Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Luca
Iknock, and what comes back through the door isn't a word. It's a low sound, rough at the edges, a voice pushed through a bruised throat. She can't say come in.
My palm is steady on the door before I decide to open it.
The room is small. A bed against the wall, a quilt with faded yellow squares, a lamp with a paper shade, a shelf with swim ribbons that say HOLT in gold letters. Gemma sits propped against two pillows in the middle of all of it.
She's here. She's breathing. She looks at me with those gray-blue eyes and doesn't tell me to get out.
I built sentences the whole drive up from Chicago. I built them again walking toward her. I had it memorized like a route through a city.
All of it's gone. There's just the six feet of floor between us. I cross it, and my legs give the rest of the way down on their own.
I kneel beside the bed and lower my head to her stomach.
Her hand comes down on my head. Slow. Careful. Her fingers spread through my hair the way she does with Nina.
That's what breaks me.
Her hand on my head, gentle — that's the thing my body can't hold. The sound that comes out of me is one I don't recognize. My shoulders shake against the mattress and I grip the quilt with both fists. I cry into her stomach, and I can't stop it.
She bends over me. Her arms come around my head and shoulders. Warm drops land in my hair, one, then another. She's crying too. We stay like that, folded into each other, her ruined breathing above me and my ruined breathing against her.
When I can move, I lift my head. She is the most beautiful thing I've seen.
"I had speeches," I say. My voice comes out scraped raw. "Wrote them in my head the whole fucking drive. They're gone. So you get this instead."
She wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand and waits.
"I love you." I hold her eyes so she can't mistake it for anything softer. "I loved you before the contract. I think I loved you when you handed me my keys and wouldn't touch my hand. I lied about a lot of shit, Gemma, but never about that. Not once."
Her mouth trembles. I keep going before I lose it.
"I was dead for six years. I ate, I worked, I bled, and none of it was living, it was just a body finishing its shifts.
Then you asked me if I was okay in a hallway, and nobody — nobody in my whole goddamn life — had asked me that and waited for the answer.
" My hand finds hers on the quilt. She lets it stay.
"You made me want mornings again. You and that girl downstairs
"Luca." Her voice cracks on the second syllable.."
"I'm not finished." I take a breath that shakes going in. "You're the second life, Gemma. Men like me don't get one of those. You gave me one anyway, and I lied to you inside it. I'll spend every fucking day I have left proving I know what it cost."
Her tears come faster now. She pulls my hand up and she presses my palm flat against her stomach and holds it there with both of hers.
She doesn't let go.
"I'm pregnant," she says.
My chest goes tight around the word.
I don't move. Under my palm her stomach rises and falls with her breathing. There is a life in there. Half hers, half mine.
I don't know what I did to deserve this. Probably nothing.
"I know," I say.
Her fingers go still on mine. "You know."
"Marco called me yesterday. You bought three tests at the pharmacy." I keep my hand where it is. "That's why I drove up. That's why I'm here today and not next week or never."
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out of it for a long moment. Her eyes move across my face, back and forth, and I watch her put the pieces together.
"That's unbelievable," she says.
"I know."
"No. Luca." She pulls one hand off mine and presses it flat against her own chest. "If I hadn't gone to that pharmacy.
If Marco hadn't seen me. You wouldn't have come today, and I'd be—" Her voice gives out.
She swallows, and the swallow costs her, I can see it hurt going down. "I'd be dead right now."
"Yes," I say, "and that would've been the end of me too. So yes. Three plastic sticks from a pharmacy. That's the whole distance between this and the second worst day of my fucking life."
A tear runs down beside her nose. She doesn't wipe it. Her hand comes up instead and touches my jaw, and her thumb moves along the stubble there, slow, like she's checking that I'm solid.
"You drove six hours because of a pharmacy receipt," she says.
"I'd have driven sixty."
"I don't know if I'd open the door."
"I don't know either." My throat works. "I booked a motel and lay awake all night deciding I'd knock anyway. If you slammed it in my face, fine. You'd still know I came. That was the whole plan, Gemma. Knock on the goddamn door and stand there."
She tries to laugh. A small broken sound comes out of her, half sob, and she winces. Then she leans down and kisses me.
My hand comes up at her jaw, careful, so careful of her neck, the other still spread over her stomach. She kisses me slow, and my eyes burn shut. I let her set the pace because this is hers to give or not give and I will take whatever she hands me for the rest of my life.
When she pulls back an inch, her forehead rests against mine. Her breath moves against my mouth, rough and uneven.
This is it. There's no third chance behind this one. No fourth. There's no version of the world where I get handed this again.
"I'm going to tell you everything," I say against her mouth.
"Every contract, every call, every goddamn thing Bruno says to me, everything I know and everything I'm ordered to keep quiet.
You'll hear it from me first or you'll hear it from me only, but you will never again learn one true thing about your own life from anyone who isn't me.
I'm swearing that to you right now, in your parents' house, on our kid. "
Her breath catches. Her hand tightens over mine on her stomach.
"And if I break it," I say, "you take Nina and this baby and you walk. I won't chase you. That's the deal I'm offering."
She's quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," she says.
One word. Same word she gave me at the altar of that chapel, standing in a white dress in front of a priest and four armed men.
It meant surrender then.
I don't know yet what it means now.
The lamp on Gemma's nightstand throws yellow light across the quilt, and her thumb moves over my knuckles in slow circles, back and forth across the ink there.
I haven't moved in twenty minutes because Gemma's head is on my chest and I don't want to give her a reason to lift it.
"Luca."
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you a question?"
Her voice is careful.
"Ask."
"What happened six years ago?"
