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I waited with bated breath.
“I want you to believe that Aleksey Korolev never sent Luca’s pin back. And I can prove it.”
And just like that, my heart shattered again. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t care about Luca. He just wanted to be right.
“You know,” I started. “All my life, I hoped that you might change. But I know for a fact that you haven’t.”
“Elia, I told you,” he said. “I was out of line yesterday. I hadn’t expected to see you or to hear you accuse me of being a liar so soon after coming home. Well, I acted with my heart and not my head.”
He stood up, and I recoiled out of familiar fear.
“To make it up to you.” He beckoned me to his desk. “You can search this desk, where you’ll find things that you were never meant to see. Letters to your mother. Drawings that you and your brother made as children. But do you know what I don’t have in there that you accuse me of having?”
I closed my eyes, and a small whisper escaped my lips. “Don’t.”
“Luca’s pin.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He took my hand more gingerly than he’d ever done, and I felt something small and cold press into my palm. When I opened my eyes, I saw it was the key to his desk.
“Then search it for yourself.”
My hands shook as I looked back at him. Was this a test? All my life, I’d found myself tested by my father, but never like this. Heneverallowed me anywhere near this desk except the other side of it.
“Go on,” he urged.
Trembling, I inserted the key into the first drawer and unlocked it. Within it were papers and deeds of the different properties he owned all across the city.Lana would have a field day with this…I thought. But no pin.
I unlocked the next drawer, and true to what he said, I found letters he had written to Mother when they were young. Their different handwritings stared back at me from the years—his were wild unkempt scribbles, and hers were neat orderly lines. I placed them back. No pin.
The next drawer contained a gun and loose bullets. For a moment, I dared to think that one of the bullets was the pin. But it wasn’t here either.
Finally, I unlocked the last drawer and gasped. He wasn’t lying. Pages after pages of drawings from when Luca and I were kids. Uncoordinated lines in crayon, markers, and colored pencil. Some I had forgotten. Others, I still remembered as if I’d drawn them yesterday.
But still, no pin.
My father had been telling me the truth.
Trembling, I placed the key back on the desk and quickly walked away.
“Elia,” he called out to me.
I stopped at the door, fighting to keep the tears back as Luca’s voice whispered from the deepest recesses of my mind.Tarallos are made of stronger stuff.
“You always have a home here,” Father said, and drove the final nail into the coffin. “You can always come home.”
I took a deep, shaking breath, not knowing how I might respond or how Iwantedto respond. All I knew in that moment was that I couldn’t stay in this office. Because then I might never muster up the strength to return to Chicago with this new horrific knowledge.
My husband was a liar.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Elia
The jet taxied on the runway and I drew in a breath, my heart pounding in my chest. I was back in Chicago, a rainy Chicago at that. The weather matched my current mood. Nothing could lift the heaviness from my chest or make me feel any safer. Not after my discovery.
I should have felt safe returning here. I should have felt like I was returning home.
