“No, I’m not.” I look at Lydia. “You heard her, Lydia. I’m Don Leo’s son now. I’ve been Don Leo’s son since I was eleven."
Lydia's hand tightens over mine.
"You get to choose," she says.
"It's not that simple."
"It is, actually." Her voice doesn't waver. "You're not a blood test, Nico. You're not whichever one of them you're scared you match today. You get to decide who you are every single time you do something. That's the whole thing nobody tells you. It's not fixed. You just keep choosing."
I sit with that. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't erase eleven years old, doesn't erase the knife, doesn't erase any of it.
But it's the first true thing anyone's ever handed me about it instead of an answer dressed up to comfort me.
"Okay," I say.
Just that. It's all I've got.
The conversation turns toward Frank.It always turns toward Frank eventually. We both know he's there before either of us says his name.
"He's not going to stop," Lydia says. "The investigation, the church shooting, all of it. He'll use whatever he can get."
"I know what he is."
"You don't." Her jaw sets. "Nobody does. I've never said this out loud to a single person in my life."
"You don't have to say anything tonight."
"I know." She looks at the window, at the dark garden outside it, then back at me. "I want to, though. I think I've wanted to for a long time and just never had anyone worth saying it to."
I don't push. I've learned that much about her. You don't drag it out of Lydia. You leave the door open and you wait.
"He didn't just hit her," Lydia says. "My mother. He hit her for years, sure, everybody who ever met them knew that much, people whispered about it at the block parties and nobody evercalled the cops." She stops. Starts again. "But that's not the worst of it."
"Lydia."
"He used her." Her voice goes thin and careful, each word measured out on its own. "Other cops. Guys in his unit. He'd... he'd send her to them. To buy loyalty. To make sure nobody in the department ever asked questions about him." She swallows. "I heard it all through a door when I was a kid. For years and years I stared at that door while she screamed and fought them. And only when all the monsters were gone, did I dare to go to her while she cried in silence on the bathroom floor.”
The kitchen goes very quiet.
I watch her say the worst sentence of her life out loud for the first time to anyone, and I watch what it costs her to get it out, and something in me that has been circling for months finally sets down.
“For years I wondered if there was something else I could’ve done. Call the cops? Frank would’ve told them exactly what they needed to hear to go away, and then he’d just hurt her again. But I wanted to do something.”
“You were a child, Lydia.”
"I promised my mom I'd come back for her someday.” Her voice cracks on the last word, just barely, and she pushes through it anyway. "I still haven't figured out how."
“I know how,” I say.
“No, Nico.” She shakes her head. “That’s not a solution. You can’t just kill your way out of everything.”
“But I can.” My voice comes out low, and steadier than I feel. “And I will.”
She looks up.
“I’m going to kill him for you. And nothing between now and whenever it happens is going to change my mind. I'm telling you so you know it's coming, and so you know it's for her as much as it's for you."
"Nico."