"Okay," I say. I breathe in through my nose. The air in this room smells of her mother's cooking and old wood. I hold onto that, because where I'm going smells of nothing good. "You don't interrupt, and you don't tell me it wasn't my fault. Deal?"
"Deal," she says.
"I was married. Her name was Elena. We had a house outside Naples.
Small. Bad plumbing, good light. She was eight months pregnant.
A girl. I did the same work then that I do now.
That year I'd handled a problem for them — a man who was skimming, same shit Voss pulled, and I ended him.
He had a brother. I knew he had a brother, and I didn't think it fucking mattered.
Elena wanted me home by midnight. There was a saint's day, and she'd made food.
She said the baby kicked when I talked. I took one more stop instead.
A pickup an hour south. Easy money, one hour of work, and I told her I'd be back by two. "
I need to do this even though it hurts so much.
"I got back at four in the morning. I saw the smoke from the end of the road.
The whole back of the house was gone. Neighbors were in the street in their nightclothes and nobody was doing a goddamn thing, because what can you do.
I went in through the kitchen. The ceiling beam came down across my shoulder — that's the scar, here.
" I touch the collarbone this time and let her see me do it.
"I couldn't reach the bedroom. I couldn't hear her, and I want to believe that means the smoke took her before I ever got there.
The doctors said probably. Probably." My throat closes on the word.
Gemma's hand tightens on mine and I keep going, because if I stop now I won't start again.
"Two men dragged me out by the legs. I broke one's nose fighting to go back in. He held me down in the road anyway."
"Luca," Gemma whispers.
"You said you wouldn't interrupt." I press my mouth to her hair so she knows I'm not angry.
"The brother set it. He wanted me in the house — he thought I was home.
He got them instead. I found him eleven days later in Salerno, and I did what I do, and it fixed nothing.
I stood over him after and waited to feel her come back.
Nothing came back." The lamp buzzes. Gemma's tears are soaking through my shirt, warm on my chest, and she cries without any sound at all, which breaks me worse than sobbing would.
"After that, Valentino gave me work, and I took all of it. Six years. If I was moving, I wasn't thinking. Then some woman stole my fucking car from a Walgreens with a kid on the back floor, and I started thinking again whether I liked it or not."
She laughs once through the tears, wet and small, and covers her mouth.
"Elena died because I wasn't there," I say. "That's the whole thing. That's what happened six years ago."
Gemma lifts her head. Her eyes are red and the bruises on her throat show above her collar, and she looks at my face the way she did in that hallway at the compound — at my face, not my hands.
"One more question," she says.
"Ask."
"The baby. Did she have a name?"
My hand stops moving on Gemma's back. I haven't said the name to a living soul in six years. Not to Valentino. Not to the priest at the funeral.
"Aurora," I say.
It comes out quiet and whole, and it doesn't kill me. Gemma takes my hand off her back, slow, watching my face the entire time, and presses my palm flat against her stomach.
Gemma
I want to tell him it wasn't his fault. The want sits in my chest with actual weight, and I could say it a hundred times right now, once for every year he's carried it, once for every night he came home to a job instead of a house.
It wasn't your fault. You didn't light the fire. You didn't know.
But I promised.
So I say the other thing instead.
"I love you." My voice comes out rough. "And that wound you have, the one you just showed me, it's going to hurt again. Some morning at four a.m., some day when you smell smoke, some random Tuesday. It'll open up and there won't be a reason. I know how that works."
He watches me without blinking. His hand tightens on my stomach, careful, like he's holding both of us at once.
"When it does, I'll be next to you," I say. "Every single time. Not just the good parts. The bad ones too. The nights you can't sleep and the days you can't talk. I'm going to be there and I'm going to love you through all of it, for as long as we get. That's it. That's what I have."
Luca doesn't answer with words. He leans in and kisses me, one hand sliding up to cradle the back of my head, gentle around the sore places like he's mapped every one of them. His mouth tastes like salt from crying. I hold on to the front of his shirt and kiss him back.
When we break apart, his forehead rests against mine. He breathes out slow.
"You want a remarriage?" he says. "Because those vows were a hell of a lot better than the shit Antonella wrote for you."
A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it, and it hurts my throat but I don't care. I hit him in the chest, soft, my knuckles barely landing.
"I memorized that shit," I say. "Two days. There was a line about two rivers meeting."
"I know. I fucking stood there and listened to it." His mouth pulls at the corner, the closest thing he has to a smile, and seeing it after everything he just told me feels like a small miracle I don't have words for. "This was better."
"It didn't rhyme."
"Good. Rhyming vows should be a goddamn crime."
I'm still laughing, low and scratchy, when someone knocks on the door.
"Come in," I say.
The door swings open and Nina barrels through it. She crosses the room and climbs straight onto the bed between us. Her arms go around my neck first, careful, and then around Luca's, not careful at all.
"Are you hungry?" she says. Her face is very serious. "Because I am. Grandma made chicken and I waited and waited and I can't wait for you any longer."
Luca laughs. An actual laugh, out loud, from his chest, and I feel it through the mattress. Nina looks at him like she's not sure what she said that was funny but she'll accept the results.
"That's just how it is, huh," he says.
"Yes." She takes his hand and tugs. "Grandma said five more minutes and it's been at least seventy-eight minutes probably."
"Okay." I wipe my face with the back of my hand, because apparently I've been crying again and didn't notice. "Okay, baby. We're coming."
We stand. Luca keeps one hand under my elbow like I might tip over, and Nina keeps his other hand in both of hers, pulling him toward the door, telling him about the garlic she planted and how it won't be ready until summer, which is forever.
He lets her drag him.