She takes my arm.
“Come inside. You need to eat.”
I let her lead me. But I don’t let her in.
Later, the study is dark.
I pour whiskey. Enough to burn. Not enough to blur.
Papa’s desk. Papa’s chair. Papa’s empire, now mine.
The leather still smells like him. Cigars and ambition and something underneath that I could never name.
I sink into the chair. His chair. It still holds the shape of him.
My teeth grind. I force myself to breathe.
The chess set sits in the corner, pieces frozen mid-game. The last match he ever played was with me, when I was twenty-two. He never finished it. Just walked away one day and never returned to the board.
I should have hated him for that. For leaving us while he was still breathing. For thrusting me into his role when I was a boy barely past twenty. For every goddamn thing I had to become because he couldn’t be bothered to survive his own grief.
I didn’t hate him. I just stopped expecting him to come back. And I picked up every fucking thing he dropped.
My hand hovers over the board.
I could finish it. Move the pieces to their conclusion. End what he started.
Or I could leave it. Another thing he left undone. Another debt with no one left to collect.
I pick up the black king. His piece.
The cold marble presses into my palm, solid and small.
All those years he sat in this chair, lost in Mama’s memory. While his children waited for him to come back.
He never did.
My fingers close around the king. Tight. Tighter. Until my knuckles go white.
I set it down. Not on the board. On the shelf. Next to Mama’s photograph.
The game is over. Not finished. Just over.
I move to the window and look out at the garden. Fresh earth beside the roses. The place where my father loved so much that his children became ghosts in his own house.
I think about Gia’s question.
Are you okay?
I think about the answer I didn’t give her.
And I make a vow. Not to my father. Not to my mother. To myself.
I will not become him.
I will not love like that. Not so much that losing them destroys me. I will not die reaching for a ghost. I’ll run this family the way it should be run. The way he stopped running it the day Mama died.
I marry the Neri girl and keep her at arm’s length and never let her get close enough to matter. Controlled. Loveless. Safe.
