IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 23: The Question

Getting quiet was harder than Maya made it sound.

I tried it the next morning. Got up before Luca, which was becoming my habit, and went to the small sitting room at the back of the compound that nobody used very much, the one with the window that looked out over the garden that I was still not allowed into, and I sat in the chair nearest the glass and I tried to be still.

The compound was not still. It was never entirely still, there was always Marco or the guards or the specific background hum of a place that was operational at all hours, but the sitting room had a quality of remove from all of that, a slight distance from the main sounds of the house, and I sat in it with my hands on my stomach and I tried to listen to the thing Maya had said I would hear if I got quiet enough.

What I heard instead was the twins. A small movement, a shift, the particular interior sensation that I had become familiar with over the past months, and I pressed my hands flatter and thought about eleven weeks and what eleven weeks meant and the fact that two people were going to arrive in the world in approximately that time and need things from me that I was not sure I was currently equipped to give.

I thought about the kitchen and the living room and the bedroom.

I thought about Bryan's hand on my face and the six years compressed into three seconds and the way he had not looked at me with any kind of accusation afterward, just with the steady open expression of someone who had said the thing they needed to say and was at peace with it regardless of what came back.

I thought about Luca's eyes in the low light of the bedroom with the composure entirely gone. About laughing in the middle of something that should not have been funny and the laughing being the most intimate part of it.

I thought about sitting at Don Adriano's table and saying Hayes and Wolfe without flinching. About the garden and Selene saying believe it. About the photograph in his pocket alongside the ultrasound. About a seven year old girl at a school funded by an anonymous scholarship.

I thought about two pink lines on a test in a university bathroom and a voice through the wood of a door saying you've been in there for twenty minutes, you okay, and how I had almost told him, almost opened the door and handed him everything right there, and how the decision not to had sent my life in a direction I could never have predicted.

I was still sitting there when Luca came to find me.

He stood in the doorway for a moment before he said anything, which was his way of reading a room before he entered it, and then he came in and sat in the chair beside mine rather than across from me, and we looked at the garden through the glass together for a moment.

"You're up early," he said.

"I'm trying to get quiet," I said.

He looked at me. "Is it working?"

"Not yet," I said.

He nodded. Looked back at the garden. "What does quiet feel like when you find it?"

I thought about that. "Like knowing something without having to think about it," I said. "Like the answer being there before the question finishes."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "I have had that feeling twice in my life. Once when I decided to come back to you after the gallery. Once when I asked you to move into my room." He paused. "Both times it was about you."

I looked at him. At the profile of his face in the morning light, the particular quality of him in unguarded moments, which I had been cataloguing since the study and which I understood now were gifts, these glimpses of the person underneath the person.

"Luca," I said.

"You don't have to say anything," he said.

"I want to," I said. "I want to say that what I am trying to get quiet enough to hear... I think I already know what it is. I think I have known for a while." I held his gaze. "I am just trying to be sure before I say it out loud because once I say it I cannot take it back and I want to say it correctly."

He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across his face that was patient and certain and completely, specifically him.

"Take the time you need," he said.

"I know," I said. "That is part of what I am trying to get quiet enough to hear. That you would say that."

He almost smiled. The thing near one. "Take the time you need," he said again, quieter, and stood, and left me in the sitting room with the garden outside and the twins moving inside and the morning doing its slow arrival through the glass.

I sat there for another hour.

My phone buzzed at nine.

Bryan.

I looked at it for a moment. Then I answered, because I had been putting off this conversation for two days and Maya's voice was in my head saying you need to tell him before he hears it from someone else, and I was done putting things off.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey." His voice was warm and careful in the specific way it had been since the kiss, the way of someone navigating new terrain in a relationship they had always moved through easily, trying to find the footing. "How are you feeling? The twins?"

"Good," I said. "Moving a lot. I think they're practicing something."

"Probably football," he said. "They have good genes for it."

I smiled despite everything. "Maya told me you called her."

A pause. "I figured she would."

"I'm not upset about it," I said. "She's your sister. She's the person you talk to."

"Yeah." Another pause. "I also wanted to check that she was looking after you. Which I know you don't need. But I wanted to know."

"She is," I said. "She always has been."

The line was quiet for a moment. The good kind of quiet, the Bryan kind, the kind that had space in it rather than distance.

"Nat," he said.

"Bryan," I said.

"I need to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly even if the answer is hard." He paused. "Can you do that?"

"Yes," I said. Because with Bryan the answer was always yes, even when I did not know yet what the question was.

"The kiss," he said. "Do you regret it?"

I sat with the question. Really sat with it, the way Maya had told me to sit with things, without rushing toward an answer that was easy or an answer that would protect someone.

"No," I said. "I don't regret it."

I heard him breathe. "Okay," he said quietly.

"But Bryan," I said. "I have to tell you something and I need you to hear it the way I mean it and not the way it might sound on the surface."

"Tell me," he said.

"What I feel for Luca is real," I said. "I have been dancing around it for weeks but I am done dancing around it. It is real and it is not going away and I think you deserve to hear me say that directly rather than letting you hold onto something uncertain." I paused. "I love you. I want you to know that. I have loved you for a very long time and what happened in the sitting room was real and it will always have been real." I stopped. "But I am not able to give you what you deserve right now. And I think you know that."

The silence on the line was very long.

Not the easy kind. The kind with weight in it, the kind that you feel on your end as something being received and processed and lived with.

"I know," he said finally. His voice was steady and it cost him something to keep it that way and I could hear both of those things simultaneously. "I think I have known for a while. I just needed to hear you say it."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be," he said. "Nat, don't be sorry for being honest. You owe me honesty. You don't owe me a different answer." A pause. "I just needed to know where I stood so I could figure out where to go from here."

"Where are you going to go?" I asked quietly.

He was quiet for a moment. "I'm going to be okay," he said. "I am going to take some time and I am going to figure out how to love you the way that is actually available to me right now, which is differently than I wanted to but still truly." Another pause. "And I am going to be there when those twins arrive because I told you I would and I meant it."

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

"Bryan," I managed.

"I know," he said quietly. "I know, Nat."

We stayed on the line for a while after that, not talking much, just existing in the same call the way we had existed in the same spaces for six years, and at some point he said he had to go and I said okay and neither of us said goodbye because goodbye felt like the wrong word for what this was.

The call ended.

I sat in the sitting room with the phone in my lap and the garden outside and the twins shifting and settling inside me, and I thought about what I had just said out loud, the plain unhedged version of it, and I waited to feel uncertain about it.

I did not feel uncertain.

I felt something that was not the absence of complications but was the presence of clarity inside them, the specific sensation Maya had described, the answer being there before the question finished.

I heard Luca's footsteps in the hallway.

He stopped outside the sitting room door. Did not come in. Just stopped.

"Luca," I said.

He appeared in the doorway.

I looked at him across the room. At this man who had packed my duffel bag in a university dorm room and locked me in a bedroom and washed his hands at a kitchen counter and kissed me in a garden and held his children on a screen with his face completely open for the first time and said both when I asked if he meant it and stayed in the room when I asked him to.

"I got quiet," I said.

He looked at me. "And?"

"And I heard it," I said.

He came into the room. Stood in front of my chair. Looked down at me with that expression, the one underneath everything, the one I had finally named and was done pretending I had not named.

"Tell me," he said.

I looked up at him.

And I told him.