He was always going to be this.
But I did my best with him.
And he spent eight months building a plan to hand me to the Volkovs.
The grief and the rage arrive together, the way they did earlier, and this time I let them stay. Let them move through me properly, doing what they need to do. The grief is real. Whatever Leo became, the boy I raised was real too, and losing him — the idea of him, the version I kept believing in despite the evidence — is a real loss.
Goodbye,I think. Not to the man who sold me out. To the four-year-old with the juice box. To the boy who existed before he chose what he was going to be.
Goodbye.
The door opens.
Luca walks in like he owns the room, which is how Luca walks into every room, shoulders first, filling the space before he's fully occupied it. He's still in his coat. His eyes find me immediately and whatever he was expecting, a man more diminished by a hospital bed perhaps, he adjusts fast.
He pulls the chair to the side of the bed and sits.
We look at each other.
Forty years of history in this silence. The first time we met, two young men who had no business being as confident as we were, shaking hands over a deal that should have gotten us both killed. The years that followed. The things we built together, the things we buried together, the friendship that became the closest thing to brotherhood I've ever known.
All of it sitting here in this room, complicated and damaged and still, somehow, present.
"We have to talk," Luca says.
"We do," I grunt.
He leans forward, forearms on his knees. "How did it go? Aurora and you—" I start.
His whole body stiffens. "Don’t talk to me about my daughter —"
"That won't be possible." I cut him off. "She's the woman I love, Luca. And she'll be in every conversation now. That's not changing."
He makes a sound that isn't quite a scoff and isn't quite a laugh.
Silence.
"I miss my friend," I say. The words come out without the armor I intended to wrap them in, just plain and direct and true. "I've missed him for seven years, and then some.” I look at Luca's face, at the lines of it that are older than I remember. "I don't think we can go back to the way we were. I know that. But I just wanted to say it."
Luca is quiet for a long time.
His jaw works slightly. He looks at the floor, then back at me.
"What if we could?" he says.
Something shifts in my chest. "What?"
"What if going back is possible?" His voice is careful. Measured. "Under one condition."
I wait.
"Leave her." He says it simply, no cruelty in it, just a man making the terms of a negotiation clear. "Walk away from Aurora. Endit. I'll have my friend back, and she'll have her father without conditions, and everyone goes back to where they were."
The room is very quiet.
I look down at my hands, the IV line, the bandaging visible at the edge of the hospital gown. I think about it genuinely, the way he deserves me to think about it. I turn it over completely. A world where Luca and I are what we were. Where the friendship is intact. Where everything that cracked gets rebuilt.
Without Aurora.
