“Sure.” What had he smelled when he put his nose in her hair? Hope? Togetherness? Completion? “I’m just a little…” I spun my hand at the wrist. There was a word, but I couldn’t think of it because I was trying to get to the primes over a hundred, where it got complex enough to sustain me. I had to shut off the TV in my head. She stayed gentle. She stayed gentle and died. “He told me she was dead.”
“He thought she was.”
He thought she was. Why was it taking me so long to process things? Why couldn’t I turn the TV down? He thought she was dead. Right. Okay. So I wasn’t half the whore, and he wasn’t a liar. He’d asked me to marry him.
Don’t cry.
Meaning Daniel was telling it right. Antonio wouldn’t have asked for my hand if he thought he had a living wife.
Don’t.
Cry.
Focus.
53. 59. 61.
“She’s been in hiding. She wasn’t in the car when it exploded. It was a setup. She and her mother-in-law set it up. She’d disappear until he finished and came home.”
I shook my head. The prime numbers clattered around. “Why?”
“They hate the mob, his mother and his sister. Valentina’s no different. From what she says, they were fighting a lot about his new line of work. So his mother convinced her Antonio would get clean and return. Told her he knew she was alive. So she waited until she found out he’d died in an explosion in downtown LA.”
“And she was pregnant when he left.”
“Yes.”
“It’s an Italian opera, isn’t it?”
“Except you’re not fat, and you can’t sing.”
I felt my face stretch into a smile, but my mind was still working on the TV. The tuning had changed, but the volume was the same. Antonio hadn’t known. He must be as confused as I was. I worried about what he felt. What he would do. About him as a person who had resigned himself to losing someone he loved and then found her in a police station.
“I don’t understand what you have to do with this,” I said. “Why I’m not being questioned by the police. Why you know. Any of it.”
“Everyone knows Spinelli shot Patalano. That’s first. You’ll be questioned, trust me, but you’re not a suspect. Not as long as I’m the district attorney. And the way the mayor’s race is going since the wedding, I’m going to be DA long enough to put him in jail and keep you from throwing yourself to the wolves for him.”
I nodded. I’d do what I had to, but I couldn’t put it together right then.
“Theresa?”
“Yes?”
“Did you look like this when I hurt you?”
I shrugged. “I’m going to do better this time.”
When I said “this time” as if it was a done deal and I had no hope of feeling whole again, I took a sharp, involuntary breath. I cleared my throat. 101. 103. 107. 113. No. One was missing.
Daniel put something in my hand. “This is yours. It’s the only thing I gave you of any value.”
I looked down at a soot-covered engagement ring.
“You’re too good for me,” he said, closing my hand around it. “I had no business asking you to marry me. And he had no business being with you, whether he knew about Valentina or not. I don’t want you to settle.”
107. 109. 113. 127.
“You’re a real fuckup,” I said.
“Yeah. But I’m a good DA.”
That was the truth. He was even a great DA.
I put the ring at the top of my thumb and let it rest there. Stupid thing. I’d been so excited to get it. I’d felt completed. I’d thought Daniel and I looking up at the solar system together was what it meant to be fulfilled. But it had been precarious, and I was a different woman now. Bone to flesh, I was different. I’d run away, shot a man, been shot at, died, come back to life. I’d gone nose to nose with danger and walked away stronger. I didn’t have to make common choices anymore. Antonio had freed me of my own expectations of myself, and I could be whomever I wanted.
“You know Donna Maria’s after him,” I said. “He has a price on his head.”
“There’s not much I can do until they try to kill you.”
“Is his wife safe?”
“Probably not. Why?”
My tears had dried up, and the rote repetition of numbers that kept me from thinking of Antonio and Valentina in that room dissolved into sense.
“I’m glad you have him,” I said. “He’s safer with you.”