20. Giovanni
— ? —
Giovanni
She chose the apartment. Of course she did.
The one my father had kept her family in for twenty years, the deed to it sitting in my safe like a debt I’d inherited along with all his other sins.
She’d asked me to come alone. I came alone, because whatever this was, it ended today, and it ended between the two of us, with no one in the room to soften it.
Bianca opened the door in red. High heels, careful hair, the smile she’d worn at every family dinner, the one that said I know something you don’t.
“Giovanni.” She stepped back to let me in. “Thank you for coming.”
The place smelled like her perfume and my father’s money. I didn’t sit.
“I assume you know why I asked,” she said, arranging herself on the couch.
“The Irish have been asking questions about your family. And there are people who would pay a great deal to hear what your father did to Patrick Jordan. What you knew. How long you knew it.” She let it settle.
“I’d hate for the wrong ears to get it.”
“Would you.”
“It would end you, Giovanni. Every Irish family on the coast would turn on you overnight. Kylie’s own uncle would put you in the ground.” She tilted her head. “Unless the two of us came to an understanding.”
“And what understanding is that?”
She rose. Crossed to me, near enough to smell the wine under the perfume. “Admit what I’ve always been to you. That there was something here. That I didn’t imagine it, all these years. The connection. The possibility.”
“Bianca.”
She stopped.
“You were my father’s debt.” I said it without heat, without cruelty, just the truth, in the apartment his guilt had paid for. “The debt is paid in full. The apartment. The allowance. Every year of patience your behavior never once earned.”
The color drained out of her face.
“What you were never, at any point, was a possibility.” I held her eyes so she couldn’t mistake it for anything else. “Not once. Not ever. I married Kylie because I loved her. I love her still. And there is nothing you can hold over me that will change a single day of it.”
“You don’t understand.” Her voice climbed, the control cracking. “I have proof. Everything your father did. Everything you buried. One word to the Irish and you lose all of it.”
“Take the story wherever you want.” I turned for the door. “You’ll find I got there first.”
Her face changed. The seduction, the threats, the years of practiced patience, all of it fell away at once, and what was underneath was raw.
“What?”
“You want to carry my family’s sins to the Irish?
” My throat tried to close. I made it keep going.
“You’re too late. This morning I put it all in a letter to Declan Jordan and sent it ahead of me.
My father’s order, my own silence, the two years I sat on the truth while his niece grieved a lie she didn’t even know was a lie.
In my own hand. He’ll have read it before I ever reach Boston. ”
Bianca stared at me.
“So if the Jordans are ever going to know what was done to Patrick, they’ll hear it from the man who owes them that truth.
Not from you,” I said. “There’s nothing left for you to sell.
And whatever it costs me, I’ll take it standing up, because I’ve earned every inch of it.
Every person who could destroy me also knows exactly who came to me with a dead man’s murder in her hands and tried to make it leverage.
” I let it land. “You didn’t come here to expose me, Bianca.
You came because I was the last person still willing to pretend you were family. I’m done pretending.”
“But I-” The word broke in half. “I was supposed to. You were supposed to.”
For one moment I looked at her, and really saw her. The girl my father had shaped into a weapon. The woman that girl had curdled into. The future she’d built in her head on a foundation that had never existed.
I felt exactly one flicker of something close to pity.
Then I thought of a stroller in a magazine photo, and Kylie’s face when she’d seen it, and the son I had almost never gotten to meet, because this woman had tried to poison the one good thing I ever made.
The flicker died.
“Goodbye, Bianca.”
“You’ll regret this.” Her voice had gone hard, the desperation curdling into something uglier as I opened the door. “I’ll make sure of it. If it takes me the rest of my life.”
I didn’t answer. There was nothing left to say to her, and I had a plane to catch, and a woman a thousand miles south who had started, lately, to end her texts with the word home.
***
Dante was waiting downstairs.
“It’s done?”
“Done.” But it didn’t feel done. It felt like the flat green calm before the part of the storm that takes the roof off the house.
“There’s something you should know.” He never softened these things; it wasn’t in him. “She emptied her accounts this morning. The trust, the allowance, everything your father set up for her family. All of it. In cash.”
So she’d walked into that apartment already liquidated.
The red dress, the threats, the last play for something that had never existed between us.
She’d known exactly how it would end before she opened the door, and she’d come anyway, and now she was out there somewhere with four million dollars and nothing left to lose.
Everything I have, she’d said once. Everything my father built.
I thought about what a person like that does with a lifetime of resentment and nothing left to lose, and it frightened me in a way no threat ever had, because the fear wasn’t for me.
“Put more men on Kylie and the baby,” I said. “Please.”
“Already did.”
***
The flight back to Savannah felt longer than usual.
I sat in the private cabin, watching the clouds scroll past the window, thinking about everything that had happened in the last twelve hours.
The meeting with Bianca. The confession I’d already delivered to Declan.
The security arrangements that would keep my family safe while we waited to see what desperate looked like with four million dollars behind it.
My phone buzzed.
Kylie. A photo of Nico, sitting up in his high chair, covered in what appeared to be mashed sweet potato. The caption was simple: He tried orange food. Verdict unclear.
I smiled.
Then I scrolled to my most recent voicemail and played it again.
Nico’s voice, caught by the car’s Bluetooth during the drive home from the fair. The word that had destroyed me. Dah-dah. Dah-dah.
I’d saved it.
Would probably save it forever.
My son’s first word, and it was my name. The name he’d given me before he knew what names meant, before he understood that I was the man who’d almost missed everything.
Another text from Kylie: Storm coming. Weather says category two maybe. You should come home.
Home.
She’d said home.
I closed my eyes and let myself feel it, the word, the invitation, the possibility of a future I’d almost destroyed.
Then I texted back: On my way.