Epilogue
Cat
One Year and Change Later
The family business call is happening on the porch, and my husband is losing his patience.
I can tell from the way he’s holding the phone slightly away from his ear, his jaw tight, his free hand resting on Tori’s back where she’s perched on his hip.
She’s wearing her favorite overalls, the ones with the tiny embroidered goose on the pocket, a gift from Nico, and chewing thoughtfully on a teething ring while her father tries to manage two crime families from my grandmother’s wraparound porch.
“The shipping routes are Enzo’s call,” Max says flatly. “If the Romano captains have concerns, they can bring them to him directly. I’m not relitigating a decision that was settled three months ago because someone’s feelings got hurt.”
A burst of voices from the speaker. Multiple people talking at once.
“I understand the concern. That doesn’t change my answer. Nico, you want to weigh in here, or should I just start hanging up on people?”
Nico’s voice comes through, dry and amused. “I’ve been trying to tell them that for twenty minutes, but apparently they needed to hear it from you.”
“They’ve heard it. We’re done for today.”
“We still have items to discuss-”
“Then you handle them. That’s why you’re my second.”
Tori drops her teething ring. Max bends to retrieve it without breaking stride, wiping it on his shirt before handing it back to her.
Then Tori sees Cannoli.
The goose has been patrolling the fence line all morning, her usual route, the one she established within weeks of Tori’s birth.
She takes her duties seriously, our homicidal waterfowl.
She’s bitten three delivery drivers, two of Nico’s men, and one very unfortunate real estate agent who wandered onto the property by mistake.
But Tori is sacred.
“Goo!” Tori shrieks, pointing with the teething ring. “Goo goo goo!”
Max glances down at his daughter, then at the goose, then at the phone still squawking with council business.
“Hold on,” he says.
“Don Moretti, we really need to resolve the harbor situation before-”
“I said hold on.” He mutes the call without ceremony, crouching down to set Tori on the porch. His hand hovers near her back as she steadies herself on wobbly legs. “Go ahead, principessa. Show me.”
Tori takes a step. Then another. Then two more, her arms windmilling, her face scrunched in concentration.
Four steps toward Cannoli, who has stopped her patrol to watch.
The goose honks once, a sound that would send grown men running, and waddles forward to meet her. Tori laughs, that full-body baby laugh that makes everything feel right, and sits down hard on the porch boards. Cannoli settles beside her like a feathered bodyguard, beady eyes scanning for threats.
Max watches them for a long moment. Then he unmutes the call.
“We’re done for today. Enzo will follow up on the harbor situation. Nico, you’ve got the rest.”
“Max, the Castellano shipment alone-”
“My daughter just took four steps. The Castellanos can wait until tomorrow, or they can find someone who cares more than I do, which at this moment is literally everyone else on this call.”
He hangs up.
“You know they’re going to complain about that for weeks,” I say, meeting him at the porch door with coffee.
“Let them complain. Tori walked.”
“Tori’s been walking for three weeks, Max. This isn’t new information.”
“She walked four steps in a row. That’s a personal record. I’m not going to miss personal records because Dominic Castellano can’t read a shipping manifest.” He takes the coffee, pulls me in for a kiss that tastes like the coffee he’s already had two cups of. “How’s the book doing?”
“Still number one. My editor sent fourteen emails this morning, which is down from yesterday’s nineteen, so I think she’s finally accepting that I’m not doing a reveal tour.”
“She should accept it faster. You’ve been saying no for three years.”
“She’s an optimist. It’s why I keep her around.
” I lean against the porch railing, watching Tori attempt to grab Cannoli’s tail feathers.
The goose tolerates it with the air of a saint being martyred.
“Did you see the dedication discourse online? Apparently there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to figuring out who M. is.”
“I saw. Someone theorized it was your dentist.”
“My dentist?”
“Apparently his name is Michael and he once commented on your Goodreads profile.”
“I don’t have a Goodreads profile.”
“You do now. Someone made you one.” He’s smiling, the whole-face one. “The dedication’s getting a lot of attention. ‘His chapter is still the worst thing I own’ is apparently very romantic to people who don’t know what it actually refers to.”
“Your chapter IS romantic. In a clinical, emotionally constipated kind of way.”
“I calculated bedroom dimensions and described a kiss as ‘strategically deployed.’ That’s not romance, that’s an operations report.”
“You measured eye contact in decimal points. ‘Approximately 3.5 seconds.’ Who does that?”
