I plate the soup. I pour the lemonade. We sit.
For a while we just eat, and it's the easiest silence I think we've ever had.
"This is good," she says, and means it. "Really good."
"Yeah."
"You could've told me you can actually cook. Would've changed my whole opening negotiating position."
"You didn't have a negotiating position. You had a shotgun wedding and a very bad attitude."
"The attitude's still bad."
"I know." I look at her over the rim of my glass. "I like it."
She looks away first, out toward the water, and I let her have the second it takes her to come back.
I don't planto say it. Things have been coming up out of me all night, unprompted, since the boat cut the engine and neither of us said a word the whole crossing. It didn't feel like punishment, for once. It felt like something closer to peace.
"I shouldn’t have lied to you," I say. "About that night when I was nine."
“You didn’t lie.” She goes still. “You left out the worst parts.”
“That’s lying by omission.” I turn the glass in my hand.
"Nico."
“No.” My voice stays flat. It's the only way I can get through it. "I let you hear the soft version. The one where I got to be a hero. And not the one where I cost my mother her ability to walk.”
Lydia doesn't say anything for a long moment. When she does, her voice has dropped into a register I've only heard from her a handful of times, every guard she owns set down somewhere out of reach.
"I'm not mad at you for that."
"You should be."
"I'm not, though." She reaches across the table and puts her hand flat over mine, and I go still under it. Nobody else gets to do that to me. Nobody else has ever tried. "You were nine. You were a child protecting your mother from a monster who almost killed you. That's not the same as lying to hurt me."
"Feels the same from in here."
"It isn't."
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
"There's more," I say.
She waits.
"My whole life," I say, "I've wondered whose son I actually am."
I've never said it out loud before. Not to Vinny, not to a priest, not to myself in any words I let finish. I've been carrying it so long I forgot it was something a person could put down.
"Martina's," I say, "or his."
"Nico."
"She's spent the first eleven years of my whole life telling me I'm hers. Even after that night, she still said I was herprincipino.” I shake my head. “Her little prince."
“Maybe you still are.”
