Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Valentino
"Valentino." The way she says my name tells me she has been lying there thinking instead of resting. Her cheek stays against my chest, her hair caught between my fingers, and I keep stroking through it because the motion gives me something simple to do. Something that does not require an answer.
"Mm," I say, already bracing for whatever comes next.
"What happened to your best friend?"
My fingers slow in her hair. I know which friend she means before I ask, but I need the second it buys me.
"Who told you about that?"
She lifts her head off my chest and looks at me like she knows the question hit somewhere bad.
"Vittoria. Years ago. We were drunk on her mother's limoncello, and I asked why you never brought anyone to family things.
She said something happened to your best friend when you were young, and that's why you don't let anyone close except family.
" Her mouth pulls a little at the corner, not quite a smile.
"Then she got that look she gets when she's said too much and changed the subject. "
Of course it was Vittoria. My cousin has always been terrible with secrets when she thinks the secret is hurting someone else.
I let out a breath I feel all the way in my ribs. "Her name was Chiara."
Amanda doesn't move against me. She just waits for me.
"We grew up together. Her family's house was forty meters from ours, close enough that her mother and mine shared a clothesline.
We learned to swim in the same cove. Stole from the same fig tree.
Got beaten by the same priest for laughing during Mass.
" A dry sound leaves me, close enough to a laugh to insult the memory of one.
"She was a sister to me. Better than a sister. A sister I chose."
The lamp throws shadows across the ceiling, and I keep my eyes there because it gives me somewhere to look that isn't Amanda's face. I haven't said this out loud since it happened.
"There was a man that summer. We were sixteen.
He was a cousin of the Amato family, and the Amatos had interests in our part of the island.
Olive presses. Transport. The usual shit.
He'd been around the village a few weeks, and I didn't like him.
He made your skin crawl before he gave you a reason. "
Amanda's hand flattens against my chest, warm over my pounding heart.
"Chiara didn't like him either. She said he watched her when she walked home from the baker's.
Same corner every day. Just standing there, watching.
" I hate that I can still see him when I close my eyes.
Memory keeps useless things sharp. The color of his shirt.
The dust on his shoes. The lazy way he smiled, like the whole street already belonged to him.
"I started meeting her after school whenever I could.
If I wasn't there, I'd tell her to take the long route home and stay where people could see her. "
Amanda says my name softly, but I can't stop now. If I stop, I won't start again.
"One afternoon, she went alone." My jaw aches, and I force it loose. "I was supposed to meet her. I was late. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. My mother asked me to move a crate of tomatoes."
Her fingers curl in my shirt. She doesn't tell me it wasn't my fault. She knows I would not believe her. Guilt doesn't answer to reason once it has lived inside you long enough.
"I came around the wall by the old fountain.
Two men had her. One of them was him. The cousin.
They'd pulled her into the alley behind the church.
" The words come out steady. I don't know how.
"I heard her before I saw her. Twenty-two years, and I can describe every stone in that alley.
But what wakes me up at night is the sound.
She wasn't screaming anymore. She was quiet. Broken."
Amanda lays her cheek against my chest again.
She doesn't push for me to continue or try to soothe me.
She doesn't ask what happened next. We both know.
Instead, she lies there in my arms, breathing with me.
Three weeks ago, I would have said she was incapable of silence.
Three weeks ago, I was a fucking idiot about a lot of things.
"I ran at them." My throat works around the rest because it makes me feel like that sixteen year old kid all over again.
Not the alley. Not the blood. This. The uselessness of my own body.
"The second man caught me before I got five steps.
He was thirty, maybe thirty-five. Built like a dock worker.
I was sixteen and still skinny from a growth spurt.
He put me against the church wall with my arm twisted behind my back and his forearm across my throat, and he made me watch. "
The shadows on the ceiling blur, and I blink until they sharpen because I refuse to lose my composure. Not here. Not with her.
"He kept saying, guarda, guarda. Watch. Watch.
Like it was a lesson." My hand tightens in Amanda's hair before I make myself ease up.
She doesn't flinch. "And the worst part, the part I've never told a priest or my mother or anyone, is that some part of me stopped fighting.
At some point, my mind just went somewhere else.
I stood there with a man's arm across my throat, frozen.”
"He was a grown man holding you against a wall."
"I know what he was."
"Do you?" She pushes up on one elbow. There's no pity in her face, and that's the only reason I can keep looking at her.
"Because you keep saying you froze like you chose it.
You ran at two grown men with nothing in your hands.
One of them overpowered you. That isn't the same as standing there and letting it happen. "
"It didn't change anything." The words come out flat, because that part hasn't let go.
Not in twenty-two years. "She survived it, if you want to call it that.
Her family sent her to relatives in Torino that autumn.
We never spoke again. She couldn't look at me, and I understood, because I couldn't look at me either. "
My hand finds her hair again. I don't remember reaching for her. I only know my fingers move through it slowly while I make myself say the rest.
"That's why I can't stand it," I say. "Anything to do with a man putting his hands on a woman. When I opened that door in the palazzo and saw you on the floor, I wasn't in Milan anymore. I was sixteen, behind the church, except this time nobody had me by the throat."
Her fingers stop against my chest, but she doesn't pull away.
"I didn't think," I say. "I didn't weigh it. I saw them over you, and I killed them. All three."
Her eyes stay on mine.
"And if I opened that door tomorrow, Amanda, I'd do it again. Slower.”