“You could have fooled me.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and inhaled like he was about to say something. But then he didn’t. Instead, he just shook his head. “You should go, Gracewell.”
“I have a name, you know!”
He laughed, looking up at the sky, like the maniac he clearly was.
“It’s Sophie. S-O-P-H-I-E.”
He continued to laugh, but when he returned his attention to me, his voice was utterly flat. “Are you sure about that?”
I blanched. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Before I could process the uneasiness grumbling inside me, he spoke again. This time his voice was disturbingly quiet. “Don’t you get it? You’re a Gracewell. That’s all you’ll ever be to us.”
“What does it matter to you if I’m a Gracewell?” I demanded.
For an interminably long moment, he regarded me pensively. When he finally relented, it was with a determined exhale, like some internal decision had finally been made. He crossed the driveway and reached me in four strides.
“You really have no idea why you’re not welcome here?” he hissed. “Are you seriously that ignorant?”
I swallowed against the sudden dryness in my throat. “What are you talking about?”
Luca frowned. I didn’t understand his question and he didn’t understand my response.
“Cazzo.” He studied me with an almost violent confusion — it pinched the hollows in his cheeks, making them gaunt. “I’m not dealing with this.”
“I want answers!” I protested.
“You won’t get them here.”
“Then where?” I said half-pleadingly, exasperation sinking into my voice.
Luca ground his jaw in slow clicks, whatever shred of patience he had for our conversation rapidly diminishing. “Go ask your father, Gracewell. You probably owe him a visit.”
A familiar feeling of dread crept up my spine. My father. Everything always came back to my father. Of course it had something to do with him — I would never outrun what he’d done. I would never live it down. But there was something more to Luca’s words, something deeper, and it was twisting my stomach. What had my father done to the Priestlys? Before he was arrested he never put a foot out of line. As far as I knew, at least.
Luca wasn’t about to wait until I figured it out. He turned away from me once again, storming into the house, and slamming the front door with a deafening bang.
Feeling my cheeks prickle and burn, I looked up and caught sight of Valentino where I had seen him that first night. He was utterly still, his elbows perched along the windowsill as he looked down on me — on everything that had just happened. His face was solemn. Did he hate me, too? Did he think it right for his twin to act like that?
He raised his hand and held it up, like a salute. I waved back, my arm feeling as heavy as my heart, and he smiled at me. It was a small moment of kindness — a soft tug at the lips, nothing more.
Then he was gone. And I was left bound up in the realization that if I really wanted answers, I would have to seek them from somewhere I had been avoiding.
The following day I called in sick to work and took a bus to visit my father at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill. I didn’t tell my mother — she had been stressed out ever since the incident at Millie’s party, and I figured my father’s incarceration was the last thing I should bring up. Besides, I was going there for answers to a problem she seemed to have no knowledge of and, if it was as bad as I was anticipating, I wanted to keep it that way.
The correctional center encompassed several concrete cell blocks and one roundhouse building fenced in by a perimeter with ten walled watchtowers. Beyond the walls, over two thousand acres of barren landscape surrounded the prison, keeping it far removed from anything that might have once resembled normal life for its nearly four thousand inmates, one of whom was my father.
It was the sixth time I had seen him since he had gone to prison almost eighteen months ago, and each time was harder than the one before. I tried not to dwell on the fact that I still had four more years of these visits ahead of me.
After presenting my identification and passing through the security check, I met my father in the visiting room. Around us, other prisoners sat on metal stools at white tables with their families; kids as young as one and two mingled with heavyset grannies and Gothic teenagers. Prison guards lingered by the walls, eyes narrowed in pursuit of a forbidden embrace or any other illicit exchange, above or below the tables.
My father was paler than I expected and there were new dark creases under his eyes. I knew it could have been a lot worse. Since my father wasn’t gang-affiliated, he was technically, in prison parlance, a “neutron,” which meant the violent inmates mostly left him alone. He could not, however, avoid the effects of meager food and limited physical exercise. He was losing weight and losing sleep.
“How are you?” I began to chew on my pinkie nail — a nervous habit that usually returned in his company.
My father shook out his scruffy gray hair so it fell across his forehead and hid the faint bruises above his eye — they only mostly left him alone. “Getting by, Soph.” He tried to smile, but it was crooked and yellowed. “It’s so good to see you.”
It took everything in me not to crumple in my cold metal seat. How did my father end up in this place? He was a shadow of the man who had raised me on sweeping fairy tales, swashbuckling adventure movies, and faraway hiking trips. The worst things he ever did were yell at me when he lost his temper, forget to wash the dishes, or stay out too late with Uncle Jack every once in a while. He didn’t belong in here with murderers. Even if he had killed a man.