16. Nicholas #2
He sat alone on the porch for a while with his wine and the cicadas and the specific quiet of a man who has just been told exactly what he already knew and wasn't yet ready to act on.
He had been in situations like this before: married women, complicated circumstances, lines that were meant to be examined and then crossed. Valentina was the most recent—a single night, no feeling, a clean exit before the sheets were cold. He walked away from that without a backward glance.
The difference with Olivia wasn't the marriage. It wasn't the mess of it or the risk of it.
The difference was that for the first time in his adult life, walking away didn't feel like freedom.
It felt like loss.
Nicholas Moretti had very little experience with loss, which meant he had very little idea what to do about it.
He went back inside. The Marino family noise wrapped around him. He tried to rejoin it, tried to let the conversation and the laughter pull him back into the room.
His mind slipped away to a hotel suite in Tampa.
He was still halfway there when something shifted in the room.
The change in energy was subtle but immediate. It was the kind of shift that comes before something serious, the way a room seems to brace itself before hard words are spoken. Nicholas straightened against the doorframe.
Uncle Vincent was standing. He didn't have the relaxed posture of someone about to tell a story. Instead, he stood with the careful stillness of a man who had been carrying something heavy and had finally decided to put it down.
The family went quiet.
"I have something to discuss," Vincent said.
Nicholas watched him. Business problem. Legal threat. Maybe something worse.
"I have a son," Vincent said. "He's twenty-two."
The silence that followed had texture.
The shock moved visibly around the room, passing through his parents, his grandfather, his uncles, and his sister, tightening the space between them as everyone tried to adjust at once.
Vincent didn't wait for the questions to form.
"Dorothy. You remember her? Mom loved her.
I loved her. But the life didn't fit her.
We split. I lost track of her." He paused, and something moved behind his eyes, something old and not entirely resolved.
"A few weeks ago, I got a call. Someone had information about her.
It was her son. Dorothy passed away recently. Cancer. Same as Mom."
Nicholas watched his uncle's hands. They stayed steady. But his eyes gave away what his hands wouldn't.
"We met at a Starbucks," Vincent continued.
"His name is Vincent. Everyone calls him Vince.
He told me about his life, about Dorothy.
She told him the truth before she died. She had lied for twenty-two years, telling him he was the result of an attack, because she wanted to protect him—from the truth, from me, from the life.
" He paused. "She said his father was a gangster. His name is Vincent Marino."
The word gangster hung in the room, heavy and unavoidable.
"Dorothy married when Vince was five," Vincent said, his voice lower now. "The man turned into an alcoholic. Abusive. Dorothy took the brunt of it for ten years. Vince watched it all growing up." His jaw tightened. "I didn't know. I wasn't there to stop it."
He looked around the room, not asking for forgiveness or inviting pity. He just wanted them to see it clearly.
"I asked for a DNA test. I already knew the truth the moment I saw his face, but I needed the proof in my hand. The results came back Friday. He's mine."
The silence held.
Then Beverly, Nicholas's mother, spoke first. She looked at her brothers, then at Vincent, with the steady calm of a woman who had always been the emotional backbone of this family, even when no one asked her to be.
"Vincent. If he's your son, he's our nephew. He belongs here. He belongs at Sunday dinner."
Vincent's face broke into a real smile, unguarded and genuine, the kind Nicholas hadn't seen from him in a long time. "I know, Bev. I wanted you to hear it from me first. I'm bringing him either next Sunday or the one after, depending on what he has scheduled. I want him to meet everyone."
Nicholas stayed in the shadow of the doorway and let the moment settle around him.
The Marino family was built on blood, loyalty, and the kind of love that didn't need explanations before it showed up.
A secret son, a decades-old lie, a woman who made an impossible choice to protect a boy from a world she couldn't free him from—none of it was simple, but all of it was being absorbed by this room without judgment.
He thought of Olivia, almost involuntarily.
His own secret. His own impossible tangle.
The path ahead didn't feel any easier.
