Nothing that would hurt anyone, they’d promised. Just intelligence about routes and timing that they needed for their own purposes.
“They said he was a bad man,” Dad whispers, water from the faucet still running as he grips the sink. “They said he dealt in illegal things, and they just needed to know when he’d be vulnerable so they could, I don’t know, arrest him or something. They made it sound like I’d be helping catch a criminal.”
“What kind of information did they want?” My voice sounds strange in my own ears, like it’s coming from very far away.
“His shipment schedules. When he transported certain goods, what routes he took, how many men would be with him.” Dad looks at me from the mirror. “They had photos, Gigi. Pictures of him with weapons, with drugs. They made it seem like he was some kind of kingpin and I’d be doing a public service.”
My stomach drops as pieces begin falling into place. “What was his name, Dad?”
Dad lets out a noisy sob. “Marchetti. Marco Marchetti.”
The name doesn’t mean anything to me, but the way Dad’s face crumples when he says it tells me everything I need to know about how the story ended.
“They killed him,” Dad continues, his voice barely audible above the running water. “Used my information to set up an ambush. B-but something went wrong. They said he wasn’t supposed to die—they were after someone else, someone bigger. But he fought back, and they had to…”
His voice cuts off, unable to finish the sentence.
But he doesn’t need to.
I understand, and it makes my stomach clench.
My father sold information that led to someone’s murder, and now the people who used him were angry that their plan went sideways.
“They came back tonight.” He touches the cut on his forehead with shaking fingers and winces at the sting. “Said it was my fault their operation failed. Said I gave them bad intelligence, that I was responsible for what happened. They beat me and trashed the apartment as punishment, b-but they said next time they’d do worse.”
I turn off the faucet and grab a clean towel, carefully cleaning the blood from his face while my mind races.
This isn’t just about gambling debts anymore.
This is about murder, conspiracy, organized crime—things so far outside my world I don’t even know where to begin processing them.
“We have to call the police,” I say, though even as I speak the words, I know it isn’t that simple.
“No!” Dad grabs my wrist with surprising strength, his non-bruised eye wild with fear. “Gigi, these aren’t the kind of people you call the police about. They have connections, influence. If I try to testify against them, we’ll both end up dead.”
“Then what do we do?” I ask, feeling like the walls are closing in on us.
“Nothing. We do nothing,” Dad says firmly. “We keep quiet and hope they forget about me.” He meets my eyes again, and I see the broken man he’s become. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone about this. Promise me you’ll let it die here.”
I should have argue with him.
I should have insist we go to the FBI or witness protection or something.
Instead, I find myself nodding, agreeing to carry this terrible secret because I’m twenty-nine years old and have no idea how to handle something this dangerous.
This is something out of a mafia movie—not real life.
I help him out of his bloody clothes and into the shower, then gather the stained garments and burn them in the building’s courtyard incinerator while he cleans his wounds.
By the time I leave his apartment the next morning, there is no physical evidence of what happened except the cuts and bruises that will heal in a few weeks.
But I kept my phone’s voice memo app running during the entire drive over, a habit I developed to record my thoughts about Dad’s behavior for the intervention I was planning.
It captured everything—his breakdown, his confession, and the phone call he had afterward that frightened my father so badly he soiled his pants.
I bury the recording so deep in my cloud storage that maybe I’ll forget about it.
Present Day
