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He was willing to die to set things right.
Jesus Christ,
“Dante. . .” I say in a whisper, but he keeps speaking.
“So, I’m sitting on this bench, trying to get the courage to move my feet. I’ve got my head in my hands, elbows to my knees, and this little thing comes over and starts talking to me. Chatting my ear off.” His hand moves to my hair, brushing it behind my shoulder and staring there, like he’s seeing it differently. “You had these little flowers tied in your hair. Fiorella.”
The world stops spinning.
I stop breathing as it all comes back to me.
“Pretty sure you were drunk, but you just sat there and talked to me.”
“It was Halloween,” I whisper. “My friends and I were all dressed like princesses. I was Rapunzel.” The man sitting there. He was wearing this black hoodie so I never got a good look at his face. And he’s right. I sat there and just started babbling.
“I think somehow you knew,” he says, ignoring how my world is exploding. “You knew what I needed even then. You said, ‘Life is beautiful if you let it be, you know? Trust me on this. Trust me that it will be worth it.’”
“Dante-”
“I think you were sent to me. A promise. If I worked to fix it, to make things right, I’d get something as beautiful as you.” His words are a whisper.
“Honey-”
“Two years. I spent two years looking for you. Your friend came over, you ran off with her. Do you know how many early 20s blondes there are in New Jersey?”
“A lot,” I whisper.
Finally, he smiles.
“There’s a lot. Marco thought I lost my damn mind. But then you just. . . fell into my lap.” He leans forward and presses his lips to my cheek, and it’s only then I realize I started crying at some point. “That’s how you can trust me. Because I’ve been working for you for two years, before I even know who you were, what we were. I’ve been searching for you and trying to earn the reward that was you.”
All this time, I have been terrified to trust this between us.
And never once did Dante.
Because all along, he knew.
“Then one day, Paulie is going on about the blonde he hired - a mayor’s daughter. I was ready to tell him no, to just call it even with the shit from Johnny and then. . . and then I saw you in the footage. I fell in love with you in black and white and you brought color to my world. I paid to spend time with you because I needed to know if it was you. If you were everything my mind had dreamed up over two years.”
I laugh a bit, knowing there is no way I did with my rebellion and constant frustration.
He grabs my chin and forces me to look at him. “You were. And so much fucking more. Never think anything less. Now, what made you come to Paulie, Lilah?”
And then I finally tell him everything, confident in what we are. Who we are. Who we’ve always been, apparently.
“My sister. My sister, because she did the heavy lifting for fifteen years and spent most of them breaking her back to keep me safe from a danger I was too up my own ass to know existed. I should have known. Should have seen it. But I ignored the signs and lived my life while she struggled. I came because I knew that even if Johnny was out of the picture, Shane wouldn’t stop, Lola would still be on the line, and she deserves a beautiful life. So it was my turn to step in.”
He looks at me as I stop breathing, gives a sharp, concise nod, then continues.
“I knew that already. Your mother?”
This gets trickier.
“Two years before the shit went down with Johnny, I found her journals.” I’ve talked about this aloud one time and one time only, in a hospital room when my sister was being seen after nearly being kidnapped. Despite Lola asking me, despite the missed calls piling up from Shane, I never spoke about it again. Except for now.
“They went all the way back to when she was a teenager. She fell in love with Arturo Russo when she was 18. Wanted him more than anything. They snuck around and had an affair. When my grandfather found out, he threatened to ship her to boarding school for college. He had plans for her.” I laugh an ugly laugh, not missing the parallels between my life and my mother’s. “Her father wanted to build ties with the Carluccio family. She was to marry your brother.”
I don’t miss the slight widening of Dante’s eyes and I wonder if he’s just now seeing how similar our stories are. How history seems to be repeating itself in some kind of fucked up way.
