Luca pointed his free hand towards his wife. “Don’t forget your place.”
Molly went silent, and I could see Marco glance over his shoulder at her with the same pain I felt in an instant. What the hell was I doing? I looked at Alessandro, bleeding on the ground with Marco’s gun still set for him. I saw the frustrated look in Marco’s face. The conflict of not knowing if he should stop Luca from killing me, stop himself from killing Alessandro, or go comfort Molly, who was now softly sniffling in the corner. I felt the darkness that had draped over me slip away like rain washing away the mud. Everything I’d done up to this point, I’d done because I wanted to bring my family back together, not tear them even further apart. Molly wasn’t crying because she was afraid. In fact, she was staunchly resolved in not showing emotion because of the strength of who she was, but her husband was the one person who loved her more than anything. He’d never spoken to her that way. That was my fault.
I went slack in Luca’s grip. “I’m sorry.” I looked around Luca to Alessandro. “I’m sorry.” My eyes moved to Molly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Luca blinked at me like he just realized where he was, and then his grip loosened. He looked over at Molly. “Mol.”
She didn’t wait. She walked around Luca and out of the office. Luca watched her as she went but didn’t follow. Molly’s Porsche roared against the quiet, and we just listened until the rumble of sound was so far in the distance we could no longer make it out.
We stayed that way, silently, for longer than I cared to count. Luca’s hand stayed gripped around my shirt, though it was looser now. In truth, the connection was probably the only thing holding him up. It was probably the only thing holding me up.
Marco kept his gun trained on Alessandro, but his arm was weak, not his typical, tree-branch form. Alessandro was looking at the pool of his blood on the ground, slowly drying with the piece of his tooth in the middle like a deserted island. A pin could have dropped and been deafening.
“Dad would be disgusted,” Alessandro said after an impossibly long time.
Marco nodded. “We’d all be six feet under.” Marco made the first movement after that, pulling his gun down and walking over to slide mine back under my waistband. “Never again.”
I shook my head. “Never again.”
“We turned into him,” Luca said. Finally releasing his hand from my collar. “All fucking four of us.”
That truth was a little too heavy, so silence captured the room again. Eventually, Luca made his way back to his office chair, and as he sunk down into it, he buried his face in his hands. I dropped down onto the couch, and Alessandro and Marco fell into the chairs opposite Luca’s desk. The calm after the storm was almost worse than the storm itself. Our thoughts were all floating around the room in a jumbled mess, and the only thing that was common across us was regret. Old regrets and new ones. Fresh ones that were still bleeding out like the matching gashes on my and Alessandro’s heads. We’d all taken such obscure, winding roads and were now colliding at an intersection. The only way we were going to recover from the crash was together, but it was difficult to imagine what that would look like, so none of us wagered a guess at it. We just sat as the afternoon sun set and left us in darkness.
When my phone buzzed, it scared all four of us. The big, bad Varassos, reduced to jumping at the simple sound of a phone. I pulled it out and looked down at it, heart skipping a beat when I saw it was from Stacy.
I got my new phone.
Thank you.
“I have to go.” I looked at Luca. I said it like a statement, but I meant it like a plea.
Luca didn’t even look up. “Go.”
I didn’t wait. I stood up, and too embarrassed to face any of my broken brothers, I left.
23
Stacy
I sat staring at the screen of my new phone. My contacts were still loading in from the phone company activating the new sim card under my phone account, but I already had Gabriel’s number. He’d slid it into the bag he left with my parents the day before, but I had it memorized. Somewhere between the dozens of times that he called me after we’d parted the first time and my pressing need to call him after he tried to ghost me, I memorized how the digits were strung together.
Why couldn’t I stay away? Why could I bring myself to just cut him off the same way I was prepared to do a month ago when I first figured out who he was? I knew I couldn’t be with him. I knew that. I didn’t even need to list the pros and cons or consider what it might mean anymore. It hurt to breathe because I had a lapse in judgment that sent me flying in Gabriel’s direction without any form of a parachute. When I crashed into the earth, it was hard, and it hurt. Next time, it could be my parents, or it could be Mira. She was already shaken from having Gabriel pull a gun on her. His life wasn’t meant to blend with my life. I didn’t have the gumption his sisters-in-law had. I was a holistic yoga instructor. I couldn’t fly off the handle and date a boss in an organized crime syndicate. What was I thinking?
I’d spent a lot of time punishing myself for the mistakes that I made. I refused to take my pain medication. I ascended the stairs to my upstairs bathroom every time I had to pee because it made my legs scream in pain when I did. I wouldn’t allow myself any cheese. The least I owed my body for getting it more beat up than an old car at a compacting yard was finally making the leap and cutting out dairy. Mira didn’t appreciate my self-deprecation. She said this wasn’t my fault, but how was it not? I had two college degrees, and I allowed myself to get blown up into a fantasy with a beautiful guy like a naive high-schooler. I had so much repenting to do that I couldn’t think straight.
None of that—none of it—could keep me from entering Gabriel’s number into my phone and sending him a text the second I got home. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I sent it, but it certainly wasn’t the lack of response I’d been met with. Part of me wanted to blame him for what happened to me and shout at him for ignoring me in spite of that. Two guys beat me to the point that I was more black and blue than my natural skin color, and he couldn’t even text me back?
Another piece of me knew why, knew that he was avoiding me because he’d already taken the blame on himself. I wished that I could look him in the face and tell him it wasn’t his fault, but would I be lying just to spend another few moments with him, or would we be too afraid to face the fact that we both ignored the inevitable in the interest of soaking up what we did to each other?
“Coffee.” Mira’s voice was sing-song as she walked into my kitchen, cradling a hot mug. She set it down in front of me and then pointed at me like a stern mother. “Hot.”
“Coffee typically is, Mir.” There was more bite in my voice than I intended to be there, so when she raised an eyebrow at me, I hummed, “Sorry.”
I brought the mug to my mouth anyway. It was already scalding against my lips as I set the mug there, but it was nothing compared to the way the coffee seared through my shirt and down to my skin when it sloshed out of my mug. My phone was buzzing in my lap, and the name I most wanted to see was flashing on it.
“Careful!” Mira screamed, having seen me jump, but it didn’t matter. I pulled my phone out of my lap and jumped up from my couch, despite the fiery pain. “Stacy! Be careful!”
I rushed into my lower-level half-bathroom, kicked the door shut, and sat on the toilet. I couldn’t press the lock with my only functioning hand holding my phone, so I opted for holding my foot against the bottom of the door.