Chapter 43
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Valentino
Chiara crosses the last three meters and wraps her arms around me, and every piece of training in my body goes useless.
For a second, I do nothing.
My hands stay open at my sides. Twenty-two years of clearing rooms, counting exits, reading hands, faces, windows, reflections. Twenty-two years of knowing where danger will come from before anyone else knows there is danger at all.
And the woman from the alley behind the church is pressed against my chest, crying into my jacket, and I cannot make myself touch her.
Amanda clears her throat behind me.
When I glance at her, she lifts her arms slowly, deliberately, the way you would show a man how to surrender, and folds them around an invisible person. Then she points at me with her chin.
I get the message.
My arms come up and close around Chiara’s shoulders.
The moment they do, she makes a sound into my jacket that I have not heard since we were children. Small. Broken. Familiar.
It takes me straight back to stone under my knees, blood in my mouth, and her name tearing out of me while grown men held me down.
I tighten my hold because letting go would be worse.
“What are you doing here?”
My voice comes out rougher than the cigarettes ever made it.
Chiara pulls back and holds me at arm’s length. Her face is older, lined around the eyes, beautiful in the way our village makes women beautiful, by surviving it.
Then she turns to Amanda, who stands there with her hands shoved in her jacket pockets, looking extremely pleased with herself and pretending not to.
"I’m so glad I finally meet you," Chiara says to her in English, the accent thick and warm. "In person, I mean."
'Likewise,' Amanda says.
I look between them like a man watching two trains arrive on the same track.
"She found me," Chiara says, turning back to me. Her hands are still shaking, but her voice has steadied. 'On Instagram. A message, very polite, very... how do you say... careful. She asked if I would want to see you."
She studies my face, and what she finds there makes her soften. "I think she loves you so much she knows exactly what it costs you that we don’t speak.'
I do not have words.
The most dangerous men in two countries have sat across tables from me, and I have always known what to say. Threats. Promises. Lies. Prices. Terms.
Now Chiara is standing in front of me, alive and older and real, and all I can do is breathe through my nose and keep myself upright.
Amanda raises one hand and waves at us both like she is flagging down a waiter.
"Okay, I’m going to go sit on the steps over there," she says, already backing away, 'and you two are going to talk for a while, and then we’re all going to eat somewhere, because I’m starving and Rome owes me carbohydrates. Take your time. Not too much time. I’m serious about the starving."
She walks off through the crowd of tourists and lovers and pickpockets, finds a spot on the worn stone steps, and sits down with her elbows on her knees like she does this every day.
Like she did not search through a life I had buried, find the one person I never let myself look for, and bring her back to me with a phone app I mocked her for using too much.
I cannot process it.
"How are you?" I ask Chiara, because it is the only sentence I can form.
She smiles, and there is gray in her hair at the temple, same place as mine, and something about that undoes me further.
We should have seen each other age. That is the thought that hits hardest. Not all at once, not like this, with two decades missing between one breath and the next.
'I’m good,' she says. "Truly good, Valentino. I have a family. Two boys, terrors, both of them. The younger one bites. I have a man who adores me. He knows everything and he adores me anyway, which took me a long time to allow."
She glances toward Amanda on the steps.
"Your woman wrote to me, and I read her message four times. I sat in my kitchen and understood I’d been waiting twenty years for someone to ask me that question. She helped me see I needed this. To talk to you."
"There’s no need."
The words come out fast, automatic, the old reflex firing before I can stop it.
"Chiara, you don’t owe me anything. I understand why you couldn’t…"
"You don’t." She says it gently, but it lands like a slap. "You don’t really understand, and that’s my fault, so be quiet and let me fix it."
The fountain at the bottom of the steps keeps splashing. Somewhere behind us, a street musician is murdering a love song. The smell of roasted chestnuts drifts past from a cart, and I stand very still in the middle of all of it.
"I didn’t stay away because you failed me," she says. Her voice does not waver now. "I never once thought you failed me. You were sixteen, and you ran at two grown men with nothing in your hands. Do you know what I remember from that day? I remember your voice. Screaming my name while they held you. That’s not a boy who failed. That’s the only person in that alley who fought. "
My jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching it.
"I stayed away because of the shame," she says. "Mine, not yours. Every time I imagined your face, I saw you looking at me and remembering, and I couldn’t carry my own weight and yours too. You walked around our village like a man dragging a corpse, Valentino. Everyone could see it. I couldn’t stand to watch you feel like that because of me, so I made myself disappear, and I told myself it was kindness. "
She exhales, slow and unsteady.
'It wasn’t kindness. It was fear, and it cost us both twenty years, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let all that time pass."
I have done worse things with a steadier face.
Standing here while she forgives the boy I have hated for twenty-two years nearly breaks it.
"But I’m here now," Chiara says, and she touches my forearm. "And I’ll be here as long as you want me to be. Twenty years doesn’t erase where we came from. It doesn’t erase what you did for me."
I cannot look at her for another second without losing the little control I have left, so I turn my head and find Amanda.
She is exactly where she said she would be, sitting among strangers, watching pigeons strut around a dropped gelato cone, giving us our privacy and pretending she is not checking on me every forty seconds.
Her hair has come loose on one side. She looks tired from travel and pleased with herself and hungry enough to become dangerous soon.
She looks like the most ordinary woman in Rome.
She found Chiara.
Not because I asked.
Because I didn’t.
I gave her Chiara’s name once, in the dark, like it was something I had no right to keep and no strength to explain.
Amanda didn’t push. She didn’t make me bleed it out for her.
She listened, remembered, and went looking for the one person who could tell me the truth I had spent half my life afraid to ask for.
For twenty-two years, I thought Chiara’s silence meant she could not bear the sight of me.
Amanda gave the truth back to me.