But sitting in this room, watching his family take in this upheaval without breaking, and seeing his mother welcome a nephew she had never met without hesitation, something in him settled, just a little, around the edges.
Thursday afternoon. Miami.
Sunlight came hard through the tall windows at Stratus Meridian Group headquarters, cutting across the floor in long, flat lines. Nicholas was deep in a spreadsheet when the desk phone rang, breaking the silence.
He picked up.
"Can you stop by my office now?" Michael's voice. No small talk. No please. He spoke like a man used to giving orders, never needing to soften them.
"Sure. I'll be right there."
He hung up, stood, and straightened his tie in the reflection of the darkened monitor.
Something about the way Michael spoke bothered him—not the words, but the feeling behind them.
He walked down the hall, his footsteps quiet on the carpet, and stopped at Sara's desk.
She kept typing for a moment before looking up, her face revealing nothing.
"Please go in. They're waiting for you."
They.
Nicholas felt a twinge of unease move through him. He pushed open the heavy oak door.
Michael sat behind the desk, the Miami skyline spread out behind him like a backdrop chosen for effect. Anthony and Vincent sat on leather couches on opposite sides, facing each other. The three of them together in one room on a Thursday afternoon, unscheduled and without warning.
Nicholas paused just inside the door and let the slight tension in the room register before he smiled.
"Uh oh. My three uncles." He looked at each of them. "Unless it's Sunday and I'm dreaming, I must be in trouble."
They laughed. It was brief and not entirely warm, which told him everything about the register of the conversation he was about to enter.
"Come sit down," Michael said.
Nicholas pulled a chair from the conference table and positioned it so he was facing all three of them. The four of them squared off. He sat and waited.
"We've been discussing Vincent's son," Michael began.
"We thought it best to get your opinion.
Anthony and I have agreed to bring Vince into the firm.
He just graduated from your alma mater. He loves real estate, and he's been trying to break into the industry with some local developers.
We were thinking he could come in under you—trainee level—and you could show him how it's done. "
Nicholas glanced at Vincent. Something was different about him today.
The usual hard edge was still there, but softer, like the volume had been turned down instead of off.
He looked like a man getting used to the weight of something new, something he wanted to carry but hadn't learned how to hold yet.
"Nicholas," Vincent said, "I don't want you to feel pressured by this. If you don't think it's a good idea, I won't be offended. I want to get to know my son, and I thought having him in the firm might give me a better opportunity to do that. That's why I'm here with my brothers."
Michael leaned forward, elbows on the mahogany. "Vincent, there's no more asking. Vince has a job here. The only question is where we put him. I can have him work under Ralph or Maria or one of the other project managers."
Nicholas didn't need to think about it.
He looked at his uncles, all three of them, and felt the full weight of what they meant.
Not just the firm. Not just the money, the power, or the towers with the family name.
It was all the times they had simply shown up.
Michael took Nicholas under his wing when he needed a job.
The problem Vincent had quietly handled for Nicholas when he was in high school, without needing to be asked or thanked.
The unspoken language of a family that moved toward each other, not away, when things got complicated.
"Hang on, Uncle. I would love to have Vince work with me.
" He looked at each of them in turn. "All of you have always been there for me.
You never asked if I needed help; you just did it.
If I had been on the financial side, Uncle Anthony, you would have done the same for me.
We're family. Nothing is more important than that, and our Sunday dinners at Grandpa's prove it every week.
" He looked at Vincent. "If Vince is your son, he's my cousin.
I want to get to know him, too. And what better way than to teach him what all of you taught me?
So yes. Gladly. When would he like to start? "
The silence that followed was a different kind entirely.
Not heavy. Not uncertain.
Full.
Vincent stood without a word, crossed the room, put a hand on Nicholas's shoulder, and pulled him into a hug that said everything he didn't bother trying to say out loud.
"Thank you," he said.
"No thanks necessary, Uncle. It's my pleasure."
Nicholas looked over Vincent's shoulder at Michael.
His uncle was smiling—genuine and quiet, the nod that meant more than most people's speeches.
The deal was done.
The family was growing.