19. Kylie
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Kylie
“He buried the truth about your father, Kylie.” Uncle Declan’s voice crackled through the phone, all Boston gravel and barely contained fury. “For three years. Looked you in the eye every day and said nothing.”
“I know.” The admission scraped on the way out.
“You know, and yet I’m hearing from my people that the man is living in your house-”
“On my couch. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being what, exactly? The thread count of the sheets?”
I switched the phone to my other ear, watching Giovanni through the kitchen window.
He was in the backyard with Nico, doing something complicated with a bubble wand that involved more engineering than seemed strictly necessary.
Nico was shrieking with delight, grabbing at iridescent spheres that floated just out of reach.
“The difference being that someone is trying to kill him, and Nico and I are potential targets, and he’s the best security I have access to.”
“We can send people. Your aunt Siobhan’s already got three names-”
“I don’t want strangers in my house.” It came out before I could dress it up.
“But you want him.”
The accusation landed harder than it should have.
“I want Nico safe,” I said. “That’s all I want.”
Declan was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted, softer now, almost gentle.
“Love, I’ve known you since you were four years old and convinced you could fly if you just found the right roof. You’ve never once been able to lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“No. You’re just not telling the whole truth.” A pause. “Which is what he did too, isn’t it? For three years.”
The comparison stung.
“I have to go,” I said. “Nico needs-”
“Kylie.”
“I’ll call you later, Uncle Dec.”
I hung up before he could respond.
***
The calls came in shifts after that.
Aunt Maeve at nine, with her particular blend of maternal concern and surgical precision: “You’re sleeping with him again, aren’t you? I can hear it in your voice.”
“I’m not sleeping with him.” The denial was automatic and unconvincing, even to me.
“You’re thinking about sleeping with him.”
“I’m thinking about a lot of things.”
“That’s a yes.”
Aunt Fiona at eleven, more direct: “I don’t care if he’s the best lay you’ve ever had, Kylie Margaret Jordan. That man is trouble wrapped in a tailored suit, and you’ve got a baby to think about.”
“I know I have a baby.”
“Then act like it.”
Cousin Cormac at one, diplomatic but firm: “Look, I’m not saying he’s a bad person. I’m saying he’s a bad bet. The family connections, the business - that world doesn’t change, Kylie. No matter how much a man wants it to.”
By three o’clock, I’d stopped answering.
By four, Miss Dot showed up at my door.
“Don’t give me that look, sugar.” She pushed past me into the living room, settling into the wingback chair like she owned it. “I’ve earned the right to say my piece.”
“Miss Dot-”
“That man looks at you like Sunday dinner.” She fixed me with eyes that had seen three husbands into the ground and emerged victorious every time. “I know that look. Had it aimed at me often enough in my day. It’s powerful flattering, I won’t lie.”
“It’s not about flattery.”
“Course it isn’t. It’s about the way your whole body changes when he walks into a room. The way you can’t stop touching your own collarbone like you’re checking for a wound.” She smiled, not unkindly. “I’ve buried three husbands, Kylie. I know how.”
“How what?”
“How the good ones kill you slowest.” She stood up, patting my cheek on her way to the door. “Just think about whether you want to spend the next fifty years loving a man whose nightstand drawer has a gun in it. That’s all I’m asking.”
The door closed behind her.
I stood in my living room, surrounded by the echoes of everyone who loved me telling me to run, and thought about the 3 a.m. image that wouldn’t leave my head: Giovanni at my kitchen table, gun pieces spread across the surface, writing something he didn’t want me to see.
The careful way he’d cleaned each component.
The practiced efficiency of hands that knew weapons the way mine knew blueprints.
The life that followed him everywhere, even to my broken-spring couch.
I stole his shirt that night.
He’d started leaving a small duffel by the back door, clothes for the mornings when he’d stay through breakfast, helping with Nico while I got ready for work. The laundry basket sat next to it, things he’d worn and would take to be cleaned.
The shirt was on top. Gray cotton, soft from washing, still smelling like him.
I took it to bed.
Wore it against my skin in the dark, telling myself it meant nothing, telling myself I was just cold, and not that I’d pressed the collar to my face and breathed him in until my whole body went loose and warm and stopped taking my orders, until I was pressing my thighs together under the sheets, furious at myself, aching anyway.
