it, she sat by the window with her hands folded like her whole life had folded, and asked.
Please, God.
Please help all of us.
Show me what to do.
THE CEMETERY SAT ON a hill north of the city, old iron and older oaks, and the wind up there had teeth.
Valerio found Giancarlo Marchetti already at the grave.
He'd have known him anywhere, though they'd met in person only twice.
The dark, deliberate elegance, the cane he used without apology, the limp that half the East Coast pretended not to see because the other half knew exactly how he'd earned it.
Giancarlo Marchetti, head in all but title of the most powerful famiglia in New England, was crouched down with some difficulty, arranging white chrysanthemums against a tombstone.
The tombstone read VIKTOR BIANCARDI.
There were no bones under it. Both of them knew there were no bones under it, because as far as the world was concerned, Viktor Biancardi had gone missing and was presumed dead, and the world had been allowed to presume.
The truth was an island, and a vial, and a man who woke up with no memories among beasts that were no accident.
Giancarlo rose, braced on the cane, and stood beside him in silence for a while, two men in black coats in front of an empty grave.
"Did he come out of the island alive?" Valerio asked.
"He's nowhere to be found," Giancarlo answered. "What that means, Il Nostro Dio alone decides."
Valerio didn't answer.
He looked at the name cut into the stone, the name that had sat in his chest like a swallowed knife for more years than he'd known Aislinn existed, and he was aware of the older man studying his profile with those calm eyes that had watched a best friend confess to arranging his murder and had somehow come out the other side of it.
"You struggle to forgive him," Giancarlo said.
"Didn't you?"
"I had a lot of regrets by the time I found him." Giancarlo's gaze rested on the chrysanthemums. "Forgiveness isn't as difficult when a man realizes he's been far from perfect himself."
"So you forgave him then. Just like that."
"We both had our fathers...taken away." The words came evenly, but the cane pressed a little deeper into the frozen ground.
"It's a given, because of the world we were born into.
But La Strega and all of us who remain, you know we turned our backs on that world.
From what I've known, you've turned your back on it as well.
There's only one step left to fully sever our ties to the past, and it lies in forgiveness. "
Valerio said nothing, and Giancarlo turned to face him.
"If you don't forgive him, it'll always be between you and them. The woman you love. And your son." The older man's voice never rose, which was what made it merciless. "You may think you have all the time in the world to make up your mind.
"But you don't."