"I was just going to say we'd have a conversation."
"No you weren't."
"You're right. I wasn't." That smile: pretty, sharp, absolutely terrifying. "Welcome to the family, Marisol."
He steers Faith and the baby away. I stare after them, then call out:
"For what it's worth, I'd never hurt him. But if I did, I'd absolutely deserve whatever you're imagining right now."
Luca pauses. Looks back. That terrifying smile flickers into something almost like respect.
"Good answer."
"Your brother just threatened me with the most polite murder I've ever received," I tell Nico once they're gone. "And I think I flirted back? Is that what happened? Did I just flirt with death?"
"That's how Luca says he likes you," Nico says, helping me balance Maria's food containers.
"Your family's love languages are deeply concerning."
"Yes."
We walk to the car together, me juggling enough food to survive an apocalypse, Chicago cold biting through my coat. Behind us, the compound glows warm and full of voices that will never quite achieve inside voices.
I spent twenty-six years in a family that communicated in silence: the silence of disappointment, of secrets, of sealed rooms. Tonight I sat in a house where people communicate in beautiful noise, where business calls require immediate attention but dinner continues, where love looks like threats and weapons rest next to baby carriers. I came to Chicago as Nico's girlfriend from Miami.
But I'm leaving as something else. Not a Rosetti by blood or name, but by the only metric this family respects: the willingness to stay at the table no matter how loud it gets, to accept the food Maria packs with tears, to understand that in this world, love and violence share the same space.
I take Nico's hand in the cold Chicago night, our breath making clouds, the compound glowing behind us like a promise that some families are worth the noise.
"Take me home," I say, meaning Miami, meaning the penthouse, meaning wherever he is. "I need to recover from being terrifying-smiled at by your brother, cry-hugged by your cook, and force-fed enough carbs to fuel a small nation. Your family is EXHAUSTING and I love them and I need a nap."
"Always," he says, helping me into the car with my cargo of love disguised as leftovers. "But first, Miami. We have an empire to run, and a priest to check on."
Always.
Epilogue—Gabriel
Three weeks later
I count the parishioners as they leave. It's a habit I can't break—the shepherd tallying his flock, making sure none have wandered. Sixty-three tonight. Not bad for a Wednesday mass in a town most people only pass through on their way to the Keys.
St.Augustine's sits on the edge of Homestead like an afterthought—stucco walls the color of old bone, a bell tower that lists slightly east, a parking lot that floods every time it rains. The diocese sent me here three years ago, and I understood the assignment immediately. This is where they put the priests they don't know what to do with. The ones too complicated for the good parishes and too useful to defrock.
I stand at the door. I shake hands. I say the things priests say—God bless you, peace be with you, see you Sunday. Mrs.Alvarez takes my hand in both of hers when she tells me about her hip. She holds on too long—she always does, the loneliness of widowhood making her grip tighter than she realizes. I let her. I don't pull away. And when she finally releases me, the warmth of her palms stays on my skin like a burn, and I carry it for the next hour because my body has so little to remember that even a seventy-year-old widow's hands feel like something worth keeping.
Mr.Gutierrez asks me to pray for his son in prison. A teenage girl whose name I should remember but don't avoids my eyes as she passes, and I wonder what she's carrying, and I wonder ifit's anything like what I carry, and I decide it isn't, because most people's sins don't have a body count.
The last of them filter into the parking lot. Taillights. Engines. The sound of ordinary lives resuming after an hour of asking God for things He may or may not provide.
I lock the church doors. I walk.
This is my evening ritual. After mass, I walk the parish. Six blocks in any direction—a grid of low houses and chain-link fences and the particular, stubborn beauty of people who make things grow in difficult soil. Bougainvillea erupting over cinderblock walls. A mango tree heavy with fruit in someone's front yard. The distant bass thump of music from a car I can't see.
I walk the way I've always walked—aware of sight lines, of doorways, of the weight distribution that lets a man change direction without breaking stride. The seminary didn't teach me this. The body I brought into the priesthood came pre-trained, carrying reflexes that have nothing to do with God and everything to do with the family I was born into. My parishioners think I walk with purpose because I'm a man of conviction. I walk with purpose because somewhere underneath the cassock, a different man is still mapping exits.
My congregation sees a man of God taking the air, saying his rosary, being present among his people. What I'm actually doing is burning off the charge that builds during mass—the specific, dangerous energy that accumulates when I spend an hour performing holiness for people who believe I possess it.
Sixty-three people looked at me tonight with the particular faith reserved for men in collars, trusting that the hands I raised over the bread and wine have only ever been used for sacred purposes.
