“Please,” I begged. “I just want to see her. I won’t bother her, and if she asks me to leave or if it seems like I’m causing her stress, I’ll go.”
I expected follow-up questions, but instead, Mira pulled out her cellphone. I followed suit and pulled mine out as well. After a quick exchange of numbers, I had the hospital information in a text. I thanked her quietly before leaving her to gather the rest of the things she needed for Stacy. I reemerged back into the chilled Philly afternoon and climbed back into my truck. I’d spent a lot of time inside and turned my nose up as I climbed in. I was sick of looking at it, and this whole ordeal was as likely as anything to convince me to get a new car soon.
I stopped briefly by the same flower shop I’d been stopping at every time I was planning to see Stacy. When I’d first come, I took an orchid by necessity, but now my eyes searched automatically for them amongst the sea of roses, tulips, and lilies. Understated or not, they were the flowers I bought Stacy, and I realized I found them to be more beautiful than any of the others. Just like meeting Stacy, buying her that first orchid had been fate, and just like with Stacy, I couldn’t bring myself to touch anything else.
I traveled next to the hospital, where I parked my car in a fifteen-minute spot outside. It was a self-regulator to keep me from staying too long. I wasn’t there to talk to her at length, try and convince her to say, or apologize to her for what had happened. I just wanted to see her. To touch her with my own hands and know that she was still real. I started out of the driver’s seat, but then I pulled back. I reached into the back seat and grabbed the new phone I’d bought to replace hers. I’d placed it in a gift bag, and I hadn’t even unpacked the box. I had slid my number into the bag on a post-it note, but that was the closest I would get to her. If she never used it again, I would understand. I slid the orchid into the bag alongside the phone, climbed out of my truck, and stepped quickly to the hospital so as not to waste any of my short time.
I checked in at the front desk, Marcus Gilde, and made my way to Stacy’s room. My brothers and I all had aliases, complete with fake IDs, just in case. The second I was clear of the desk, I peeled the temporary badge off my shirt. I could pull it out if I needed it, claiming it just wouldn’t stick, but otherwise, I didn’t need anyone seeing the false name.
I stopped in front of room 1408, the one that Stacy was in. I could already see through a slit in the window, and I saw her resting but bruised face as she laid in bed. It broke me. It took the already shattered pieces and smashed them even smaller, and then it ground those into dust. Any way I looked at it, Stacy’s injuries were ultimately my fault. If not for her association with me, then at least for my stupid brother’s reckless actions or a rivalry that my father kicked up nearly five years ago now. If she’d just met some guy in her yoga class and let her take him out, they could be a simple, happy couple. They could go out to restaurants and ignore their families and hole up together for whole weekends with no consequences except for maybe some lecturing and uncomfortable prying. Two beasts wouldn’t have snuck into her house and beat her within an inch of her life. But it wasn’t just some guy, it was me, and now she was here.
Going by was a mistake. I should have stayed away. I turned around, planning to leave when I came face to face with a woman. Looking at her left me with no guesses as to who she was. She had blue eyes as opposed to green, but in every other way, she was the image of Stacy in an older form. It was clearly he
r mother.
“Are you here to see Stacy?” she asked, blinking at me innocently. Her hands pushed against her mouth. “Oh. Are you the one she’s been seeing. The date she was expecting.”
I had no idea what version of the story she was referencing, but playing along was my only option. “Yeah.” I looked back at the hospital room. “How is she?”
“Come, come,” her mom started to push me in. “She’ll be happy to see you.”
I shook my head. “I’m in fifteen-minute parking downstairs, I just came to give her—”
I didn’t get the rest of the sentence out. Her mom was oddly strong, but then again, so was Stacy. When I broke the threshold, a man with long gray hair and Stacy’s green eyes looked up at me.
“Hello,” he said.
“H-hi.” I tried to swallow away the knot in my throat. It wasn’t at all how I expected I’d meet Stacy’s parents.
“This is the one she was supposed to see. The one she was naked for,” Stacy’s mom said, and I nearly threw up.
“W-what?”
Her dad waved his hand. “Oh, it’s okay. We’re very open with Stacy.” His eyes trailed down to the gift bag in my hand. “That’s nice.”
“Oh.” I held it up awkwardly, pushing it out towards her dad. “Can you give it to her?”
“I can, but she should wake up soon. You could stick around if you wanted. We won’t smother you with any uncomfortable questions.”
The end of his sentence was a distant mumbling in my ear. I’d finally brought myself to look at Stacy, and it had my stomach twisting into knots. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to turn back time and make it so that she’d never met me, but the idea of not knowing her was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
“I have to go.”
I could hear her parents protesting behind me, but I rushed out regardless. I took the stairs instead of the elevator, even though taking fourteen flights of stairs down sent a burning through my chest. I got into my car with a changed mind. I had to go home without seeing Stacy. If she was smart, she would never contact me again.
22
Gabriel
All of my brothers’ cars were in the driveway when I pulled in, along with Molly’s and Ricky’s. It was a full house. I hadn’t responded to anyone’s calls in a couple of days, so even if nothing else huge had happened, they were bound to be pissed that I was ignoring them. I didn’t care. Alessandro’s arrogance was what pissed Carducci off in the first place. Let them take what happened to Stacy up with him before they scream at me for a few missed calls.
I’d had just about enough of being more of a pet than a brother to the Varassos. The woman I loved was sitting in a hospital bed because of it. If I’d been with Stacy, I could have protected her. If we weren’t trying to run this stupid business to begin with, she wouldn’t have been in danger. I should have walked away from her the first chance I got. I never should have followed Molly’s encouragement and gone to see Stacy at that hotel. We’d made a clean break, she was safe, and that should have been it. The Varassos’s combined stupidity landed her in a hospital, so unless my brothers were waiting in line with apologies, I didn’t give a shit if they felt like I should have been at their beck and call.
I reached over to shove my gun in my glove compartment as I always did when getting out of my car but hesitated. I couldn’t place the reluctance. I never felt like I needed my gun when I was in my family home, but lately, that feeling was fading more and more. Luca, Marco, and Sandro stayed armed at all times. Even Molly had a gun on her so long as she wasn’t going to be dealing with the kids, but I knew two things with certainty. Varasso blood was thick, thick enough to keep a man from pulling a trigger on his own brother, even if he hated him, and even if we found ourselves in a pit of danger, I didn’t have the stones to pull a trigger, regardless. I kept two guns in my car—one in my glovebox and one under my driver’s seat—but I’d never used them, and I never planned to.
So, it was a mystery to me why I closed my glove box without sliding my gun inside and, instead, slid it into the waistband of my suit pants. An invisible force guided it in like I was a marionette being controlled by someone else, and I knew who was pulling the strings. Even from buried in the earth, my dad still had his sausage fingers clutched around all of our throats, more than any of us were willing to accept or talk about. If that fact alone didn’t erode our family from the inside out, the way the business was eating away at our relationships would be more than happy to fill the position.
I stepped up to Varasso estate with unfamiliar confidence. It wasn’t the joy that bounded me up the path after I’d confessed my love to Stacy. It was something else, almost sickly. It was like wearing someone else’s dirty laundry and discovering it fits all too well. I could see it in the way the staff looked at me as I strode across the threshold. They were well aware of the new atmosphere I carried with me. It was hard not to notice it. The way they cowered away from me as I strode forth, the way they ducked their heads and didn’t make eye contact. It was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It was hard not to lay it out on a countertop in neat lines and snort it through a straw.