IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 8: Quit

The car did not come in.

It sat at the gate for exactly three minutes, engine running, and then it left the same way it had arrived, slowly, deliberately, without hurry, in the way of things that want to be remembered. Luca stood at the window and watched it go and none of us said anything because the silence he was radiating was the kind that discouraged words.

Then he turned around and said, very calmly, that we needed to go inside and that everything was fine, and I had now known him long enough to understand that when Luca Wolfe said everything was fine he meant that everything was under control, which was not the same thing and never had been.

My mom had had enough.

I watched it happen in real time, the moment her patience with being in a house she didn't understand, in a situation nobody had explained to her properly, with a man who answered direct questions with technically accurate non answers, finally ran out completely. She set her glass down on the counter and looked at Luca and said, in the voice she reserved for situations that had gone past her limit, that she would like to speak with her daughter. Alone. Now.

Luca looked at her. Then at me. Then he walked out of the kitchen without a word, which was the most respectful thing I had seen him do since I met him, and I made a note of it somewhere in the back of my mind.

My mom turned to me.

What followed was ten minutes that I will not put on the page in full because some conversations between mothers and daughters belong only to the two people who had them. What I will say is that she cried, and I cried, and she held my face in her hands and told me that whatever happened she was not going anywhere, and that the babies were going to be loved, and that she needed me to promise her I was safe. I promised her. I meant it as much as I could mean anything right now, which was imperfectly and with my whole heart simultaneously.

Then she hugged me for a long time. And I let her. And it was the first moment since yesterday morning that I had felt like a daughter instead of a problem to be managed.

She left with Maya's hand in hers, the two of them moving toward the front door together, and I was already preparing myself for Maya's exit to be the cold kind, the careful kind, the kind that told me we would be okay eventually but not today.

Maya stopped just inside the door and turned around.

"Give us a minute," she said to my mom.

My mom looked at me. I nodded. She went outside.

Maya walked back toward me and I braced for it, for whatever version of this was coming, and then she did something I was not prepared for at all. She took both of my hands in hers and held them and looked at me with an expression that was tired and sad and more honest than anything she had said since she arrived.

"I knew," she said.

I looked at her. "Knew what."

"About Bryan." She said it quietly, like she had been carrying it for a long time and was finally setting it down. "I knew he was in love with you. I have known for years, Natalie. Since probably before he knew himself."

The kitchen felt very still.

"Maya..."

"I didn't say anything," she continued, "because it wasn't mine to say. Because I kept thinking one of you would figure it out on your own, that you would just look at each other one day and it would happen the way it was supposed to and I wouldn't have to do anything except watch and be happy about it." She stopped. Swallowed. "I was protecting him. And you. And honestly I think I was protecting myself too because I didn't want to be the one who pushed and got it wrong."

I felt the tears coming and couldn't stop them.

"That's why this hurts," Maya said, and her voice was very steady now, the kind of steady that takes real effort. "Not just because you kept a secret from me. But because I kept one too, and we both lost anyway, and Bryan cried on the phone at midnight and I didn't know what to tell him because there was nothing to say that made it okay."

I couldn't speak. I just held her hands and let the tears run and she let me because that was who Maya had always been, even when she was hurting, even when she had every right to let me stand in it alone.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said finally. "I want you to know that. I'm angry and I'm hurt and I need some time but I am not going anywhere. Those babies are going to have the best aunt they have ever seen in their lives and you are going to call me every single day and we are going to figure this out. Okay."

"Okay," I managed.

She squeezed my hands once. Then let go.

She walked to the door and I thought that was it, thought she was done, and then she stopped with her hand on the frame and looked across the hallway to where Luca was standing near the bottom of the stairs, far enough away to have been giving us privacy but close enough that I wondered how much he had heard.

Maya looked at him for a long moment. Something passed across her face that I couldn't fully read.

Then she looked back at me.

"Don't let him make you someone I don't recognise," she said quietly.

Then she was gone. The door closed. And I stood in the hallway and looked at the space where she had been and felt the weight of every word she had said settling into me one at a time like stones dropped into deep water.

Luca didn't move from his spot near the stairs.

I turned to look at him. At the complete composure of him, the stillness, the face that had given me one unguarded moment at an ultrasound machine this morning and nothing before or since. And Maya's voice was still in my head, her warning sitting in my chest like something with edges, and I thought about the car at the gate and Don Adriano coming in two days and the gun that lived on the kitchen counter and the fact that I was locked in this world now, that my twins were locked in it, that there was no version of the next few months that did not run directly through Luca Wolfe and everything he carried with him.

