Brooklyn
Four Years Ago
Ibring tulips, because they were on sale at the bodega, and because I don’t actually know what my birth mother liked. That’s the whole problem in a single bunch of flowers.
I’m fifteen years old and standing over the grave of the woman who carried me, who birthed me, and I couldn’t tell you her favorite color, her middle name, or one single true thing about her that didn’t come out of a court file.
My dad had custody of me for a reason.
KENNEDY, the stone says, and beneath it a last name I’ve had to be reminded of more than once, because it was never mine and never going to be.
Then the years. Beloved. Somebody paid for that word as a kindness, and it’s a lie, and everyone who comes here knows it’s a lie, and that’s somehow the saddest thing in this whole cemetery.
I set the tulips down. I stand there the regulatory amount of time.
I wait to feel something, the way I’m supposed to, the way the movies say a girl is supposed to feel at her dead mother’s grave.
What I feel, mostly, is guilt for feeling nothing.
Like there’s a daughter-shaped hole in me where the grief should fit and I just never grew the right organ.
I don’t miss her. I barely remember her, and the parts I do remember are bad—a car, a man who wasn’t my dad, a hand too tight on my arm, the specific cold of being someplace I wasn’t supposed to be while a woman who was supposed to love me let someone use me as bait.
I was little. I remember being scared. I don’t remember being loved by her. And then she was gone, and my dad married Si, and I got a mother who actually shows up, and the truth I will take to my grave is that I have never once wished it had gone the other way.
I come here because it’s what a daughter does. That’s all. It’s a chore I do for a stranger so that nobody can say I didn’t.
“You bring her flowers,” a voice says behind me, “but you stand like you’re waiting for a bus.”
I don’t jump. I know that voice better than I know my own.
I called him Domino when I was little, my own private name for the prettiest, scariest, safest man in my whole loud family.
That was back before I understood that the thing I felt was a baby’s crush and not the truth, which is that Dom is the one person on earth I can tell anything.
He let me watch scary movies with him, and we laughed every time the dumb girl went up the stairs instead of toward the door.
He’s leaning against a tree a few graves down in a black coat, hands in his pockets, watching me with those dark unreadable eyes that everyone else in the world finds terrifying and I find—restful.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Visiting my parents.” He nods toward the older section, where Grandpa Tony and his mom are buried, and something passes over his face, there and gone. “I saw you. Figured you could use the company, or you couldn’t, and I’d find out which when I got over here.”
“And?”
“Still deciding.” He pushes off the tree and comes to stand beside me, looking down at the stone, at the lie carved into it, at my discount tulips. For a while he doesn’t say anything. Dom is the only adult I know who isn’t afraid of a silence.
Then he says, quietly, like he’s been carrying it a long way to set it down right here: “I need to tell you something about her, doll. And I need you to hear it from me, today, while you’re old enough to understand it and before you’re old enough to find it out the wrong way.
Because you will find it out. We don’t get to keep secrets in this family. We just get to choose who tells them.”
Something in my chest goes very still and very calm. The way it does before a fight. “Okay.”
“She didn’t get sick. She didn’t have an accident.
” He doesn’t look away from the stone. “She put you in danger. Twice. The second time she put my sister in it too, your mom, your real one, the one who shows up, to take Si from Matteo.” A pause.
His voice doesn’t change at all, and that’s how I know it’s true, even though I remember some of it.
“So I killed her. With my own hands. I made a choice that you would live and she would not, and I would make it again right now, in front of her grave, without blinking.”
The wind moves the tulips.
I wait, again, to feel the thing I’m supposed to feel. Horror. Grief. The floor opening. A normal girl, told her uncle murdered her mother, falls apart.
I’m not a normal girl. I never was.
What I feel, standing there at fifteen with the truth finally where I can see it, is the click of a thing sliding into place. Relief, almost. Because some primal part of me always knew the beloved on that stone was wrong, and now I know exactly how wrong.
“Okay,” I say again.
Dom finally looks at me, and there’s something careful in it, something braced. “That’s it? Okay?”
“You want me to cry over the woman who used me to help get my real mom taken away, or killed, or whatever it was that he had planned?” I look up at him, and I let him see that I mean it.
“You killed her and I got a true mom instead of one who only ever saw me as a useful tool. I get it.” I shrug, and it’s the most honest shrug of my life.
“I’m not going to thank you at a graveside like a psycho.
But I’m not going to pretend, either. Not to you. ”
Something eases in his shoulders. He reaches out and grips the back of my neck the way he’s done since I was five, steadying, anchoring, his thumb at the hinge of my jaw.
“You’re going to scare the hell out of whatever man is unlucky enough to fall for you someday,” he says. “You know that.”
“Good.”
His hand doesn’t leave my neck. If anything it tightens, and when he speaks again the teasing is gone and what’s left is the voice he uses for the things he’d die before breaking.
“Hear me, doll. Your mother used you as a piece on a board, a thing to be moved, to be spent, to buy something she wanted. That will never happen to you again as long as I am breathing.” His thumb settles at the hinge of my jaw and tips my face up until I have to look at him.
“You are not a bargaining chip. Not a prize, not a peace treaty, not a name to be traded to end somebody’s war.
Nobody moves you. Not an enemy, not this family.
Not even me. Whatever you become, you’ll choose it yourself, with your own two hands and your eyes open.
And anyone who reaches for you as a piece answers to me first.”
I don’t answer right away. I don’t have to.
In ten years since I’ve known him, Dom has never once lied to me, and a vow from a man who deals only in truths is a solid ground I can stand on. So I nod, and I let him see I believe him.
“This stays with us.” It isn’t a question, but the boss asks it like one anyway, because he respects me enough to, I suppose.
“Your dad knows. Sienna knows. K knows because he was there. And Ren, but nobody else needs to. And the day they try to hand her death to you like a weapon, and somebody will, doll, somebody always does, is the day I want you to own it. I want it to be old news in your hands. I don’t ever want anyone to get to watch your face break. ”
“It won’t break,” I tell him. I may be fifteen, but I know I’m right.
He huffs something that’s almost a laugh, and then he steers me away from the stone, toward the gate, toward the living. And just before we leave her behind for good, he says it, low, like a fact and a vow and the only kind of I love you a man like him knows how to say.
“I’d do it again to keep you safe, to keep my sister breathing. Every time, doll. Don’t you ever forget who’d burn the world for you.”
And I don’t.