The words are bitter in my mouth as I force them out.
“I made a mistake,” I say, and the understatement of it is almost astounding. “I let my anger and bitterness get the best of me. I told myself I could fix things if I could only get her back home. I told myself that she’d come home because I asked, because there was a time when that would have been enough.”
Adrian Connolly was good at being what he was asked to be. He didn’t improvise. He just did what he was told. I didn’t say the words “don’t hurt her” because they’ve never needed to be said when it came to my blood. I didn’t say “don’t frighten her” because I was stupid enough to think my name would make her feel safe.
“I told him to bring her home,” I murmur. “He heard ‘by any means necessary.’ And I know he did. I knew it, but I didn’t correct him.
“He tried to take her.” I rub my hand over my mouth. “He put his hands on our daughter, our pregnant daughter, because I never told him otherwise. I was too prideful to pick up the damn phone and speak to her myself. Or I could’ve sent someone else. Antonio, he was her favorite uncle. Caterina, her mini-me.”
I exhale through my nose.
“I didn’t. I didn’t even tell them. By the time they found out how badly I had fucked up, it was too late. Nick Dixon swooped in and bought up the prison. I could’ve even dealt with that. But then he told me that Lucia wasn’t my daughter anymore. Thathewas her family now, and she didn’t need me.”
I soften my voice. “It did something to me, Carlotta. It brought out the monster that Lucia thought I was. The one everybody thinks I am.”
I picture Lucia as she was the last time I saw her. Before she started looking at me with suspicion and fear in her eyes.
She was just my little girl, running around the yard, teasing her brothers, staying up way past her bedtime so she could sneak back down to the kitchen and take the last cannoli.
How she would giggle when I caught her, and the price of my silence was the other half of the cannoli.
“I have been living for the day I’d get out of prison and pay him back for that,” I tell her. “I wake up and think about it. I go to sleep and think about it. When I eat, I think about it. When Isit still too long, the pressure builds under my skin and I can’t keep from imagining how I will show Nick Dixon that he’s not protected by his money, not where I’m concerned.”
But now,” I say, and I look down at Carlotta’s name again, “there is more than myself to consider.”
I picture Elena the way she was the last time I saw her—hair scattered across the pillow, a light flush still on her cheeks as she slept deeply—before I had to sneak away in the early morning light.
“I can’t do what I was going to do without her looking at me like I’m a monster,” I say. “She is a prosecutor. A good one. She believes in rules and boundaries and the law, in righting injustices and making a case against wrong. She’ll know.”
I push my hand through my hair. “Even if she can’t prove it. Even if she can’t put me behind bars for it. She’ll know, and she’ll look at me in exactly the same way Lucia did all those years ago. With fear and disgust. And Lucia will look at me that same way again, too.”
The wind blows again, and the sound of a siren beyond the wall grows and fades just as quickly.
“I keep telling myself to let it go. Let the world think I’m exactly what they want me to be: manageable.” I rub my jaw and feel the rasp that I didn’t bother to shave this morning. “How long can I keep that up? Hmm? How long until the real me comes out and chases her away?”
I blow out a breath that tastes like this morning’s espresso.
“And Lucia?” I ask. “What do I do with her? What do I do when a part of me wants to call her and tell her that I’m still her father? To come home. We’ll fix this. And the other part of me wants to end the man who stands with her, and knowing that if I do that, she will never in this world forgive me?”
I look up at her name again and ask her what I always asked her when I was the least useful version of myself. “Tell me what to do.”
Of course, there’s no answer. That was never how this worked. Even when she was sitting across from me at the table, her answer was always: What do you want to be true when you wake up tomorrow? Be brave enough to choose that.
I put my hand flat on the top of the stone one last time and bend until my forehead touches the marble. It’s cold, and it takes the heat out of my skin. I stay there long enough to smell dust and rain and whatever flowers died here last.
“Help me,” I say against the stone.
The wind hushes and then comes back. A cloud crosses the sun. Somewhere, a bell rings twice and then stops.
I straighten, and my back complains. I smooth my palm over her name one more time: Carlotta. I take a step back, then another.
“Ti amo,” I say, because I said it every day I could and I said it every day I couldn’t, even if it was only in my head.
Then I turn and walk back down the row, counting the steps past the fig tree with no figs, past the stones nobody visits anymore.
The gate scrapes when I push it. The road on the other side hasn’t changed. The world hasn’t either.
Chapter Twenty
