30. Lydia
LYDIA
The phone sits face up on my knee, screen dark, and I still haven't stopped seeing what's on it.
My father's firm's name on the incorporation papers, Vincent D'Ambrosio's name three lines below as the man who brought him in, matter-of-fact, like it belongs there.
I photographed four pages in a shaking hallway in Gravesend this morning.
I've looked at them maybe thirty times since, and every time my stomach drops the same half inch.
Frank's photos are still open in another tab. Bruises on a woman's arm that used to be my mother's, that used to be the one I remember. The word relapse sitting under them in his stupid all-caps text like he's proud of the word.
I have all of it at once. That's the part nobody warns you about, how it doesn't come one thing at a time so you can handle each piece before the next one arrives. It just sits there, all of it, all together, and you're supposed to keep breathing anyway.
I keep breathing anyway.
The taste in my mouth is bitter, metal almost, the same one from the car ride back from my father's house, and I tell myself it's the granola bar I ate too fast, or the coffee, or nerves. It has to be nerves. There's plenty to be nervous about.
I don't let myself think it might be something else. Not yet.
For about four minutes, I want to tell Nico everything.
I get as far as standing up. I get as far as the hallway, my hand already halfway to knocking on the door of his study, my mouth already shaping the first few words. I know what happened to my father. I think I know who did it.
I don't knock.
Because I know exactly what he'd do with it.
He'd go quiet, that terrible calm quiet he gets, and he'd start making calls.
It would take days, maybe weeks, moving pieces around a board only he can see, and at the end of all that patience there'd be bodies.
There always are, with him. That's not a guess.
That's watching how this family solves problems, up close, for weeks now.
My mother doesn't have weeks. She might not have days.
So I stand in the hallway with my hand still raised, lower it, go back to the room, and sit back down on the bed like nothing happened, because nothing did. That's the whole horror of it. Nothing happened. I just decided something in a hallway, alone, and no one will ever know I stood there at all.
What I'm about to hand Frank isn't just paperwork.
I know that. Nico told me about Terminal 7 at the club itself, on the mezzanine, with his guard all the way down, the one place he keeps the worst of what his father made him do, the one thing in his life he still calls his own instead of his father's.
He gave me that unguarded. He's never shown that place to anyone else, not once, and I'm about to put it in Frank Carpenter's hands like it's a poker chip.
I think about the first month of this marriage, the shame that used to climb up my throat when some part of me wanted Nico to take control instead of fighting him for it.
I hated myself for that for a long time.
I told myself it was the only ugly thing about me, the one wire crossed wrong, and if I could just manage that, I'd be fine.
That shame doesn't feel like the big one anymore.
Because underneath the coercion, underneath Frank and the photos and my mother's arm and all of it, there's a small, cold, awake part of me that wants Nico to lose something.
Not because I have to give Frank something.
Because I think my husband killed my father, and some ugly, unlit room in me wants him to pay for that before I even know for certain that he did.
That's the truth and I make myself hold it instead of looking away from it. I don't get to be only a victim in this. Not this time.
The nausea climbs another notch. I put my hand flat against my stomach like that'll help. It doesn't.
I tell myself it's guilt. I need it to be guilt. Guilt I can survive; I've survived it before.
I ask to see my mother alone.
I don't have to build a story for it, the way I did for Anastasio at Gravesend, standing in that dusty hallway inventing a reason to be somewhere I shouldn't.
Nobody questions a wife who wants privacy with her dying mother the same day she found her father's murder connected to her husband's family.
Grief is the easiest lie I've never had to tell.
Nico looks at me like he wants to come with me and doesn't, reads something in my face he takes for sorrow instead of what it actually is, and lets me go.
I almost can't stand how easy that is.
Frank is already in the hallway outside her room when I get there, leaning against the wall in his off-duty jacket like he owns the hospital and every hallway in it.
"There she is." He smiles, and it's the same smile he's worn my whole life before something bad happens to me. "You look like hell, sweetheart."
"I have something." My voice comes out flatter than I mean it to. "For you."
That gets his attention fast. He straightens off the wall.
I hand him the phone.
I watch his face while he scrolls through the four photos, and I have to swallow hard, twice, to keep from being sick right there in the hallway.
Something moves behind his eyes that I've genuinely never seen on him before.
It's hunger, brighter and worse than the smugness I'm used to, worse than the low, constant satisfaction of a man who already knows he's won.
His mouth opens a little. For one unbearable second, he looks openly delighted.
"Terminal 7." He says it slow, tasting it. "He never once mentioned this club existed. Not once, in every file I ever ran." He looks up at me like I just handed him a gift he didn't know to ask for. "Where'd you find this?"
