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“Okay.” I consider that for a moment. “But do you like spending time with her?”
He’s quiet for a long beat, and I have a gut-wrenching feeling I already know what he’s going to say before he finally answers.
“Not really,” he admits. “She yells a lot, and it scares me.”
I lean back, trying to digest those words. From a child’s perspective, I can understand where he’s coming from. Gwen was loud and blunt when I first met her too. She has the personality of a bull, and it’s not for everyone. Over the years, with every devasting blow she’s received, her grief has slowly whittled away at her sanity. Now she’s on a heavy cocktail of psychiatric drugs for various maladies. Little things become big things to her, and I’ve witnessed her come unhinged often. She’s under the close supervision of an entire medical team who continually assure me of her progress. If she weren’t, I would never have left Nino with her for short periods of time. Now, I realize that too may have been a mistake. I don’t know how to navigate the balance between protecting Nino and allowing Gwen to be a part of his life. She is the closest thing to a mother I’ve had since my own was murdered in front of me. She took me in and cared for me when I was at my lowest. I owe her everything, and sometimes that loyalty can be blinding. As much as I hate to admit it, Natalia had a point. Gwen is a grown woman, and Nino is still a child. If he isn’t comfortable around her, I can’t force him to spend time with her. It’s something I’ll have to deal with, and I only hope she won’t have another breakdown when I do.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to spend time at Gwen’s,” I tell Nino. “I won’t make you do that anymore. How do you feel about her coming to the house?”
He relaxes back against his seat, relieved. Guilt weighs heavy on my conscience that it took me so long to see something that was right in front of me.
“I don’t care if she comes to the house,” he says. “If you or Natalia are with me.”
I rub the pressure from my neck, silently contemplating how the hell I’m going to bring this up with Enzo without him coming unhinged too. I’ll have to be the one to address it first before Gwen goes to visit him in hysterics without giving him any context.
“Alessio.” Nino’s voice pulls me from my thoughts.
“Yes?”
He tangles his fingers together in his lap, tension returning to his face. “What if there’s someone else I don’t like?”
I lean forward, hoping to be as approachable as a man like me can be. “You can tell me, Nino. You can tell me anything. I’ll never get angry at you for being honest.”
He fidgets some more, eventually working up the courage to say what’s on his mind.
“What if I don’t want to visit Enzo anymore?”
His words blindside me.
“You don’t want to visit your father?” I ask.
He shakes his head quickly, clearly ashamed of his admission. Now, part of me feels like a liar because I told him he could trust me with his thoughts, but I also made a promise to Enzo that I would bring his son to visit as often as I could. Nino can’t comprehend the gravity of what he’s asking me. My loyalty to Enzo is the reason I took Nino into my care in the first place. To betray him would be unthinkable.
“Why don’t you want to see him?” I adopt a neutral tone, despite the turmoil raging inside of me.
Nino stares down at his shoes, wiggling them back and forth to distract himself. “He’s mean to me.”
I let those words settle over us, but I need clarification. When I take Nino to visit Enzo in the Tribunal’s prison, I’m only with them for the first ten minutes, and then his visits are supervised by the guards. Faithfully, I have brought Nino there to see his father from the beginning of his incarceration. I always assumed he was sad when he left because he was leaving, not because he had to visit in the first place.
“Can you explain how he’s mean to you?” I ask.
Nino hesitates, and he still won’t look at me. “He gets mad at me because he says I don’t talk, but I always answer him. Sometimes he pinches my arm or squeezes my face. He says I’m weak, and I need to be strong like him, but I don’t know how.”
He’s on the verge of tears by the time he gets the words out, and I’m in too much shock to comprehend it. I can’t imagine Enzo doing any of those things. If I consider that Nino is a quiet, introverted child, much like I was, Enzo has always been the opposite. He is the charmer. He’s loud and free with his thoughts, consequences be damned. It triggers a memory long forgotten when we were in school together, and he would get on my case about talking more. He told me it was the only way I’d get some action, and everyone would think I was weak if I didn’t. I ignored him as I often did, letting Enzo get his say in because he’d usually forget about it five minutes later. But it bothered me then the way I can see it bothers Nino now.
