“You’re not asking because you’re actually going to listen to me.” He pulls away, frustrated, and goes through into the sitting area, staring at the wall opposite.
I follow him, still trying to judge his mood.
“I lived a long time in places like this,” he says, which is not at all what I expected him to say. “Not next door to the fucking Pope, of course, but in hotel rooms. Even the nicest of them aren’t exactlyhomey.” He turns around to look at me, finally, and I stop myself from going to him. He obviously has something he wants to say.
It’s time I let him say it.
“I taught myself to stop thinking about family,” he goes on, his voice soft, so I have to listen hard to make sure I’m hearing him right. “I got to a place where I accepted that they just didn’t want to see me. Not just Pops, but the rest of them, too. They never tried to get in touch—or so I thought. Tara told me later that she sent more than one letter. She never had an email address for me, but she knew which hotel I was staying in, and she tried to reach out. But Pops had so much pull, the hotel just conveniently lost all my mail from home. Tara told me she thoughtIhad never tried to get in touch withher.” He swallows. “And, well, I guess she was right about that. I never did.”
I stay quiet. What am I going to say? It makes me furious every time I think of the way his so-called father, Howard Donovan, treated him, but the man is dead now, and good riddance as far as I’m concerned.
Finch wanders the room, trailing his fingers over the cherrywood frame of the sofa. “What I’m saying is, it’s important to me to reach out to Róisín, too. She might not like me all that much—pretty sure she doesn’t—but she’s still family, and I know she didn’t like the way Pops and Maggie treated me.”
“We have no guarantee that Róisín has your best interests at heart, even if she feels bad about the things that were done to you.”
“Maybe not,” Finch says, his chin coming up and his back straightening. “But I want to give her the chance, at least, to show me. So no matter whatyoudecide to do, Luca,I’mgoing to meet her. And you’ll have to tie me up and lock me in the fucking closet to stop me.”
“As tempting as that sounds,” I say, “I have, over the years, learned my lesson about trying to stop you from doing the things you want to do.”
Hope sparks in his eyes. “So you’ll let me go?”
“No. I won’tletyou go. I’m your husband, Finch, not your jailer. You’re a free agent.”
“But…you won’t come?”
At that, I laugh. “Of course I’m coming with you.” Now Idogo to him, hug him close. “Your happiness, your wellbeing, are the most important things to me,” I remind him gently. He’s shaking very slightly in my arms, and I’m sorry to know how much that speech has taken out of him.
“I won’t go if you think we’ll end up dead—I mean,reallythink it,” he mutters into my chest.
“You and I, we’re getting good at dodging death, don’t you think?”
“Our luck will run out sooner or later.”
“Maybe.” I push him back and look down into his face, searing him into my mind so I can remember him like this, serious and beautiful. “But our luck will not run out today.”
I kiss him and let him go, make my way back to the curtain to keep an eye on the crowd.
“How can you be so sure?” he asks, coming up beside me to look out as well. His fingers slide into mine and I squeeze his hand as I answer.
“Because I make my own luck.”
* * *
The closer itgets to eleven-forty, the time I’ve announced we will leave the hotel, the more fidgety Finch gets, roaming around the room, coming back to the curtain to look out, sitting down on the chair, standing up…
“Is it time yet?”
He’s asked every five minutes for the last half-hour, and my response has always been the same. “Not yet.”
“It’s half past!” he says this time, a new refrain. “We won’t make it past the fucking security checks and into the square if we don’t go now.”
“I have been timing how long it takes to get through the security checkpoint,” I say calmly. “Trust me. We’ll make it in. I don’t want to be standing around under the eyes of the world any longer than we have to be.”
But wewillbe cutting it close. And I think Finch will explode if we wait any longer.
“Okay,” I sigh a minute later. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