I turn back to Chiara, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect. "I need you to do me a favor."
Her eyebrows lift. "Twenty years of silence and the first thing you ask me is a favor." She laughs then, soft and disbelieving, and for one second I hear the girl she used to be. 'Of course. Anything. What is it?"
I look at Amanda one more time.
She is watching a pigeon like it has offended her personally, one hand braced on the step beside her, the other loose between her knees. She has no idea I am looking at her and no idea that I am standing here because of her in more ways than one.
For once, there is no exit to count. No room to clear. No threat to measure before I speak.
There is only Chiara in front of me, Amanda on the steps, and the first thing I have wanted in years that does not feel like penance.
I turn back to Chiara.
"I need you with me when I ask her to stay."
Amanda
Valentino walks back toward me across the piazza, and the crowd just parts for him.
Everybody peels out of his path without seeming to notice they're doing it.
That walk should be illegal. It's the walk every mafia movie has been chasing since Brando, and here it is, live and in person, aimed directly at me.
If he were anyone else I'd have wet myself somewhere around the fountain.
Instead I sit there on the warm stone of the Spanish Steps with my chin in my hand and watch him come, because he's mine, and watching him move is the closest thing I have to a religion.
He stops one step below me, which puts us at eye level. His eyes are dark and steady and locked on mine with the kind of focus he usually reserves for exits and threats.
"Marry me," he says.
The words land and slide right off, like my brain has a no-vacancy sign up.
"Excuse me?"
"Marry me."
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it, loud enough that a pigeon two steps down takes offense and leaves.
"Babe. Oh my God. You have no idea how men propose. There's supposed to be a ring. Candles. Possibly a string quartet hiding behind a hedge—"
He doesn't blink. He doesn't smile. He just keeps looking at me with that terrible patience, the kind he uses when he's already decided something and is simply waiting for the world to catch up.
The laugh dies in my throat.
Oh.
Oh, he means it. This isn't banter. My heart does this slow, painful roll in my chest, and to my horror my eyes go hot.
"Oh," I say. "Yeah. I will marry you." My voice comes out softer than I planned, so I shore it up with the truth. "Honestly? I always kind of thought we should be married. Like the universe was just being slow about the paperwork."
I smile at him, and something I see a loosening around the eyes that I've learned to read like scripture.
"Good," he says.
Then he grabs my wrist and pulls me off the steps.
He turns and walks, and I'm towed behind him like luggage, my sneakers slapping stone, the evening crowd blurring past in a smear of linen and sunburn. Behind us, Chiara laugh.
"Valentino. Valentino. What the hell is going on?" I ask.
"We're getting married," he says, without slowing down, without looking back, like he's reporting weather.
"What? When?"
He doesn't answer. The street narrows, the noise of the piazza falls away behind us, and the air cools in the shadow between buildings.
The next thing I fully register, we're standing in front of a church. A small one, tucked between a shuttered farmacia and a building the color of dried apricots. The doors are open. Candlelight spills out onto the steps in a long gold tongue.
He pulls me inside.
The temperature drops ten degrees and the world goes quiet, that particular held-breath quiet that old churches have, like the building itself is listening.
Incense hangs in the air, sweet and ancient.
An elderly priest is doing something with candles near the altar, and Valentino walks straight up the aisle toward him—dragging me, in a sundress and sneakers, my hair doing whatever it wants—and speaks to him in low, rapid Italian.
I catch maybe four words. One of them is definitely sposare.
The priest looks at Valentino. Looks at me.
Looks at Valentino again with an expression that says he has seen everything in his long life and this is at least top twenty.
He asks something, and Valentino answers, and then the priest says something with a question mark hanging off the end of it, glancing past us toward the door.
"He asks if we have a witness," Valentino translates.
Chiara's hand goes up from the back pew. She's followed us in, and she's glowing, hands pressed together under her chin like she personally ordered this from the universe.
"Io," she says.
The priest nods slowly and shuffles off toward the sacristy, presumably for whatever holy paperwork this requires.
I stand there in the candlelight and my brain finally catches up with my body, which is a problem, because my body has been fully on board since the piazza and my brain has questions.
Twenty minutes ago I was eating tiramisu.
Now there's a crucifix the size of a surfboard looking down at me and my mascara is not waterproof and I'm about to become somebody's wife.
In Rome. In a dress I picked because it was the least wrinkled thing in my suitcase.
Vittoria is going to murder me. Then she's going to cry. Then she's going to murder me again.
Valentino turns to me. The candlelight does criminal things to his face, gilding the gray at his temples, deepening the shadows under his cheekbones, and his voice drops low enough that only I can hear it.
"This is your last chance," he says.
"My last chance to what?"
"To run."
I tip my head, studying him. He's serious but underneath the gravel there's a current of something I've only seen a handful of times. He's nervous. Valentino Conti, who handed himself to Enzo Basile like a parcel, who took forty stitches without making a sound, is nervous, in a church, about me.
"And if I leave?" I ask. "Hypothetically. If I walk out those doors right now, what happens?"
He considers the question with the gravity it deserves. The watch ticks on his wrist. Somewhere behind us, Chiara is pretending very hard not to listen.
"I'll probably drag you back," he says.
The laugh that comes out of me echoes off five hundred years of stone, bright and wild and completely unsuited to the venue, and I do not care even a little.
"That's the right answer," I tell him. My eyes are streaming now, ruining my makeup, but I don't care. I take his hand, and I lace my fingers through his and squeeze.
"Okay, Conti," I say. "Let's do this."
The priest comes back through the side door with a book in his hands, and behind me Chiara is already crying, and the candles gutter in a draft from the street like the whole church just exhaled.
He hasn't let go of my wrist once. I'm starting to understand he never will.