35. Nico
NICO
The coffee went cold two hours ago and I still haven't touched it.
I sit behind the desk with a stack of shipping manifests I haven't read a word of, and I tell myself the same thing I told myself at six this morning. She needs space. Give her the room. Don't make it worse.
It's a good lie. I've built worse ones out of less.
I can't stop seeing last night. Her voice breaking apart under me.
The sound she made after, small and wrecked, coming through the bathroom door while I stood on the other side of it with my hand raised and never knocked.
I told myself I was protecting her from more of me.
The truth is simpler and uglier. I was a coward standing in a hallway, and I let her cry alone rather than look at what I'd done to her face.
I've killed men for less cowardice than that.
The manifests blur. I read the same line four times.
Somewhere in the house a door closes and footsteps cross a floor above me.
Every one of them isn't hers. I've been listening for her step since sunrise, the same old instinct that used to have me listening for gunfire.
My whole body pointed at a door she isn't behind.
Give her the room, I tell myself again.
I don't move. That's the thing nobody tells you about guilt this heavy. It doesn't make you run. It keeps you standing exactly where you are and lets you believe that's respect.
Marco knocks at seven with a question about the Brooklyn shipment and I answer him without hearing a word he says.
He leaves. I don't remember him leaving.
I sit with my hands flat on the desk like I'm holding it down, like the whole house might tip if I let go.
Somewhere under that stillness is a boy standing in a hallway with a knife in his hand, eleven years old, told to be still, told stillness was obedience and obedience was love.
I learned the lesson too well. I've been practicing it on her all morning without even calling it by its name.
I pour the coffee out at some point and pour a fresh cup I also don't drink. Small rituals to convince myself I'm doing something other than waiting for a version of today where I didn't fail her last night.
The light on the far wall crawls from one bookshelf to the next.
That's how I mark the morning going, not by a clock, by a rectangle of sun sliding slow across old spines.
Ten. Eleven. Some hour past that. I text her once.
Piccola. Nothing else. I don't know what else I'm allowed to say to her right now.
No reply comes, and I tell myself that's space too.
That's her taking what I promised to give her.
I sit there and let the silence do the work guilt usually does.
Somewhere past noon a thought finally cuts through the paralysis.
I haven't seen her at all today.
Not once today. I haven't passed her in a hallway, heard her voice down the stairwell telling Giorgia she wants eggs, or caught the water running in her bathroom. Nothing. A whole morning of a house with my wife in it and I haven't laid eyes on her a single time.
I stand up so fast the chair skids back and cracks against the wall.
I go up the stairs two at a time, and I tell myself this is nothing. I'm only going to see her, that's all. I'm not going to say anything. I just need to see her face and know she's still in this house and still mine to fail correctly tomorrow.
Her door's open. The bed's made, too made, made like nobody slept in it and pretended otherwise. Her closet's got gaps in it I recognize before I understand them, a coat missing, the good boots gone, the small bag she keeps for overnight things not on its hook.
My stomach drops through the floor.
"Piccola?"
The word comes out wrong, too big for the empty room, and nothing answers it.
I check the bathroom, the sitting room down the hall with the window seat she likes, the kitchen, the garden, and the car she almost never drives, standing exactly where it always stands.
Nothing. I take the stairs down two at a time and I'm shouting her name now, not asking. My chest is tight enough to hurt.
Giorgia's in the kitchen, drying a glass that's already dry.
"Where's Lydia."
She sets the glass down slow. She's been waiting all morning for exactly this question, and she isn't in any hurry to give me the answer I want.
"Gone," she says.
"Gone where."
"I don't know where. Gone is gone, Nicolas.
" She folds the towel over the oven rail, straightens it twice, and turns to face me full on.
She never used to do that when I was a boy, when she was afraid of my father's temper in the next room.
She isn't afraid now. "She left this morning with a bag.
Didn't say where. Didn't have to. Any fool in this house could see it coming a mile off, except you, apparently, since you were up here hiding from her all night and half the day. "
"I wasn't hiding."
"You stood outside a door and listened to her cry and you didn't go in." Flat. No heat in it, which is worse than heat. "Don't tell me what you were doing. I know what you were doing."
I open my mouth and nothing comes.
"You've been telling yourself she needs space since sunup," she says. "I heard you tell Marco that at breakfast. Space. As if she asked you for space. As if she asked you for anything at all before she packed a bag and walked out of a house you swore she'd never have reason to leave."
"I was trying not to make it worse."
