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“You’d be a bad brother if you decided it for me. And, you’d have something in common with Lupo.”
“That’s low,” he says.
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
He sips his coffee while he glares at me instead.
I take his hand across the wrought-iron table. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Mark, and I don’t mean that in some out-of-control way. I mean it in regard to the rest of my life. Which is really scary, if I’m honest with myself.”
“You could decide those things on the beach in Hawaii.”
“Sarah—”
“Right.” He sits back, conceding the point.
“To be clear, I’m not staying because I’ve forgiven him. I haven’t. I’m not sure I ever could.”
“Then why?”
“There’s a kid who needs me, and a set of choices I can only make from here. Trust me to make them.”
He stares off over the vineyard. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I absolutely do not. But it’s mine to not-know and mine to figure out.”
He almost laughs. “The kid, though. She really is something. If you’re staying for anybody, she’s a good anybody to stay for. And that’s not me giving my big brother permission to be with that asshole. It’s just an observation.”
“Noted.”
“God, you two and your noted.”
I laugh, because I didn’t realize I’d done it.
Mark leaves in a rented car, my only blood on the continent, not counting distant relatives I’ve never met. I stand in the doorway of a don’s house, lonely in a way I have no name for, having just sent away the one person who was uncomplicatedly mine.
I spend the day missing Mark and trying to follow Diana’s recipes. Sarah’s having sleepy days, so her naptimes give me plenty of freedom to cook and be Lupo’s conscience when he asks my opinions on things in his office.
“The Ministry hasn’t come after me. The old me would have bribed a few low-level officials to make sure they never did. But I’m trying that whole self-improvement thing you said I could do, and… I’m at a loss. What does a good man do at this point?”
I snort at that. “I’m pretty sure good men don’t find themselves at this point.”
“Don’t get cuter with me. You know what I mean.”
“A lot of—cuter? The phrase is ‘don’t get cute with me.’ Not cuter.”
“I know what I said.”
I roll my eyes so he doesn’t see that I liked that or the heat that flared in me when he did it. “Don’t bribe anyone. Not yet. The Ministry will do what it’s going to do, and you said you were willing to pay the price for your sins. Prove it.”
He slowly nods as his mood darkens. “I am willing to, Veda. I meant that. The bribery—I think that’s just a reflex.”
“It’s like I said before, it’s going to take a long time before those decades of training are out of your system. The fact that you didn’t instantly bribe them means that you’re trying, so give yourself some credit there.”
“Mark is right about you.”
I’m surprised to hear that from him. “How so?”
“You’re too nice to me, and I haven’t earned that. Why are you?”