“I was trying to be precise.”
“Romance isn’t about precision!”
He’s fighting a grin and losing, our old argument worn smooth and warm from use.
“The precision was the point. I wanted to capture exactly what I felt.”
“What you felt was apparently ‘tactical approach’ and ‘positive response to stimulus.’”
“The feelings were implied.”
“The feelings were buried under spatial awareness calculations.”
He laughs, and I laugh, and from the yard Cannoli honks imperiously at a butterfly that dared to fly too close to Tori.
This is our life now. This is what we built from the wreckage of everything that came before.
Enzo arrives around noon, his rental car kicking up dust on the long drive.
He comes bearing gifts, as always, a truly enormous stuffed elephant for Tori, three bottles of wine from a vineyard he’s apparently invested in, and enough food from Mamma to feed a small army.
“She thinks you’re starving us,” I say, helping him unload containers from the trunk. “I’ve sent her photos of the garden. I’ve sent her photos of Max’s meal prep containers, which are color-coded and labeled by day, because he’s an insane person. She still thinks we’re wasting away.”
“You know how she is. If she’s not feeding someone, she’s not happy. I tried to tell her you have a literal farm, but she said farms don’t make good ragù.” He stacks containers in my arms. “Speaking of the farm, where’s my favorite niece?”
“Your only niece is on the porch, being supervised by a goose.”
“Cannoli’s doing childcare now?”
“Cannoli’s been doing childcare since Tori started crawling. She takes it very seriously. Last week she chased a FedEx driver halfway down the driveway because he got too close to the playpen.”
“That tracks. She always hated strangers.” He grabs the last of the containers. “Also, I’m pretty sure she hates me specifically. She bit me four times at the christening.”
“She bites everyone. It’s how she shows affection.”
“Then she’s extremely affectionate toward my left ankle. I still have the scar.”
“You have a scar from a goose bite?”
“I have two scars from goose bites. The christening and the first birthday. She’s consistent.”
He shows me the ankle scar with the wounded pride of a war veteran, and I do not laugh. Much.
“Maybe she’s trying to tell you something.”
“What? ‘Go away, you’re not family’?”
“More like ‘stop wearing those shoes, they offend me.’ She has standards.”
“A goose with standards. This is my life now.”
We head inside, depositing Mamma’s food in the kitchen. Through the window, I can see Max on the porch with Tori, pointing out something in the garden while Cannoli stands guard at the bottom of the steps.
“He’s good at this,” Enzo says quietly, following my gaze. “The dad thing. I wasn’t sure he would be, but he’s good.”
“He had a lot of practice with the overprotective hovering. He just redirected it toward someone who actually needs supervision.”
“Unlike you, who definitely didn’t need supervision when you were hiding from assassins in rural motels.”
“That was different. That was survival. This is-” I watch Max lift Tori up to see over the porch railing, pointing at something that makes her squeal with delight. “This is something else entirely.”
“It’s domesticity. It’s disgusting and I’m jealous.” Enzo bumps my shoulder. “You know I’m happy for you, right? Even though you married into the family that tried to kill us for two generations and the whole thing is objectively insane.”
“The whole thing is completely insane. I wrote a book about it.”
“I know. I read it.” He pauses. “It was good. The part where she almost dies in the church was a little too realistic for comfort, but it was good.”
“That part was cathartic. I got to rewrite it so I wasn’t hiding behind a pillar having a panic attack.”
“In the book she kicks three guys in the face.”
“In the book she’s a badass. In real life I was mostly just trying not to throw up from fear.”
“Potato, potato.” He reaches for the wine. “So what’s the plan for today? I assume you have some idyllic family activity scheduled that’s going to make me feel inadequate about my own life choices.”
“Enzo, your life choices include a penthouse in Manhattan and a different date to every charity gala.”
“Exactly. Inadequate. Where’s my goose? Where’s my tiny human who thinks I’m the most interesting person in the world?”
“You don’t want a goose. Cannoli is a menace.”
“I want something. Maybe a dog. A very calm dog who doesn’t bite.”
Enzo says it with the wounded sincerity of a man who has everything and has decided he’s owed a farm bird.
“You’re allergic to dogs.”
“Then a fish. A very calm fish.”
“Get a fish, Enzo.”
With Enzo on Tori duty, he insisted, claiming uncle privileges and also that he needed to “practice being responsible for something smaller than the Romano territories”, the house goes quiet.