Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
Gemma
The water is colder than I expect, but I leave my feet in it anyway.
The dock hasn't changed. Same gray boards, same nail near the end that sits a quarter inch too high, the one Dad used to warn me about every single summer as if I'd forget between June and July.
I used to sit right here with a fishing rod I didn't know how to use while he drank coffee from a thermos and told me the fish could hear me thinking too loud. I believed him until I was nine.
I told my parents I needed a few hours alone. Mom looked at me but didn't argue, which means she understood, and Dad asked if the car had gas, which is how he says he loves me. Nina was still asleep.
So now it's me and the lake and the thing I can't say out loud yet.
I'm pregnant.
I say it in my head and it still doesn't land. It sits on the surface of me like the leaves on the water, drifting around, refusing to sink in. I keep waiting for the part where I feel it, and instead there's just this hum in my chest, steady and low, like a fridge running in another room.
Last night I lay in my childhood bed and I went through the options. I could end it. Plenty of women do, and I wouldn't judge a single one of them. But when I got to that item on the list, my whole body said no before my brain finished the sentence. So I'm keeping it. That's the one thing I know.
Everything after that is fog.
Because here's the problem. I can't keep this a secret. A baby isn't a secret. A baby is a person who shows up and stays. And Nina already lost one father. Now I'm going to hand her a brother or sister whose father is also not around. Two kids, two absent men.
That's what I keep telling myself the problem is.
Right.
The honest version is simpler and I hate it.
The honest version is that I miss him. I miss him in a way that's physical, like a pulled muscle that only hurts when I move a certain direction, except every direction is that direction.
I miss the sound of his boots on the floor at night.
I miss watching his hands do careful things.
I miss how he never once asked me to be smaller than I am.
He lied to me. I've repeated it to myself every day for a month like homework.
And I still miss him so much.
The board behind me knocks under a shoe.
I pull my feet out of the water and turn around.
Dominik stands at the shore end of the dock with his hands in his coat pockets, and he's smirking at me the way he used to smirk at waiters who got his order wrong. Patient. Already forgiving me for a mistake I don't know I have made.
Run. The thought arrives whole and useless, because I'm at the end of a dock and he's standing on the only way off it.
My legs get me standing. That's all they do.
"Hello, Gemma." He steps onto the next board. Then the next. He takes his time, looking at the lake, at the trees, at me last. "Pretty out here. I understand now why you never wanted to bring me."
"You shouldn't be here." My voice comes out low and even, which surprises me, because my heart is hitting my ribs hard enough that I can feel it in my throat.
"Many people shouldn’t be in many places.
" He stops a few feet away. "But here we are.
Both of us out of places to go. You ran out of yours faster than I thought you would.
The waitress thing, the motel, the enforcer.
And then straight back to Mommy and Daddy.
" He tips his head toward the house. "This was always the last stop. All I had to do was wait."
"What do you want," I say.
"See, that's new." He smiles wider. "The old Gemma would've asked how I was. Offered me coffee." He looks past me at the water. "Nina's gotten big. I watched her in the garden yesterday. Planting with your father." He says it in the same tone he'd use for the weather. "She has my chin."
The dock tilts under me. It doesn't move, I know it doesn't move, but my stomach drops anyway and I have to plant my bare feet wider on the cold boards to stay still. He was here yesterday. He stood somewhere with a view of my daughter and my father kneeling in the dirt, and none of us felt it.
"Don't," I say. Just that. I can't build the rest of the sentence.
"Don't what? She's my daughter." He shrugs, easy, reasonable.
"But relax. I'm not here for her. Children are expensive and I'm currently a dead man with cash flow problems." He takes one more step.
The board creaks. "I'm here because your situation has improved and mine hasn't, and that's an imbalance we can fix. "
"I don't have anything." It's true. I left the card, the apartment, all of it. "I don't have money, Dominik."
"You have a father dying in a bed in Milwaukee who'd sign over the lake if you asked him for it." His voice stays soft.
My hands have gone cold. I press them against my thighs so he won't see them shake.
Luca
The porch light is still on at nine in the morning.
The door opens on the second knock. A man in his sixties fills the frame. Broad through the shoulders, gray at the temples, a trowel in one hand and dirt under his nails.
He doesn't ask who I am. He looks at me and whatever he finds there makes his mouth go flat.
"You'd be Luca," he says.
"Yes, sir."
He stands in the doorway and doesn't move aside. The trowel hangs loose at his side, and I understand it isn't a weapon, but he holds it like a man who'd use it if he had to.
