Page 94 of Winter With You

‘I know.’

‘So, if you want to tell me then tell me. If you don’t want to tell me we can talk about the New York Giants instead or how I can say no to going to Auntie Marina’s for Christmas Day.’

He smiled. ‘You don’t really want to not go to Auntie Marina’s? She has the best limoncello.’

His mother didn’t answer but she put two steaming coffees on the table and pulled out a chair, sitting down. He followed suit, then wrapped his hands around the mug and took a sip. It wasn’t as restorative as he had hoped but there was no going back now.

‘Mom, what I’m going to say to you is going to be hard for you to hear but… I think it’s time you heard it.’

He saw concern flicker in his mother’s eyes.

‘Is it something to do with your sister? Is she OK?’

‘It’s not Steffi.’

‘You? Are you OK?’ Vittoria asked fast.

‘Yes, Mom.’

He watched a breath leave her and then she sat a bit taller in her seat. ‘Well, Luca, anything else is gonna be OK.’

He hoped that was true. Because he loved his mom, but equally, her love for his father was so woven into her psyche that morality significantly blurred for her. But not for him.

‘Mom… it was me who told the cops about Dad. All the things that got him convicted.’ He couldn’t stop, had to get it all out here and now. ‘And I did it because every time he went out that door something bad happened. He made something bad happen. To other people’s families and, if that wasn’t bad enough, I just knew that one day something bad was going to happen to him unless someone did something about it.’

He stopped talking, watching his mother’s expression. There was nothing, no shock, no quivering of her lips that usually led to her tears, she was just static in her seat. And then she spoke.

‘Thank you, Luca,’ she said softly, nodding.

‘For telling you? After all this time?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘For doing what you did. For going to the cops and for trying to do your best to protect everyone in this situation.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re not mad at me?’

‘For what?’ she asked. ‘Doing what I should have done many years before? No.’ She wrapped her fingers around the mug. ‘It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it so many times before. When I was cleaning up after an “incident”, when I was ringing Dr Sergio to pull bullets out of people. Because I could only see one ending, your father in a grave or going missing, never to be seen again.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ he asked.

She smiled and took her hands off the mug and held on to his. ‘Because I’m not as brave as you.’

He shook his head. ‘I disagree. You live this life every single day with no escape, lying, keeping secrets, raising me and Steffi in his abnormality, suffering⁠—’

‘Not suffering, Luca. Not the way you think.’ She took a breath. ‘I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I started dating your father and when he asked me to marry him, I had a choice. And I made the choice. For love. But I was under no illusion about the man he is.’ She sighed. ‘It’s simple. I love him, not the things he does.’

‘But how can you separate that?’ Luca asked.

‘Well, Luca, I like to think about it like an egg. Some recipes need the yolk, others need the white, but when it comes to the whole, you can’t have one without the other. The part I love best is the yolk and, yes, perhaps in an ideal world I would like nothing more than to discard the white, but I accepted a long time ago that life with your father is always going to have conditions.’

‘Did he tell you… that things are dangerous for him right now?’ Luca asked.

‘If he told you details, Luca, I don’t want to hear them. Knowing but not knowing, that’s another thing I’ve insisted on and, believe me, there have been times I’ve known way too much.’ She sighed. ‘And when has there been a time when things haven’t been dangerous for him?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know. But, right now, things are a little different.’

Now his mother’s expression faltered just a touch. ‘OK, I’m listening. Does he have a plan?’

Luca nodded. ‘Yes.’