And…
And before Valentina was brought in, Daniel Brower had asked me questions that didn’t make sense, about Italy, about my whereabouts ten years ago. My relationship with Paulie took up no more than three minutes. I couldn’t turn the questions on him because there were two cops in the room, and my personal history with the district attorney was dangerous territory.
I knew he was hiding something. I knew he was beating around a bush. I knew he was playing a game of his own making when he dismissed the cops and said the interview was over. They shut off the camera and started out.
“And Theresa?” I’d asked as Brower was the last one out the door.
“Don’t worry about her.”
“Don’t dismiss me.”
“I’m not dismissing you.” Brower held the door ajar. “Believe me. You fucked me royally. I’d never dismiss you again. But you’re about to hurt her, and I thought I could stand that. I was wrong.”
Before I could tell him he was wrong about that too, he closed the door, and my denials died on my lips. I’d never hurt Theresa. I’d take death for her. Eat it with a spoon. Embrace my damnation to save her. She was my hope, the call to that earlier self I thought had died.
In the minutes between the door closing and opening again, I unraveled the components of our predicament and tried to find a way through. She’d confess to shooting Paulie even if I swore I’d done it. The evidence might back her up. I had no idea what forensics would find. Hopefully the Carriage House had been such a mess nothing could be proven. Hopefully there had been so many criminals in such a small space that doubts would arise. But mostly, I hoped that the district attorney loved Theresa enough to protect her from what she’d done.
What simple worries. What facile hopes.
I forgot all of them. They imploded. A windshield—smooth, simple—cracked into an unpredictable web of joy, horror, confusion, completion.
And disbelief.
In the first second of seeing Valentina, I thought I was looking at a ghost. Or a different woman. Or a trick of the light. She was older but the same. She was… my God. My heart went up and down at the same time. It went to the heavens with joy and dropped out of me like a stone, because my grief was for naught, and my anger had been misdirected.
And still, even with her hand on the shoulder of a boy who looked exactly like my father, I didn’t believe it until I held her and smelled the grass in her hair. It was her. I felt nothing but confirmation, a clicking into place of a memory with a fact.
I had questions. Too many. Where? How? Why? And they were drowned out by the sound of a windshield cracking slowly into a million complex shapes that would never fit together again.
She’d done to me what Theresa and I had attempted to do to everyone else. She’d faked her death. Her resurfacing was the perfect vengeance for the wrong we’d done.
“Antonio,” she said, the Italian lilt a hymn from her lips.
Her voice brought me back ten years, to the rustling olive trees, the trickle of the fountain in the piazza, the thick smell of soil. She ran into my arms, and I had to catch her or she would fall.
“Valentina? Is it you?” Her cheek felt the same when my lips touched it; the smell and taste were the same. Though I felt all the tenderness in my heart for her and all the joy in the world that she was alive, another crack appeared where my love should have been. I pulled away, more confused than I thought possible.
“It’s me, amore,” she said.
“I know, it’s just… how?”
“We have forever to talk.”
Did we? Forever? Another crack. Another discomfort lodged in my gut where I thought I couldn’t be less comfortable. I held her face and called for the old feelings and found only happiness. An overwhelming yet generic pleasure that she still existed.
She cast her eyes down. “This is your son, Antonin.”