"You drove up from Chicago." It's not a question.
"Last night. I stayed at the motel on Route 12."
Behind him, warm air drifts out of the house.
Coffee. Toast. A television running cartoons low in another room.
Everything Gemma came from and everything I took her out of, and this man knows it.
He studies my face for a long time, and I let him.
I've stood across from men who wanted me dead and given them less than I'm giving him now.
"She's not here," he says.
The words drop into my chest and sit there. I look past his shoulder at the hallway and the hope I've been carrying since the pharmacy report goes very quiet.
"Sir, I need to—"
"Mr. Luca!"
The cartoons cut off with a thump of small feet. Nina comes down the hallway at a run, dark hair flying, and her grandfather steps aside.
She hits my leg and wraps both arms around it. My hand comes down on her head. Her hair is soft.
"Hey," I say. My voice comes out rough. "Hello, piccola."
"You finished your work!" She tips her head back to look up at me, and her whole face is open. "Mama said when your work is done we go home and plant the flowers. Is your work done?"
Gerald Holt watches me. He wants to hear the answer too.
"Almost," I say. "I have to talk to your mama first. Where is she?"
"At the lake." Nina says it like it's obvious, and points through the house, through the back wall, toward water I can't see.
"She goes there when she wants to think about grown-up things.
Grandpa says the dock is old and I can't go without a big person.
" She lowers her voice. "There's a big tree that hangs over the water.
That's how you find the right dock. The other docks don't have the tree. "
"How far?"
"Through the back field and down the hill," Gerald says. "Ten minutes walking."
I crouch down to Nina's height.
"I'm going to go find her," I say. "You stay with your grandpa, okay?"
"Tell her I ate all my toast," Nina says. "Even the crust."
"I'll tell her every damn word."
Gerald makes a sound in his throat at the language. Nina doesn't blink.
I stand and the old man is still watching me, reading me one more time. Whatever he sees now, he steps back and holds the door wider.
"Gate's at the end of the garden," he says. "Follow the fence line down."
I'm off the porch before he finishes. Through the side yard, past a garden bed with fresh-turned soil, through the gate, into a brown field that slopes toward a gray line of water.
Gemma
"You look better," he says. "The country air. I told you Wisconsin would suit you."
"Okay," I say.
He'll believe me if I stay small. He always liked me small. So I keep my shoulders down, my voice soft. My eyes just below his, and I nod when nodding is what he wants, because the only thing that matters right now is that he walks off this dock believing I'll do whatever he asks.
"I've been thinking about the property," I say. "Dad would sign it over. It'd take a few weeks, but I can start—"
"Gemma." He smiles, patient, and my stomach drops, because I know that smile. It means I've answered a question he didn't ask. "The property is a start. But I didn't drive all this way for a lake house."
"Then what?"
"You're going to divorce Farro," he says. "Quietly. Then you're going to sit down with your dear daddy and you're going to tell him the truth. That you love your first husband. That you grieved him for eighteen months. You're going to tell Cesare Orsini you want your husband back."
He wants back in. That's all this is. The son-in-law of a dying man, restored, forgiven, positioned.
"I'm not coming back to you," I say.
He laughs. A warm, easy laugh. He steps onto the fifth board. Then the sixth.
I step back and my heel finds the edge of the last plank. There's nothing behind me but water. The cold coming off it climbs my calves through my jeans.
"You misunderstand," he says. "I'm not asking you to love me.
I'm asking you to say a sentence to an old man.
And if the sentence doesn't get said —" he tips his head toward the house, easy, reasonable "— then Gerald has a bad fall.
Susan next. Aidan drives to work on the same road every morning, did you know that? And Nina."
He says her name and stops there.
My lungs quit. I can't pull a full breath.
"You wouldn't." My voice comes out wrong. "She's yours. She's your own kid, Dominik. Your daughter —" and now I'm shouting, the sound tearing up out of me before I decide to make it, "— she's four years old, she's YOURS—"
His hand closes on my throat.
"Don't do that," he says. "Someone will hear."
I claw at his wrist. My nails find skin and drag but he doesn't flinch, so I swing my knee at him and catch his thigh.
He shifts his weight and takes me down. The boards hit my shoulder blades and the back of my skull.
His knee lands on my hip. Both his hands are on my throat now, and he leans his weight through them, calm, adjusting his grip.
I twist my hips sideways into his forearms and pull but it does nothing. His arms are wire.
"Shh," he says.
There's no air. My heels drum the boards.