“Pappa,” he greets, but there’s no warmth in it. There’s rarely warmth between us in private because I taught him better than that. “This is unexpected.”
“Yes,” I say, and he gestures for me to sit.
A faint line appears between his brows. “Is something wrong? You rarely leave the villa.”
Many things are wrong, I think as I cross the room and sit down in the chair opposite his desk. He fixes me with the kind of expression he uses in negotiations when he thinks the other party is about to waste his time.
It strikes me, not for the first time, how much he looks like me as he gets older. That should please me, but today it only makes me tired.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
He lets out the smallest breath through his nose, not quite a laugh, but close enough to be disrespectful if I choose to hear it that way. I don’t. We both know I have never happened to be in the same neighborhood when it comes to him.
“That’s hard to believe,” he says.
“I’m aware.”
The silence that descends is thick and familiar. We have had a great many conversations in silence over the years. My children learned to read me that way because there was often little else to work with.
He waits me out for perhaps ten seconds before saying, “You look as though you haven’t been sleeping well.”
I tilt my head slightly. “You notice a great deal.”
“I learned from the best.”
The exchange is as awkward as I thought it would be, and it occurs to me then that I have never asked him how he is. Not once in the way fathers are meant to ask. Not in childhood fevers or after punishments. Not after Silvano, or even the years when he was building himself into something colder than I could be.
I have asked whether he understood, obeyed, or completed a task. Whether the damage had been contained or what the fallout was. But never the other thing. The ordinary thing… The human thing.
And because I am sixty years old, and apparently age turns men pathetic in private, I hear myself ask, “How are you, Vincenzo?”
My son simply stares at me, and the look on his face is worse than anger would have been. It’s bewilderment sharpened by suspicion. I know he’s wondering whether I’ve gone mad or whether this is just some more intricate cruelty than the ones he already knew how to survive.
“That,” he says after a moment, “is a strange question from you.”
“I think it’s a valid question to ask, given that you’ve just come from seeing a man you’ve been pretending you’re not in love with.”
The words leave my mouth before I can dress them in anything gentler, which is perhaps for the best.
Vincenzo goes utterly still, and for one suspended second, the office seems to stop breathing with him. The city beyond the window still glints and moves, sunlight flashing off distant glass and chrome. But in this room, there is only my son, his hand half-curled on the arm of his chair, and the thing I have just pulled into the open between us.
He does not deny it, and that interests me more than it should. Instead, he sits there looking at me as if I’ve spoken in a language he was not prepared to hear from my mouth. “That is a dangerous assumption.”
“No,” I say with a shake of my head. “Just an eight-year-long observation.”
“You think you know what I feel?” he says, clearly getting annoyed.
“I know what I’ve seen.”
“And what exactly have you seen, Pappa?” he asks, and his expression doesn’t change much, but the stillness around him deepens. Vincenzo has always had a habit of becoming quieter as he gets closer to anger. “In fact, you saying anything at all would imply that you knew what happened at Vintermoor and said nothing.”
“What would you have preferred I say?” I ask. “‘Careful, Vincenzo, you’re about to hand your heart to your enemy? Don’t be foolish, my son, love does not automatically become safe because it is returned? Stay away from him, or you’ll both end up like Ruslan and me?’”
The bitter edge to my voice surprises me, so does the fact that I have just revealed even more of my own shame. Vincenzo looks at me as if I’ve struck him. He’s too smart not to have suspected something had happened between the two of us, especially given our last conversation at Vintermoor. No, the shock on his face comes from the admission itself.
I hold his gaze and let him have the truth of my face, because if I look away now, he will read it as cowardice. He would be right.
“You’re actually admitting it,” he says with a disbelieving scoff. “You’re actually admitting that something happened between you and Ruslan.”