"Doesn't matter where. It's real." I keep my eyes on his face because if I look at the phone again I don't trust my own stomach. "Isn’t that what you wanted?"
"Yes it is, baby girl." He almost laughs. "You did good, Lyddie.”
I want to take the phone back out of his hand so bad my fingers ache with it, and I don't, because there's no version of this where I get to take it back.
"So we're done," I say. "You do your part now."
He tucks the phone in his jacket pocket like it's already his, and something in me screams at the sight of it disappearing into that pocket, gone, out of my hands for good.
"About that." He rocks back on his heels. "Power of attorney's signed. Hell, it’s executed. Sitting right here." He pats his chest like there's a folder in there instead of a heart. "All legal, all real, just like I promised you."
"Then give it to me."
"I will." His smile doesn't move. "Once your husband's put away for good. Not before."
The hallway tilts a half inch, same as the floor did this morning.
"That wasn't the deal."
"The deal was you'd bring me something real, and you did.
I'm grateful. I really am." He says grateful like it tastes good in his mouth.
"But I'm not handing a signed medical power of attorney to a Mafia wife while her husband's still walking around free to do whatever he wants with it.
Think about it from where I'm standing. You'd have it in your hand for maybe an hour before he found out. And then what?"
He leans in, low, almost gentle, which is somehow worse than the menace.
"This is me being patient with you, Lyddie. You should be thanking me."
I don't say anything. Anything I said would come out as a scream.
"Tell you what." He glances toward the door, toward the room, toward the shape of my mother somewhere on the other side of it.
"As a show of good faith. You get her alone.
No nurse standing over your shoulder, no camera in the corner, whatever you two need to say to each other.
" He steps back, opening the hallway like he's granting me a kingdom.
"First time since you got here. My treat. "
I almost laugh, and it comes out as something closer to a sob that I swallow before it finishes.
He walks off down the hallway whistling something I don't recognize, phone heavy in his pocket with my husband's whole hidden life folded up inside it, and I stand there until I can trust my legs again before I go in.
She looks smaller every time. I know that's not possible, not really, that a body can only shrink so much before it stops being a body at all, but every time I walk into this room she takes up less space in the bed than she did the last time.
I pull the chair up close, take her hand, the one without the IV line running into it, and don't let go.
"Hi, Mom."
Nothing. The machines keep their rhythm. I knew there'd be nothing. I sit with it anyway.
"I did something today," I say, and then I stop, because I don't know how to say the rest of it out loud, even to a woman who can't hear me, even now.
But I start anyway, because if I don't say it here I'm never going to say it anywhere, and it has to live somewhere outside my own head or it's going to eat me alive.
"I think Nico killed Dad." My voice comes out so quiet I almost don't hear myself say it.
"I found something today that makes me almost sure of it.
And I didn't tell him I know. I just... I took what I found and I gave it to Frank instead.
The one thing Nico's never shown anyone. I handed it over like it was nothing."
I press her hand against my cheek. It's warm, at least. Someone that warm can't really be gone yet.
"I told myself it was for you. That's true.
It is true. He's holding your power of attorney over my head like a leash, and I don't have time to fight him the slow way.
" My throat closes and I push through it anyway, because this is the one room in the world where nobody's watching me perform being fine.
"But that's not all of it, Mom. Some part of me wanted him to lose something.
Because I think he took Dad from us, and I wanted him to feel that, even a little, even unfairly, before I know for certain.
And I don't know what that makes me. I don't know if it makes me like Frank.
I don't know if it makes me like Don Leo.
I just know I did it, would probably do it again, and hate that more than I hate anything Frank's ever done to us. "
I say something else out loud too, quieter than the rest. That I chose this, twice, in the same day, and I'd probably choose it again tomorrow if it came to that.
"I don't know if any of this is going to be worth it," I tell her. "I don't know if I just wrecked the one good thing I've got left to save the only other good thing I've got left, and I don't know if you'd even want me to make that trade if you could hear me say it."
My stomach turns again, slow and sour, and I press my free hand flat against it like I can hold the feeling still if I just don't let it move.
I keep telling myself it's guilt.
I stay until the light outside the window goes from gray to grayer, holding her hand, saying things I've never said to anyone.
None of it fixes anything, and none of it makes the sick feeling in my stomach go away.
I don't leave anyway. I just sit there with her, spent and queasy, nothing resolved, not for her, not for Nico.
Whatever I've just made of myself in this hospital hallway on this particular day stays unresolved too, and I hold on to her hand like it's the only thing in the whole building that's still mine.