Chapter 40 - Sophia
Liszt’s last chord shivers into silence, and then the crash—metal scraping tile, a breathless tangle of limbs. I lift my hands. Raffael is already there, voice like a line drawn through chaos. “Enough.”
I watch him separate the boys like he’s untangling wires, but he doesn’t yank; there is no rage, just that calm, immovable authority. He makes them breathe. He makes them look him in the eye. He cleans a split lip with the same care he uses to holster a gun. He gives choices, not lectures.
“Anger’s a signal,” he tells them. “What you do with it—that’s on you.” When he says, “In here we take care of people smaller than us,” something in my chest clicks back into place.
The room exhales. The boys shadow him around the perimeter like ducklings in oversized sneakers while I find the keys again, lighter now, a strange brightness fluttering under my ribs.
I don’t go back to Liszt. My hands want air.
I let them play something I don’t have a name for, something that sounds like sunlight catching in leftover rain.
A gentle bounce in the left hand, a ribbon of melody in the right that keeps lifting and setting down, lifting and setting down.
If anyone asked, I’d call it Feather Waltz, because that’s what it feels like, the small white scrap still tucked in my hair, learning how to fly.
The little girl stays at my feet, palm on my shin like I’m an anchor. The mothers stand more easily. When Raffael circles back with the boys, both of them are breathing steadily. One of them—the older one, Mason—almost smiles. Raffael tips his head at me, eyes warm. The song inside me gets braver.
When I stop, the room claps like it’s afraid to scare the moment away. I close the fallboard and slide off the office chair. Lexy meets me halfway, arms folded, mouth fighting a grin.
“You didn’t tell me he had a soft spot for kids,” I say, a little breathless.
“Oh, he’s a terror on grown men,” she answers, eyes dancing, “but the littles? Yeah. Heart the size of this building. He pretends he’s just keeping order. He’s really building a world.”
My chest swells, embarrassingly obvious. “He’d make a good father,” slips out before I can stop it.
“Hmm.” I take the grunt as Lexy-styled approval as she eyes me.
When I look over at Raffael, he’s crouched again, showing Nick how to reset a chair without smashing fingers. Mason watches and copies on his own, trying not to be seen trying. My throat burns, and not from sadness this time.
He is nothing like Roberto.
We linger, we help pass juice boxes, we promise to come back. On the way out, the little girl whispers, “Don’t forget,” and I tell her I won’t.
Just then, the sun catches on something I had completely forgotten.
The oversized diamond ring and wedding band Roberto gave me.
The only times I ever took them off were to have them cleaned.
Roberto made sure of it. I've grown so used to them that I forgot they were there.
His claim. They're probably worth a couple of million dollars, but to me, they're nothing but baggage.
Shiny rocks that deceived me into believing a lie for a few months.
A shackle for years to come. I pull them off and hand them to Lexy, who stares at me, speechless for the first time since I've known her.
"Sell them. Use the money for the shelter. "
Lexy looks at Raf, who shrugs. I know him well enough to hear the thought in his silence: how ironic that, in death, Roberto will be paying to shelter the very women he hurt and sold.
The truck pulls away, and after a short drive, the city gives way to trees in a slow dissolve. For a while, we don’t talk. We don’t need to.
“Thank you,” I say at last.
“For what?”
“For being exactly who you were in there.”
He keeps his eyes on the road. The corner of his mouth tilts. “You liked that side of me?”
“I did.”
Silence encompasses us once again for a few more miles. Then, “You know,” he says quietly, “when I was a kid… I used to wish for a place like that.”
I turn in my seat. “The shelter?”
He nods. “Yeah. People think a roof and a full fridge fix it all. The DeSantises—” The way he says his adoptive parents' name mirrors his divided emotions for them. “—were good people. Just… not mine. I ate. I slept. I stayed out of the way. That was the deal.”
He blows out a breath, eyes still on the road.
“I don’t have a birth certificate. No original name anyone would say out loud.
Carlos handed me to a soldier and his wife and said, Raise him.
He’ll be useful. They tried in their way.
She made sure I had a coat in winter. He made sure I knew how to mow a lawn straight.
Their real kids got the fridge drawings and the birthday candles.
I got the chores list and the spare room that smelled like mothballs. ”
He’s not complaining, he's just telling me his story, and I listen.
