“And now,” I say. “Now that you know me. Was today going to be the day, or was I going to find out the way I found out–by accident, half-asleep, saying something I didn’t even know I remembered?”
She doesn’t answer. The silence does it for her, and the silence is its own kind of answer, and I feel something close in my chest like a door finally, irreversibly shutting.
“Valentino, please—”
I step back from the counter.
I don’t shout. I don’t slam anything. I simply pick up my jacket from the back of the chair where I left it last night, and I walk past her, out of the kitchen, down the hall, past Nico’s door where the nightlight is still glowing amber and useless against everything that’s happened in the last ten minutes.
“Where are you going?” Her voice follows me, cracking apart entirely now.
I don’t answer that either.
I walk out the front door into the grey, pre-dawn light, down the steps where I sat last night deciding whether discipline or fear was the better word for what kept me outside that door, and I keep walking, because right now I cannot trust myself to stay.
The lake is the color of pewter in the half-light, flat and unmoving, and I walk toward it without any particular destination, just the need for distance, for cold air, for something that isn’t the kitchen and isn’t her face and isn’t the particular sound four years made when it finally collapsed into a single, devastating word. Somewhere behind me, in the cottage, my son is still asleep, unaware that the careful architecture of his small life just shifted permanently in the time it took his mother to say one syllable.
Not because I don’t care.
Because I care more than I have allowed myself to care about anything in fifteen years, and right now that feels less like a gift than like standing in the open with no exit route mapped, for the first time in my adult life, and absolutely no idea which direction is safe.
Chapter Twenty-One
LIVIA
I don’t remember sitting down on the kitchen floor. I just remember being there, back against the cabinet, knees pulled up, the cold tile seeping through my t-shirt while the front door’s echo still hung in the air like something that hadn’t finished happening.
Nico is still asleep. The monitor on the counter blinks its small green light, indifferent to the fact that his entire world just changed shape while he dreamed about racetracks and dragons. I keep looking at that light, that steady, mechanical pulse, because it’s the only thing in the room behaving the way it’s supposed to.
I don’t know how long I sit there. Long enough that my legs go numb. Long enough that the grey light through the window turns into something closer to morning, pale and flat and entirely unsympathetic to the wreckage currently occupying the cottage kitchen. I replay the conversation in pieces, out of order, the way the mind does when it’s trying to protect itself from the whole of something too large to hold at once. His stillness. The exact angle of his shoulders when he asked the question, like he already knew, like he was only confirming something he’d spent days assembling alone. The particular silence after I said yes, before either of us said anything else, a silence with enough weight in it to flatten a person.
I think about calling him. I get as far as picking up my own phone, scrolling to his name, before I put it back down, because I don’t actually know what I would say, and because some old instinct insists that the right thing to do right now is nothing atall. Just sit. Just wait. Just let the wreckage settle before I try to move through it.
When Piper lets herself in — she has a key, has had one since the second day, because she decided unilaterally that the situation required backup and I didn’t have the energy to argue — she finds me exactly where I’ve been for the last hour.
“Okay.” She drops her bag by the door, takes one look at my face, and crosses the kitchen without another word. She sits down on the floor across from me, in her work clothes, on tile that is absolutely going to leave a mark on those pants, and doesn’t say anything else for a long moment. “You don’t have to talk yet.”
“He knows.”
So much for not talking yet.
Piper’s expression doesn’t change, exactly, but something in it settles, like she’s been braced for this specific sentence since the moment she saw my face. “Knows what, specifically. I need the full scope before I can appropriately panic.”
“Venice. Nico. All of it.” My voice comes out flat, scraped clean of anything resembling composure. “He asked me this morning. Just asked. Standing at the counter like he already knew the answer and just needed me to say it out loud.”
“And you told him.”
“I couldn’t lie again. Not after” I stop. There are some things I’m not ready to say even to Piper, even now, even with my whole life currently in pieces on this kitchen floor.
“Not after last night,” Piper finishes for me, gently, and I don’t correct her, because she’s not wrong, even if she doesn’t know the half of what last night actually contained.
“He went very still,” I say. “I told him everything. The masks, the antibiotics, finding out, trying to find him, Dante, running. All of it. And he just got quieter and quieter until I couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all, and then he said” My voice cracks. I press the back of my hand against my mouth for a second before I can finish. “He said I let him hold his own son and called it a performance.”
Piper is quiet for a moment. “That’s a brutal thing to say.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s true and brutal. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” She reaches over and takes my hand, the cold tile be damned, her grip firm in the way it’s always been since university, since the seminar, since every disaster I’ve ever called her in the middle of. “And then he left.”
