I was going to get Valentina and send her home by plane or slow boat. Arrange something with my son she’d agree to. I would apologize to Theresa with the most profound and honest apology I could muster. Then I would end my marriage somehow. I’d do something that was against every tradition in my family and get a divorce. Or get an annulment and make sure my son was taken care of in some other meaningful way. Something more, and something less, than my father had done after my mother annulled their marriage.
I was elated. Walking on air. Everything I wanted was about to come to me. I could settle down and let Zo take the reins of the business without fighting for my crew. Theresa and I had enough money, time, love.
My god, I loved her.
I didn’t think it could happen. She and I, together almost normally. But it was going to happen. In the short trip down the hall, I remembered the scent of olive blossoms on the way up the 5 freeway. I would buy a small orchard between Los Angeles and San Diego, and we would live on it together. Close to her family. Close to Zia, who I forgave in my heart for keeping my wife and child from me. I would run the business legitimately, completely above board, and Theresa would keep the books and numbers. She’d pressure me to be more efficient, and I’d teach her why I couldn’t be. We’d fight and make up and fight and make up and make children and make up and—
I got to room 498 mid-smile. The door was closed, probably because Valentina was supposed to have checked out already. I had a moment of concern that she might have tried to escape when the alarms went off two floors below, but I was propelled by my plan, thoughtless in my fantasy of a life with Theresa, and na?ve in my belief in her father.
They wore white coats, and I felt a prick in my hip. It was too late to say or do anything. Too late to apologize or to ask where Valentina was. Too late to run, too late to fight. The room went sideways, and the smile left my face.
forty-two.
theresa
y eyes adjusted. A woman smoking. Thin as a rail. She sounded old, but I couldn’t see her well enough to confirm. She blew a stream of smoke, leaving the last huff for two rings that drifted up in a breaking halo.
“Donna Maria,” I said, remembering her from the wedding. The alarm was muffled through the door, but it was a constant that made me raise my voice. “How long have you been here?”
“I’ve heard people fucking before. Don’t worry your pretty head about it.”
I let that hang like the layer of smoke collecting at the ceiling. It had been a separate room and a closed door, but still. She stepped forward into the window light. It cast her in blue, revealing her age. I stepped back.
“I wanted to see you,” she said. “To get a good look at you. I wanted to see if you have vengeance in you.”
“And what if I do?”
“We can’t have that.”
We regarded each other for too long. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I knew it frightened me. She looked like solid evil. Sin made flesh. As old as she was and as small as she was, she had murder on her hands.
I stepped back again. “How did you know we were here?”
“Why? Are you afraid my consigliere set you up?”
“He didn’t.” I hadn’t considered it because there was no way Antonio or my father would put me in a room with this woman. Lorenzo? Otto? One of them. They would pay.
Donna Maria pointed at my eyes. “And there it is.” She shook her head slowly.
“What?”
“Some people are born with a need to make things even. Imbalance is like a stone in their shoe. They need to shake it out. This never changes. It’s not even a choice. It’s who they are. This is you. I saw it on you just now. For you, there will be an imbalance, and you’ll need to correct it, unless I correct you first.”
Imbalance?
Vengeance.
Then there must be something to avenge. Oh God.
“Don’t.” I said one word as a full sentence, begging for Antonio’s life as an answer to what was in my head, not what had come from her lips.
She looked at her wrist then at me. “It’s probably already done.”
I had an excess of physical reactions to quell. My hands got hot. My thighs tingled. My rib cage shrank until all the air was squeezed from my lungs. There might have been more, but I hadn’t time to catalog them.