Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Gemma
Mariela sees the hair before she sees me.
She stops halfway across the restaurant with the shoebox held against her chest in both arms, and her mouth opens, and then she keeps walking, slower, like she's checking I'm real. I stand up from the booth.
"Gem." She sets the box on the table and takes my chin in one hand and turns my face left, then right. "Blonde."
"It's a long story."
"Sí, I can see that." She lets go and sits across from me and pushes the shoebox over. "Everything's inside. The certificates, the passports, the little envelope with the hospital bracelet. I didn't look at anything else."
"Thank you." I put my hand on the lid. My chest loosens a notch I didn't know was cranked tight. "Mariela, thank you. I'm sorry I asked you to—"
"Stop." She raises one finger. "You order yet?"
"No. I was waiting."
She picks up the menu and reads it top to bottom the way she reads everything, all the way through. She flags the waiter and orders soup, a torta and coffee, and I order the same because deciding feels like too much today.
Liam is at a table near the door with his back to the wall, drinking water and pretending to read his phone. Mariela’s eyes went to him, then to me, then to the menu.
The waiter leaves and she folds her hands on the table.
"Okay," she says. "Tell me what you can tell me."
So I do. I keep my voice level and I keep it short.
Dominik left debts when he died, big ones, to people who don't forgive debts, and one of them found me at the diner, and I ran with Nina, and a man helped us.
The man is dangerous but not to us. There's protection now that comes with conditions, and one of the conditions was getting married, so I got married.
When I finish, she's quiet for a while, her thumb goes to the gold cross at her throat and rubs it.
"One question," she says. "Only one."
"Okay."
"Does he hit you?"
She's asking the only thing that matters to her, and she's asking it because she's watched me flinch at raised hands for a year and never said a word about it.
"No," I say. "He doesn't."
She studies me. I've lied to a lot of people about a lot of things, and she knows that. Now she's checking whether this is one of them. It isn't. Luca has never once made me small. I hold her eyes and let her look as long as she needs.
"Bueno," she says finally, and picks up her coffee. "Then the rest we figure out."
The food comes. She salts her soup without tasting it first, and then she puts her spoon down.
"Gem. Your apartment."
"What about it."
"Somebody went through it." She keeps her voice low. "The mattress, the couch, the cereal boxes. All of it opened, dumped. The super, he says he heard nothing." She touches the cross again. "I stood in the door maybe ten seconds. Then I got your box from the closet like you told me and I left."
My spoon stays in my hand.
"You shouldn't have gone in," I say. My voice comes out thin. "I told you if anything looked wrong—"
"You needed the box." She shrugs one shoulder and picks the spoon back up. "Eat. It's getting cold."
We eat. She tells me Camila lost a tooth, swallowed it and cried about the tooth fairy until Diego wrote the fairy a letter of explanation. She tells me the woman on the second floor got a new dog that barks at the mailman only, nobody else, just him.
It's the most normal hour I've had lately, and I can tell what it's taking from her — the thing she won't say surfaces every time she stops to breathe, then she talks over it again.
She says it over the last of the coffee.
"My mother's worse." She turns her cup a quarter turn on the saucer. "The doctor says weeks now. Not months."
"Mariela."
"I'm going back to San Antonio Friday." She looks at the window instead of me. "So if you call the apartment and nobody answers, that's why."
I reach across the table. She takes my hand and grips it hard. Her knuckles are rough like mine, cleaner's hands, and we sit there in a taquería in Wicker Park holding on while the waiter decides not to bring the check yet. She doesn't cry. Neither do I.
"You call me," she says. "I don't care what time."
"I will."
Outside, the wind comes off the street cold and she buttons her cardigan to the top.
She hugs me once, quick and strong. She pats the shoebox under my arm like she's telling it to behave.
Then she walks to the bus stop on the corner.
I stand on the sidewalk with Liam ten feet behind me, and I watch her wait for the 56 with her hands in her pockets.
She carried my whole life across the city in a shoebox on a public bus. She stood in a ransacked apartment for me and didn't ask one question she wasn't owed. Her mother is dying and she spent her afternoon making sure I ate.
The bus comes and takes her, and I stay on the corner until it turns out of sight, holding everything I own against my ribs, feeling like the worst friend alive.
Luca
The shoebox hits the counter. The lid slides half off, and she doesn't fix it.
"Dinner," she says. "At his house. With Bruno and Antonella. In a few days."
"Yes."
"Why does a dying man I met once at my wedding want me at his table?"
I keep my hands still on the counter. The truth sits in my mouth and I swallow it, the same way I've swallowed it till now. "He's old and sick. He wants to look at the woman who married a Sartori enforcer. Men like Cesare don't explain themselves. You eat his food, you smile, we fucking leave."
She studies me. Her eyes are pale in the kitchen light, and she reads faces better than anyone I've worked with, which is a problem I chose to have.
"Okay," she says. Then she pulls the lid the rest of the way off the box.
Birth certificates. A folded piece of paper with hospital printing on it. She spreads them out on my counter like she's dealing cards, and her hand hovers over her own birth certificate a second longer than the rest.
"This is everything that proves I exist," she says.
I cross to her.
"You don't need paper to prove you exist," I say. "I can feel you from across the goddamn room."
She laughs. It comes out wet, half a sob caught in it, and she leans her cheek into my palm with her whole weight, the way she never did in the first days, when she wouldn't take socks from my hand without checking where my fingers were.
"Show me," she says.
I kiss her hard. She stopped needing warnings from me somewhere around the third night in this apartment, and knowing that does more to me than the kiss does.
She makes a small sound against my mouth and grabs the front of my shirt.
I take her hand off my shirt and put it on my cock, already thick behind the zipper.
"Feel that," I say against her jaw. "You did that by standing at this fucking counter. You don't have to touch me. You look at me across a room and I'm hard. That's proof you exist, Gemma. That's the only proof I need."
She moans. Quiet, because Nina's asleep in her bedroom.
"Follow me," I say.
She does. Down the hall past Nina's door, both of us silent on the floorboards.