22. Nico
NICO
The beans have been simmering for an hour before Lydia even asks what I'm making.
"Pasta e fagioli," I say, not looking up from the pot. "My mother's recipe. What's left of it in my head, anyway."
She's sitting on the counter, bare feet swinging, watching me like she's never seen a man cook before. Maybe she hasn't. Not one who does it himself, without staff hovering, without a taste-tester standing by in case someone wants me dead through the soup.
"You cook."
"I cook this. One thing." I stir. "Everything else, I can afford to pay someone better than me."
The quiet that met us in the doorway an hour ago has filled in with steam and the smell of dried garlic. Stone walls two feet thick, cool even in the dead of summer.
A kitchen my staff stocks and nobody touches. A dining table long enough to seat twelve, and I don't think it's held more than two at a time since the day it was delivered.
The doors on the far wall stand open onto the garden, lemon and olive trees in crooked rows down the terraces, the bay spread out flat and dark blue beyond them, Capri a shadow on the water where we just came from.
I bought this house because a Don is supposed to have a house in Sorrento. I never once thought about what it would be like to cook dinner in it.
I press the lemons myself. Squeeze them into a jug with sugar and water, without taking any shortcuts.
My father broke a lot in me over the years.
He never got this. Small mercy, maybe the only one, that some nights when I was a kid, mother would let me stand on a chair at her elbow and teach me which pot to use.
By a stroke of luck, that part stayed and refused to be ripped out.
Garlic first, browned soft in the oil. Rosemary from a bush growing wild against the garden wall, still in its stem, pulled out before the beans go in.
Half a rind of parmesan dropped into the pot to melt down into the broth, exactly like she taught me.
I add salt by feel, and taste twice to make sure it's good.
Somewhere in my chest, doing this, I'm nine years old again, and for once, I'm remembering the good part.
Upstairs, through the window over the sink, I can see the edge of the balcony off our bedroom, hanging out over the water toward Capri across the bay.
We haven't used it yet. I've been meaning to bring her up there since the day I bought the place, to stand next to her and look at nothing in particular for once.
"It smells like actual food," Lydia says. "I didn't know that was a category you had access to."
"Careful."
"I'm complimenting you."
"Doesn't sound like it."
She grins, and something in my chest goes warm and stupid and undefended. It's been happening more and more since Capri. Since the boat. Since I watched my mother take my own worst memory and pry the rest of it open in front of the one person I never meant to let see inside it.
I plate the soup. I pour the lemonade. We sit.
For a while we just eat, and it's the easiest silence I think we've ever had.
"This is good," she says, and means it. "Really good."
"Yeah."
"You could've told me you can actually cook. Would've changed my whole opening negotiating position."
"You didn't have a negotiating position. You had a shotgun wedding and a very bad attitude."
"The attitude's still bad."
"I know." I look at her over the rim of my glass. "I like it."
She looks away first, out toward the water, and I let her have the second it takes her to come back.
I don't plan to say it. Things have been coming up out of me all night, unprompted, since the boat cut the engine and neither of us said a word the whole crossing. It didn't feel like punishment, for once. It felt like something closer to peace.
"I shouldn’t have lied to you," I say. "About that night when I was nine."
“You didn’t lie.” She goes still. “You left out the worst parts.”
“That’s lying by omission.” I turn the glass in my hand.
"Nico."
“No.” My voice stays flat. It's the only way I can get through it. "I let you hear the soft version. The one where I got to be a hero. And not the one where I cost my mother her ability to walk.”
Lydia doesn't say anything for a long moment. When she does, her voice has dropped into a register I've only heard from her a handful of times, every guard she owns set down somewhere out of reach.
"I'm not mad at you for that."
"You should be."
"I'm not, though." She reaches across the table and puts her hand flat over mine, and I go still under it.
Nobody else gets to do that to me. Nobody else has ever tried.
"You were nine. You were a child protecting your mother from a monster who almost killed you.
That's not the same as lying to hurt me. "
"Feels the same from in here."
"It isn't."
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
"There's more," I say.
She waits.
"My whole life," I say, "I've wondered whose son I actually am."
I've never said it out loud before. Not to Vinny, not to a priest, not to myself in any words I let finish. I've been carrying it so long I forgot it was something a person could put down.
"Martina's," I say, "or his."
"Nico."
"She's spent the first eleven years of my whole life telling me I'm hers. Even after that night, she still said I was her principino.” I shake my head. “Her little prince."
“Maybe you still are.”
