Chapter 6
CONSTANTINE
My father was sitting up when I knocked.
There were days he couldn't manage it, days when the effort of pushing himself upright against the pillows cost him something visible, and on those days I kept my visits short and my expression neutral and drove home the long way afterward.
But tonight he was sitting up with his reading glasses on and a file open across his lap, which meant he was having a good night, which meant I could tell him the truth.
"You look like a man carrying something heavy," he said as I came through the door. He closed the file and set it aside with the deliberate patience of someone who had learned not to waste good hours.
"I have something to tell you." I kissed each of his cheeks and took the chair beside his bed. The lamp on the nightstand threw warm light across the room, making it look almost normal. Almost like a room where a man was simply resting rather than diminishing.
"Does it have anything to do with the young woman currently in my house?" He arched his brow and the corner of his mouth moved. "I might be dying, son, but I still know everything that's happening."
"Emilio told you."
"Emilio didn't have to. Your mother came to check on me wearing the expression she wears when something significant has happened and she's decided I shouldn't know about it yet." He settled back against his pillows. "After forty years I can read that woman from across a room. Now tell me."
I told him everything. Cecilia's month in Chicago, the protocol she'd broken and why, what she'd told us about her father's plans, the Lombardi arrangement, Nicola's death.
My father listened the way he'd always listened, completely still, no interruptions, taking it in and turning it over.
It was one of the things that had made him exceptional at what he did.
He never responded to information before he'd finished receiving it.
When I was done he was quiet for a moment, looking at the middle distance above my shoulder.
"Sergio Avola," he said finally, "has always been a man who confused ambition with vision.
They are not the same thing." He shifted against his pillows.
"A man with vision builds something that lasts.
A man with ambition just takes what other people built.
" He looked at me directly. "His daughter is not her father. "
"No," I said. "She isn't."
Something in my voice must have told him something, because he looked at me for a long moment with an expression that was quieter and more specific than his usual assessment. "Tell me about her."
I thought about how to answer that honestly.
"She's intelligent. More than her father ever accounted for, which is how she knew what she knew.
She's been living alone in a city where she doesn't know anyone, working under the table, keeping her head down.
" I paused. "She learned about Nicola's death in front of me today.
She fell apart and then she pulled herself back together and told me everything she knew. All of it, without being asked twice."
"That's not a woman who breaks," my father said.
"No."
"That's a woman who bends and comes back.
" He nodded slowly. "Those are the ones worth keeping.
" He looked at me with the particular expression he reserved for moments when he was about to say something he'd been thinking for longer than the conversation suggested. "You have to get married, Constantine."
"Pop.”
"I'm not talking about eventually." He cut me off gently but completely.
"I'm talking about the situation in front of you.
Her father knows she's in the US. It won't take him long to narrow it down to Chicago, and when he does, you need her to be untouchable.
" He folded his hands across the file in his lap. "A Venosa wife is untouchable."
"She arrived today. I can't propose to a woman I met today."
"You can and you will if it's necessary.
" He said it without apology. "But I'm not telling you to do it today.
I'm telling you to think carefully about the window you have.
" He looked at me steadily. "Get to know her.
Let her get to know you. But don't take so long that the decision gets made for you by people who don't have her interests at heart. "
I was quiet for a moment. Outside the rain had softened to something barely audible against the windows.
"She's an Avola," I said. Not as an objection exactly. More as a thing that needed to be said out loud.
"She was an Avola," my father said. "Past tense, from the sound of it.
The woman you're describing has already left that name behind.
She just hasn't got a new one yet." He reached out and put his hand briefly on my arm.
"Your great-grandfather left a woman behind once because the timing was complicated.
He regretted it for the rest of his life.
I'm telling you that story because I think you need to hear it. "
I looked at him. At the man who had taught me everything I knew about running a family and considerably more than that about running a life.
Who was sitting up tonight in the warm lamplight looking sharper than he had any right to look given what was happening inside his body, and giving me counsel I hadn't asked for and badly needed.
"I'm not going to let anything happen to her," I said.
"I know you aren't." He picked his file back up, which meant the conversation was over in the way his conversations ended -- not abruptly, just completely, like a door being closed with care.
"Send your mother up, will you? And Constantine.
" He looked up once more. "Bring her to meet me tomorrow. I want to see her for myself."
"I will."
"Good." He opened the file. "Now go think."
I went.
The house was quieter than usual when I came back downstairs. The staff had wound down for the evening, the lights in the formal rooms dimmed, and from the direction of the kitchen I could hear the low sound of my mother's voice and another voice answering it.
I stopped in the hallway outside the kitchen doorway.
Cecilia was at the kitchen table with a cup of something warm between her hands, still dressed from the day, her hair loose now around her shoulders.
My mother sat across from her and they were talking in the easy unhurried way of people who had found unexpected common ground.
I couldn't make out the words. I didn't try to.
I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to.
She laughed at something my mother said -- a real laugh, quiet and unguarded, nothing like the careful composure she'd been wearing since Lorenzo brought her into the coffee shop.
It changed her face completely. It made her look her age, which I was increasingly aware was considerably younger than the situation she was navigating.
Twenty-two years old, alone in a foreign city, and she'd built herself a life out of nothing and protected it for a month on sheer nerve.
I thought about what my father had said. Those are the ones worth keeping.
I pushed off the wall and walked back toward my office. There was work to do, and standing in hallways watching women laugh in kitchens was not something I had time for.
I told myself that twice before I believed it.