Chapter 8
LORENZO
The garden is the only place I can be right now. Not inside. Not anywhere near the guest wing where she’s sleeping. Not in my room, where the silence presses in and my hands won’t stop remembering what they held an hour ago.
I’m on the bench by the fountain. The jasmine is blooming, heavy sweetness thick enough to taste. Mama planted these bushes. The fountain murmurs beside me. Water over stone. I’ve been listening to it for hours, hoping it will drown everything else out.
It’s not working.
My phone buzzes. One of the crews, reporting movement near the Benedetti docks. I type two words. Watch. Report. Put the phone face-down on the bench.
Not even the job clears my head tonight.
Her pulse jumped under my thumb like a second heartbeat. I tore myself away, and I almost went back.
My mother’s voice in my head. The name she used to call me. Back before the funeral. Before I became this.
Cazzo.
The beads dig into my palm. I squeeze harder.
I need to know what she looks like when she wakes up.
I turn them between my fingers the way Mama used to. Isabella never met the boy she loved. She only knows what I’ve become.
Footsteps on the garden path. Quiet but not hiding. Gia rounds the corner of the hedge. Scrubs still on, dark circles carved under her eyes. One of the soldiers from the Tchoupitoulas job, probably. She’s been stitching someone up.
I should be inside. I’m not.
She sees me on the bench. Notes what I’m holding. She doesn’t comment. Just crosses and sits beside me. Near enough to feel her presence, far enough so she’s not touching me. She learned that boundary years ago.
No one touches me. Except Isabella. Isabella fisted her hands in my shirt and I let her. Needed her to.
Gia doesn’t fill the silence. Just exists beside me, breathing, present, waiting.
“You’re up late,” she says.
“So are you.”
“Nico’s guy. Shoulder wound reopened.” She shrugs. “He moves too much.” A pause. “You’re different, Renzo.”
My hand stills.
“Since she got here.” Quiet. Observing, not accusing. “You’re more present. Really here.”
“I’m the same.”
“You’re not.” She turns to look at me, and her eyes see too much. “When I was stitching up Dante last week, you asked how he was doing. You haven’t done that in years. You used to just stand there like you were waiting for a debriefing.”
“He’s our brother.”
“That’s my point. You’re treating him like one again.”
“Don’t.” The word comes out harder than I intended.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever this is. Don’t.”
“Renzo.” My name. The one only family uses. The one Mama said when she wanted me to listen. “I’m not attacking you. I’m letting you know what I see.”
“You don’t see anything.”
“I see you in this garden at three in the morning.” Her voice doesn’t waver. “I see you have her in your office. Your office. The room no one enters. Her coffee cup is on your desk, Renzo. Her jacket is on the back of your chair. And you’re fetching her food. Making her coffee.”
Silence. The only defense I have left.
“When has Lorenzo Santoro ever brought anyone coffee?”
“She forgets to eat.”
“You memorized her order. Two sugars. Without being asked.” Her voice softens. “You’ve been watching her. Finding excuses to stand in doorways. And now you’re out here at three in the morning holding Mama’s rosary.”
“Surveillance.”
“Bullshit.” The word hits like a slap. Gia doesn’t curse. When she does, she means every syllable. “Whatever she’s doing to you,” she says, softer now, “don’t fight it.”
“There’s nothing.”
“There is. And you’re losing the fight against it.” She reaches toward my arm, then stops herself. Remembering. “That’s not a bad thing, Renzo.”
I stare at the fountain. Watch the water fall and fall.
“Mama spent years trying to reach you,” Gia says.
“After you started shutting down. Before she got sick. She tried everything. Talking to you. Giving you space. Sending Nonna to check on you.” Her voice catches.
Barely perceptible. “She used to come to my room at night. Asking what she did wrong. Why you wouldn’t let her in anymore. ”
The air gets knocked out of me.
“She never stopped trying. Not until the end. And you never let her back in.”
“Gia.”
“That girl in the guest room has done more in days than we managed in all that time.”
I could deny it. Tell her she’s wrong. Retreat back into myself, reinforce the silence, go back to being the weapon that doesn’t bleed.
But the lie won’t form.
Because she’s right. Isabella bites the side of her thumbnail when she’s close to solving something. Talks to her laptop like it’s a person. Mutters curse words under her breath in a mix of English and half-remembered Italian when the code fights back.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
Damn it. The words tear loose from somewhere deep. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. Raw. Wrecked. My whole body is locked so tight it hurts, and the beads are grinding into my palm.
Gia is quiet for a moment. “You don’t have to know how. You just have to stop fighting it.”
“And if it breaks me?”
“Then you break. And we put you back together.” She says it like it’s obvious. “That’s what family does.”
Mama. The way she used to cup my face in her hands. The way I left her room at the end because I couldn’t watch her wither. She died asking for me. And I was across town, handling business that could have waited, because I was too much of a coward to watch her fade.
I think about Isabella’s throat under my hand. The way she looked at me afterward. Unafraid. She should be afraid. Everyone should be afraid of what I am. But she’s not. And I have no idea what to do with that.
Gia stands. Brushes off her scrubs. Looks down at me with an expression I can’t read.
“Mama would be happy,” she says. “If she could see you now. Not because you’re hurting. Because you’re finally starting to live again.”
Her expression shifts. Brief. Gone before I can read it.
She leaves before I can respond. Her footsteps fade down the path, and then I’m alone with the fountain and the jasmine and the first pale light bleeding into the eastern sky.
I sit in her garden as the sun rises over the flowers she planted. They’re warm against my palm. Somewhere inside the house, Isabella is sleeping, and I can still feel the ghost of her pulse under my thumb.
I don’t know how to stop this. For the first time in longer than I can remember, I don’t know if I would.