“I remember this one night,” he goes on.
“I was… seven? Maybe. They had a family night, board games, popcorn—something small but theirs. I sat on the stairs, ‘cause they told me to give them space. I could see the TV light flicker under the door. I could hear them laughing. I wasn’t mad. Just… outside. Every sound in that house told me I was a noise. Not a note.”
My fingers find his sleeve. I don’t interrupt.
“I would’ve picked the shelter,” he says, voice rougher now.
“Honest rules. Someone who knows your name because they read it on a form and decided you were their problem on purpose. A door that shuts at night because safety’s a policy, not a privilege.
One adult who looks you in the eye and asks, What’s your favorite color?
Not because it matters… but because you do. ”
He swallows. The road hums. “I didn’t need perfect. I just needed to be chosen.”
I press my palm to his forearm, feel the tight rope of muscle loosen under my touch. “You deserved to be chosen,” I assure him. “You deserved to be wanted.”
His mouth twists like the words hurt and heal at the same time.
“Sometimes I think about the kid version of me,” he says.
“Sitting on those stairs. If I could go back, I’d tell him to hang on.
That one day, he’ll build the house where the kids come first. That one day a woman will sit at a beat-up piano and make the air soft, and he’ll get to be the kind of man who tells two boys to breathe instead of breaking up a fight with his fists. ”
I can’t speak for a few seconds. The trees blur. My eyes do too.
“I saw you,” I manage. “With them. I saw the father you’ll be.”
He glances at me then, quick, like the look is something precious he can’t afford to hold too long. “Is that what you want?” he asks, quietly. No pressure. Just the truth of a question.
The word rises without panic. “Yes.”
I need to know one thing, though: "Have you decided yet on what you want?"
He doesn't ask what I mean. The throne. The Don's position.
"I don't want it if it means hurting you." He looks away from the road for a moment and at me.
My throat tightens. He doesn't have to spell it out either.
We both know what he means. Marcello. Is he willing to give up his rightful seat to spare me pain?
Do I want him to? I think of Marcello. My brother.
The only other person in the entire world I love, and my throat tightens even more.
I don't know Marcello any longer. I haven't seen him in years.
Yeah, we talk on the phone, but it's mostly awkward, like, How is the weather?
It's not like I can ask him if he put more pressure on big pharma to expand his empire. Or who he’s killed lately.
He used to ask me about my marriage, and I would say it was fine.
Lies. All lies. Everything we have said to each other on the phone has been lies.
And yet. It wasn't the words. It was what we didn't say.
The connection between us. For a few minutes each month or so, we heard each other breathe and knew we still loved each other.
So I have no idea what Marcello would say about Raf's claim. Would he fight with or against him?
Raf takes my hand and squeezes it. "I will never hurt you, princess, not in any way. And if that means staying away from being Don, I will."
But can I ask that of him?
We keep driving with that sitting between us.
As the hills start to fold into the Catskills, he says, even softer, returning to the previous conversation as if the second hadn't taken place. “I would’ve preferred one parent who loved me and a spot on a shelter cot over a whole house that never called me by any name that felt like mine.”
I slide closer on the bench seat until our shoulders touch. “What’s your favorite color?” I ask.
He huffs out a laugh that sounds like relief. “Don’t know that I have one.”
“You do,” I say. “Everyone does.”
He falls silent again, and when I think he won't answer, he admits, “Blue. The dark kind. Like lake water.”
“Good,” I whisper. “Mine’s the color your eyes get when you’re about to do something reckless and kind.”
He chuckles, “That’s not a color.”
“It is now.”
The truck climbs, the trees open, and the sky pours itself over us. When our home finally appears through the pines, I don’t have to say the safe word. He’s already turning up the drive. Home. The word means what it should now.
We park. He cuts the engine. Silence settles like a blanket. He looks at me like I'm the miracle he's been praying for, when it's really the other way around.
I lean in and press my forehead to his. “I love you."
The words are so simple. So honest and so true. I've loved him for so long, so very differently. A teenager's crush, a young girl's hero, a betrayed bride's only hope, and now I'm loving him as a woman who, for the first time in her life, is free.
He doesn't say anything. He takes my chin into his hand and locks eyes with me. But I feel the relaxing of his muscles, see how his eyes mirror my image, I see all the words, all the emotions he's got bottled up inside him. I see him.