Telling myself the way his scent wrapped around me wasn’t the closest thing to comfort, to want, I’d felt in a year.
In the morning, I put it back.
He never mentioned it.
But the next night, there was a different shirt in the basket. Softer. Newer.
Like he was leaving them for me on purpose.
***
I called him at 1 a.m. on Tuesday.
Didn’t plan to. My finger found his name in my contacts, hit dial before my brain could intervene. The phone rang twice before he answered.
“Kylie?”
His voice was rough. Sleep-thick. The voice of someone dragged out of a dream.
I didn’t say anything.
Couldn’t, suddenly. All the words I’d meant to say, what words? I hadn’t planned any words, tangled in my throat like fishing line.
His breathing changed on the other end. Steadied. Like he was waiting.
Still I said nothing.
“Take your time,” he said quietly. “I’m here.”
I hung up.
Thirty seconds later, my phone buzzed with a text.
You breathe louder than you think, amore. Goodnight.
I stared at the message until my screen went dark.
Then I pressed his shirt to my face and tried to remember why I was supposed to be angry.
It happened again on Thursday.
And Friday.
And Sunday, twice.
I’d call. Say nothing. He’d wait, breathing steadily on the other end of the line, offering me silence without pressure. Then I’d hang up, and he’d text something that made my chest ache.
Still here.
The moon is full tonight. Nico would like it.
I dreamed about the theater. You were on the balcony. I was watching from the dark.
Each text was a thread. Each thread pulled something in me that I’d been trying to keep tied down.
The refusing was starting to feel like a performance.
A bit we were both in on, playing our parts, waiting for someone to call scene.
Saturday morning.
The farmers market was packed, the September heat thick enough to taste, the square filled with canvas bags and strollers and the kind of small-town bustle that made Savannah feel like a village instead of a city.
I was there for tomatoes. Just tomatoes. A quick errand before the day got away from me.
I didn’t expect to see him.
But there he was, three stalls down, examining peaches with the same focused intensity he brought to everything.
Dark jeans, white shirt with the cuffs turned back, sunglasses pushed up on his head.
Looking like something out of a magazine spread, entirely out of place among the retirees with their tote bags.
He saw me at the same moment I saw him.
Started toward me.
And something in my chest, the thing I’d been holding down for weeks, months, a year, cracked open.
“Stop.”
He stopped.
People flowed around us, the Saturday crowd oblivious to the two people frozen in the middle of the aisle. I could see Miss Dot three stalls back, her generation gathered around her like a Greek chorus, all of them watching.
“Kylie-”
“This is your life, Giovanni.” The words got away from me, louder than I meant. “The gun on my kitchen table at 3 a.m. The texts from blocked numbers. The security details and the threats and the-” I gestured at everything, at nothing. “It followed you here. To my city. My house. My son.”
“I know.”
“It will always follow you.”
“I know.”
“Then you know this.” I made myself say it. Made myself believe it. “Maybe we’re a mistake it just took me a year to finish making.”
I turned.
Walked.
Away from him, away from the tomatoes, away from the pull in my chest that was screaming at me to turn around.
“Kylie.”
I kept walking.
“Kylie, wait-”
I passed the tomato guy. The honey vendor. The woman selling handmade soap who’d tried to recruit me for her book club three times.
“Kylie!”
His voice was louder now. Cutting through the market noise, drawing looks, drawing attention. I could feel the weight of eyes on us, the whole town, watching.
Still I walked.
Then I heard a sound that made me stop.
A thud. Like knees hitting cobblestone.
I turned.
***
Giovanni Ferraro, don of New York, master of negotiations that shaped the eastern seaboard, a man whose survival had depended his entire life on never being seen as weak, was on his knees in the middle of the Savannah Saturday market.
Both knees. Down in the dirt between the produce stalls, surrounded by canvas bags and strollers and Miss Dot’s entire generation with their phones already coming out.
“Don’t-” I started toward him. “Giovanni, what are you-”
“I neglected my wife for three years.” His voice was steady. Loud enough to carry. “I let work consume everything. I let another woman poison my house while my wife starved for attention I should have been giving her.”
“Get up.”
“I held information that would have changed her life, and I held it for three years because I was too much of a coward to tell her the truth.” He didn’t move.
Didn’t look away from me. “I made decisions for her instead of with her. I told myself I was protecting her when I was really protecting myself.”
“Giovanni-”