“No, I’m not.” I look at Lydia. “You heard her, Lydia. I’m Don Leo’s son now. I’ve been Don Leo’s son since I was eleven."
Lydia's hand tightens over mine.
"You get to choose," she says.
"It's not that simple."
"It is, actually." Her voice doesn't waver. "You're not a blood test, Nico. You're not whichever one of them you're scared you match today. You get to decide who you are every single time you do something. That's the whole thing nobody tells you. It's not fixed. You just keep choosing."
I sit with that. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't erase eleven years old, doesn't erase the knife, doesn't erase any of it.
But it's the first true thing anyone's ever handed me about it instead of an answer dressed up to comfort me.
"Okay," I say.
Just that. It's all I've got.
The conversation turns toward Frank. It always turns toward Frank eventually. We both know he's there before either of us says his name.
"He's not going to stop," Lydia says. "The investigation, the church shooting, all of it. He'll use whatever he can get."
"I know what he is."
"You don't." Her jaw sets. "Nobody does. I've never said this out loud to a single person in my life."
"You don't have to say anything tonight."
"I know." She looks at the window, at the dark garden outside it, then back at me. "I want to, though. I think I've wanted to for a long time and just never had anyone worth saying it to."
I don't push. I've learned that much about her. You don't drag it out of Lydia. You leave the door open and you wait.
"He didn't just hit her," Lydia says. "My mother. He hit her for years, sure, everybody who ever met them knew that much, people whispered about it at the block parties and nobody ever called the cops." She stops. Starts again. "But that's not the worst of it."
"Lydia."
"He used her." Her voice goes thin and careful, each word measured out on its own.
"Other cops. Guys in his unit. He'd... he'd send her to them.
To buy loyalty. To make sure nobody in the department ever asked questions about him.
" She swallows. "I heard it all through a door when I was a kid. For years and years I stared at that door while she screamed and fought them. And only when all the monsters were gone, did I dare to go to her while she cried in silence on the bathroom floor.”
The kitchen goes very quiet.
I watch her say the worst sentence of her life out loud for the first time to anyone, and I watch what it costs her to get it out, and something in me that has been circling for months finally sets down.
“For years I wondered if there was something else I could’ve done. Call the cops? Frank would’ve told them exactly what they needed to hear to go away, and then he’d just hurt her again. But I wanted to do something.”
“You were a child, Lydia.”
"I promised my mom I'd come back for her someday.” Her voice cracks on the last word, just barely, and she pushes through it anyway. "I still haven't figured out how."
“I know how,” I say.
“No, Nico.” She shakes her head. “That’s not a solution. You can’t just kill your way out of everything.”
“But I can.” My voice comes out low, and steadier than I feel. “And I will.”
She looks up.
“I’m going to kill him for you. And nothing between now and whenever it happens is going to change my mind. I'm telling you so you know it's coming, and so you know it's for her as much as it's for you."
"Nico."
"I mean it, piccola.”
Her eyes are wet, and she doesn't look away from me, and then a moment later, she nods.
The air between us changes so fast I feel it happen, a current flipping over from grief into something else entirely.
I reach across the table and take her face in both hands, and she comes up out of her chair to meet me, and I kiss her like I've been waiting to since Capri, since the boat, since long before either of us would've admitted it.
She makes a sound against my mouth that undoes something in my chest completely.
I stand, and my arm goes flat across the table. Everything on it, plates, the jug, the glasses, goes crashing to the stone floor in one motion. Neither of us even flinches at the noise.
I lift her onto the table.
Her legs come around my waist, ankles locking at the small of my back, and she pulls me in by the collar with both fists, holding on like she means to keep me there all night. Fine by me. I'm not going anywhere.
She's laughing and breathless and pulling me down by the shirt, and I go, kneeling on the bench, then the table itself, working her dress up and off over her head until there's nothing left between us but skin and lamplight and the sound of the water outside.
Her hair comes loose across the wood. Candlelight from the sideboard throws gold along her collarbone, down the length of her, catching on the small mole at the back of her neck when she tips her head back and lets me look.
I trail my mouth down her throat, her chest, the soft plane of her stomach, memorizing all of it again even though I already know every inch by heart. She threads her fingers into my hair and holds on.
I settle between her legs. My hands go flat on either side of her ribs, and I look down at her spread out under me, mine in every way that's ever mattered, and I have to know.
"What are you?” I ask. Not a question exactly. A demand, quiet and certain, the only kind I have left in me tonight.
She doesn't hesitate.
"Your wife," she says.