“That should not be as comforting as it is,” I admit a little grudgingly.
“It’s a gift.” Dad laughs again, clearly pleased with himself.Sincerity returning, he asks, “Can you promise me that if there ever comes another time when you’re going through something and need advice, and I’m in the same ten-mile radius…you’ll consider giving me a shout?”
Emotion clogging my throat again, I nod.
Probably sensing I need the company and the comedic relief, Dad sticks around the library for a while, telling me about some embarrassing but hilarious experience he had trying to order in Italian at a bakery the other day. He asks more about my life, even has me show him Project Euclid. I try to talk him through the current problem I’m working, but don’t get very far before there’s a glazed look in his eyes.
“The last math class I took was first semester of undergrad, and for good reason,” he says.
Even as it does my heart and mind good to have the time together, both parts of me are only half present. The other halves are with Cammie, wondering how she’s feeling now. Concerned how things are going with Luca and Dr. Alex. Considering how I fit into the transforming picture of her life.
When Dad decides to turn in, he gives me a long, tight hug, and tells me everything will look brighter after a good night’s rest. I go to sleep hoping more than anything that he’s right.
I wake up to find he’s not.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cammie
“You know, one thing aboutbecoming a single mom in my early twenties, far from home and completely terrified,” Mom muses, lying beside me on her bed a few hours after I left West’s room, both of us staring up at the ceiling, “was that I read a shit ton of parenting books.”
The unexpected curse earns a surprised snort-laugh from me, though it shouldn’t. I heard her yelling at Johnny Russo, after all.
She goes on. “And would you believe that not one of them told me how to discipline your nineteen-year-old, after she pulls off an elaborate scheme to find the father who you never let her know of, because you yourself had been conned into believing he didn’t want either of you, when, in fact, he was under the impression that he didn’t even have a kid?”
I hum thoughtfully. “Yeah, that is a pretty unique set of circumstances that I can’t imagine a lot of moms relating to.”
“Well, aren’t they lucky?” she scoffs.
I give her a conflicted sort of smile as we turn toward each other, just a few inches between us on the pillows. “Yeah. I think the answer is you just have to have some difficult conversations.”
“I think you’re right,” she agrees, “and I think I probably should have tried that a long time ago.”
I feel a pang of sympathy for twenty-years-ago Alex, who I’ve gotten to know pretty well by now. A young woman not much older than me, who was just trying to figure it all out as she went. Exactly as I am.
“I also could have asked,” I say, “but neither of us is that into the hard conversations.”
She reaches over and takes my hand in one of hers. “You are handling all of this almost scarily well,” she says, a little accusation in her voice. “But I’m so sorry you have to handle it at all. That I got us into this mess twenty years ago and couldn’t even manage to sort it out until you grew old enough, and sharp enough, and doggedly persistent enough to sort it out yourself.”
“I tried to, anyway,” I correct her, “but the truth was beyond the scope of my imagination. Maybe even beyond the imagination of, like, Shonda Rhimes herself.”
Mom laughs. “She would totally write a Johnny Russo type of villain.”
“Right?” I agree.
Her voice turns serious again. “But now that it’s all out in the open, or, you know, at least the essentials are, can I clear upanything else? Other things you want to know but might have been afraid to ask?”
I consider the question for a minute. “Is he like…the one that got away?” I try at last, forming the thought carefully. I don’t have to say who “he” is. Besides Johnny, who we more often call “that bastard” or “dickhead” or other derogatory names, there’s only one man who’s monopolized our conversations and thoughts since last night. The man who stayed down in the depths of Villa di Bronzo with us for nearly an hour after the others left, in the aftermath of his entire world shifting irrevocably. He did an admirable job of pretending he wasn’t losing his grip on his sanity, but when the silences between the three of us grew longer, conversation more stilted and less meaningful, as it’s wont to do when all parties are dealing with everything they thought they knew changing on a dime—and are up far past their bedtimes—we said our good-nights, with the vague agreement to talk again soon. I assume he went back to his place on Via Camilla, while Mom and I returned to Villa Russo, both of us too physically and emotionally exhausted to talk anymore.
I’d rested well in West’s arms, safe and warm and loved. But learning he was hiding stuff from me again came as a rude awakening. Now I feel similarly to how I did from my first and only hangover not that long ago. I guess I am emotionally hungover. But the espresso Mom fetched for me from downstairs is gradually reviving me, as is the knowledge that’s slowly setting in amid all the chaos from last night and this morning: I know who my father is.
I just didn’t expect the information to be brand-new to him as well. And if Mom is offering, I’m certainly going to pump her for all the details I can on my no-longer-a-mystery parent. The next time I see him, I’ll go into the meeting armed with intel, if few other defenses.
She takes a while to form her answer, which is a sort of answer in itself, though I don’t make fun of her for it.
“ ‘The one that got away’ feels so melodramatic,” she says with a groan, pinching the bridge of her nose in a familiar gesture. It wasn’t my intention to make her cry. But it’s probably healthy, in light of all she’s reckoning with. “I do believe we were very in love—deeply, authentically. I mean, you read our letters to each other, as absolutely mortifying as that is.”
“You thinkyou’remortified,” I grumble with mock indignation that I don’t have the right to even pretend is there.