Something in me that had been holding very carefully since yesterday morning finally stopped holding.

"Just quit," I said.

He looked at me. "What?"

"Quit." I crossed the hallway toward him and I could hear that my voice was shaking slightly and I didn't care. "Whatever this is, whatever you do for Don Adriano and the Vitale family, just stop. We leave. We go somewhere they don't know. I'll work two jobs, three if I have to, I'll finish my degree online, we'll figure it out, people figure things like this out all the time and we can too if you just..."

"Natalie."

"I'm serious, Luca. I'm completely serious. We take the twins somewhere safe and we build something normal and you can be their father, a real one, without any of this, without cars sitting at gates and phone calls that make your jaw do that thing and men like Don Adriano deciding what my children's lives look like before they're even born, we can just..."

"There is no just." His voice was quiet. Not angry. Worse than angry. Certain. "There is no version of that sentence that ends the way you want it to."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that." He looked at me steadily, and there was something in it that I had not seen before, something that sat underneath the composure like a current under still water. "You think I haven't thought about it. You think this is the first time someone standing in front of me has used that word. Just quit. Just walk away. Just choose something different." He stopped. Let the silence sit for a moment. "The people who want to hurt me do not care that I quit. They care that I exist. They care that I know what I know and that I built what I built inside their world and that I cannot unknow or unbuild any of it by handing in some kind of resignation."

"So we hide..."

"There is no hiding from Don Adriano Vitale." He said it simply, without drama, the way you say things that are just true. "Not for me. And not anymore for you."

I stared at him. "So what then. This is just our life now. This is just what it is."

"What it is," he said, "is that I am the only thing standing between those two children and a world that will see them as leverage before it sees them as people. And if I step back from that, if I walk away from my position and my protection and everything that makes Don Adriano calculate before he acts, then it is not me they come for, Natalie." His eyes dropped to my stomach for just a second. Just one. "You want me to sign their death certificates so you can sleep better at night. Is that what you're asking me."

The words hit me somewhere I didn't have a name for.

"That's not fair," I said.

"No," he agreed. "It isn't." And something in his voice when he said it told me that he knew that better than I did. That he had been living inside the unfairness of it for longer than I had and had stopped expecting it to change.

I looked at him for a long moment. At this man who kept a photograph of his unborn children in his pocket and guns on his kitchen counter and the weight of a world I didn't understand on his face in the moments when he forgot I was watching.

And I did not have anything left to say.

I walked past him and up the stairs and closed my bedroom door behind me, not slamming it, just closing it, and I sat on the edge of the bed in the quiet and pressed both hands flat against my stomach and stayed there for a long time.

I thought about two heartbeats on a screen this morning. About Maya's hands holding mine. About her warning sitting in my chest like something with edges. About Bryan's text still warm in my phone, those three words at the bottom of it, it was always real, the realest and most uncomplicated thing anyone had said to me in as long as I could remember.

And then I thought about Luca.

About the way he had looked at that screen this morning, just for a moment, before he remembered to put his face back on. About the photograph he had asked for and put in his pocket like it was something he needed close to him. About the way he had stood in the hallway just now and told me the truth, the whole ugly necessary truth, when lying to me would have been so much easier and he must have known it.

About the way he said there is no just. Not cruelly. Not to shut me down. But because he was living inside that reality and he needed me to live inside it too, and the only way he knew how to do that was to say it plainly and let it land.

I sat in the grey quiet of a room that had not been mine four days ago and pressed my hands against my stomach and felt the two small lives shifting and settling inside me and I tried to locate the feeling that was sitting in my chest, tried to find the right word for it, the accurate one, the honest one.

It was not gratitude. It was not obligation. It was not the complicated tangle of fear and proximity that I had been calling it in my head for the last two days because those words were safer and smaller and easier to put down at the end of the night.

It was something else. Something that had been growing in the dark without my permission, quiet and inconvenient and completely unwilling to be reasoned with.

And sitting there in the silence, for the first time since any of this began, I stopped trying to talk myself out of it.

I was not in love with Luca Wolfe.

But I was standing at the edge of something that looked very much like the beginning of it.

And I did not know what frightened me more. The feeling itself, or the fact that somewhere between the ultrasound and the fight and the way he had said it is not me they come for, I had stopped being sure I wanted it to go away.