"You made it worse the second you didn't open that door.
" She says it plain, no drama in her voice, and the plainness hits harder than shouting ever could.
"You've spent this whole morning protecting yourself from having to look at what you did to her.
Call it whatever you like. I call it a coward standing very still and calling it kindness. "
Heat climbs my neck. Some old animal part of me wants to bark back at her, wants to remind her whose roof this is. I don't. I can't. Because she's not finished, and some part of me already knows what she's building toward, has known it since the word gone left her mouth.
"You want to know what your father would've done," she says.
"If a woman under his roof defied him and walked.
He'd have sat in that chair of his and let her suffer for it, and told himself it was mercy that he didn't go looking.
Or he'd have gone looking, and God help her when he found her, because with him it was never about getting her back.
It was about making sure nobody who belonged to him ever forgot who she belonged to. "
"I'm not him."
"Then prove it." She doesn't blink. "Are you your father, Nicolas?"
She's asked me some version of this before, a lifetime ago, standing in almost this same spot. It hits harder now.
The kitchen goes very quiet.
Something in my chest that has been locked since I was eleven years old, since a knife I didn't want to hold and a man's face I didn't want to remember, cracks straight down the middle.
I'm not going after her because I own her.
The thought hurts, and it hurts exactly where Giorgia meant it to.
"Get my keys," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like the man who's been sitting behind a desk all morning. It sounds like the one everyone in this city is afraid of, and for once in my life I'm glad to hear him.
I've got my phone out before I hit the front hall, Anastasio's name already ringing.
"Talk to me," he says, no hello, because he knows my voice by now, knows when it means business.
"Lydia's gone. Since this morning. I need her phone, I need her car, I need eyes on both five minutes ago."
"On it." I hear him moving already, a door, a chair scraping, the particular quiet of a man who saves his breath for what actually gets her back faster.
Three minutes. Four. I stand in the front hall with my jaw locked so hard it aches, watching the clock on the wall move slower than any clock has ever moved in my life.
"Got her car," he says finally. "Plate pinged twenty minutes ago heading east out of the city. Direction's Gravesend."
Gravesend. Her mother. The house she grew up running from.
Of course. Of course that's where she'd go, back to the one place that was hers before any of this, before me, before Frank, before a father she never got to bury properly because I was the one who put him in the ground.
"Send me everything," I say. "I'm driving."
The tires scream out of the gate before Giorgia's even got the door shut behind me.
The drive to Gravesend takes forty minutes and every single one of them is its own hell.
I run three lights I have no business running.
My hands are steady on the wheel and nothing else in me is steady at all.
I keep seeing her face last night, the one she wore right before I broke something between us that might not go back together.
Underneath that, older, is a girl's face I've never actually seen but built anyway out of one photograph and a decade of guilt, Harry Mitchell's daughter growing up in a house I put a hole in before she ever knew my name.
My mother's voice rides shotgun the whole way. You will hurt her. That's what your father did to me.
Maybe I already have.
But I'm not sitting in a chair telling myself it's mercy not to look. I'm not hunting her down to remind her who she belongs to. I'm going because if I lose her, I lose the only thing in twenty-four years of this life that ever made me want to be better than the man who raised me.
Prove Giorgia wrong. Prove my mother wrong. Prove myself wrong, most of all, the version of me that stood outside a door all night and called it love.
The highway blurs into surface streets and the surface streets blur into each other.
Somewhere in the middle of it I catch myself praying, actually praying, to whatever's left listening after everything I've done, that she's just sitting in her mother's kitchen with a cup of tea she isn't drinking, safe and furious and done with me.
That's the whole disaster, just her being done with me and nothing worse.
I don't believe it. Some animal part of me has known since the kitchen that worse is already moving.
Gravesend comes up fast, row houses and chain-link and a gray sky pressing low over streets I've never driven and somehow already hate.
Anastasio texts the address and I don't need the GPS voice to tell me I'm close.
My whole body knows it, some old instinct for danger waking up in my blood again after years of pretending it had gone to sleep.
I turn onto her street going too fast and my stomach drops clean through the floor of the car.
A black sedan sits idling in the driveway of a narrow, gray-sided house, exhaust curling white into the cold, back door hanging open like a mouth.
And there, halfway across the cracked concrete path, Frank has one hand fisted in Lydia's coat and the other braced against her back, shoving her toward the open door while she twists against him with everything she's got.
Her hair's come loose from its knot. Her mouth is open, shouting something I can't hear yet over my own engine.
I put my foot down.