IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 22: Maya Returns

Maya knew the moment she walked through the door.

I do not know how. I had spent the morning constructing what I considered to be a very convincing version of normal, I had eaten breakfast, I had showered, I had responded to my mother's text with appropriate warmth and an appropriate amount of detail, I had sat in the sitting room with my thesis open on my laptop and my face arranged into the expression of someone engaged in productive academic work. I had been, by any reasonable external measure, completely fine.

Maya walked through the door at eleven, looked at me for approximately two seconds, and said: "What did you do."

Not a question. A statement delivered in the voice she used when she had already done the calculation and was simply waiting for me to confirm the answer.

I closed my laptop.

"Sit down," I said.

"That bad," she said, and sat down.

I told her. Not everything, because some things belonged to the rooms they happened in and did not need to be carried into other spaces, but enough. The kitchen and Luca's hand on my waist. Bryan arriving and seeing it. The sitting room and what Bryan had said and what I had not pulled away from fast enough. The kitchen again afterward and Luca's deliberate unbothered performance and me seeing through it. And then the bedroom, which I described in terms that were enough without being everything, because Maya was my best friend and not a confessional.

She listened to all of it without interrupting, which was unusual for Maya, who had opinions in real time and generally shared them. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her face doing the complicated thing it had been doing for weeks around anything involving me and these two men, and she let me finish before she said anything.

Then she said: "Natalie."

"I know," I said.

"Both of them," she said. "In one day."

"I know," I said again.

"Bryan kissed you."

"Yes."

"And then Luca."

"Yes."

"And then you and Luca..."

"Maya."

"I am not judging you," she said, and I believed her because Maya's voice when she was judging someone was a different instrument entirely, sharper and less patient. This was the voice she used when she was trying to understand something. "I am trying to understand the geography of what happened."

"The geography," I said, "is that I am twenty one years old and I have somehow ended up in love with two people at the same time and both of those loves are real and neither of them cancels the other out and I lay awake last night asking myself what is wrong with me and I still do not have an answer."

Maya looked at me for a long moment.

"Nothing is wrong with you," she said.

I stared at her.

"I mean it," she said. "Nothing is wrong with you. You are a person in an impossible situation who has been surviving it the best way she knows how, and the heart does not follow the rules that the situation sets for it, and sometimes it loves more than one person at the same time and that is not a moral failing, it is just what hearts do when they are not given the chance to choose cleanly." She paused. "The situation did not give you the chance to choose cleanly. You went from a bathroom at Velmoor to a compound in four days. You did not get the luxury of sorting yourself out first."

I looked at my hands. "That is a very generous reading of what I did yesterday."

"I am your best friend," Maya said. "Generous readings are part of the contract."

I almost laughed. Almost.

She moved across the couch and sat closer to me and I leaned into her the way I had been leaning into things lately, finding the solid points in a landscape that kept shifting, and she put her arm around me and we sat there for a moment in the quiet of the sitting room while the compound did its sounds outside.

"Bryan told me about the kiss," she said, after a while.

I pulled back to look at her. "He called you?"

"Last night. Late." She looked at me evenly. "He is not angry, Nat. I want you to know that. He is not calling to report back or to make things difficult. He called because he needed to talk to someone and I am the person he talks to."

"What did he say?" I said, though some part of me was not sure I was ready for the answer.

"He said he knew what he was doing when he kissed you," Maya said carefully. "He said he went in with his eyes open and he does not regret it and he is not asking you for anything in response to it." She paused. "He also said that watching Luca's hand on your waist was the hardest thing he has sat through since the dorm hallway." She held my gaze. "He is struggling, Nat. He is doing it quietly and with more grace than most people could manage but he is struggling."

I pressed my hands over my face.

"I know," I said into my palms.

"I am not telling you to fix it," Maya said. "I am not telling you to choose. I am just telling you what I know, because you deserve to have all the information, which is the same reason Bryan hired that investigator." A pause. "You are surrounded by people who love you and their primary mode of expression is making sure you know things."

I lowered my hands. Looked at her. "Including you."

"Especially me," she said. "Which is why I am going to tell you something now that I have been sitting with for a while and have decided you are ready to hear."

I looked at her warily. "That sounds ominous."

"It's not ominous," she said. "It's just true." She held my gaze steadily. "I have watched you in this compound for weeks now, every time I have come, and I have watched you with Luca, and Nat..." she paused. "I owe you an apology."

I blinked. "For what."

"For the warning I gave you," she said. "Don't let him make you someone I don't recognise. I said that and I meant it when I said it and I stand by the sentiment behind it." She paused. "But I have been watching you and you are not someone I don't recognise. You are more yourself than I have seen you in a long time. You are arguing with mafia dons and demanding full truths and holding your ground in situations that would flatten most people and you are still you, completely you, just, more of you than before." She stopped. "I think he has something to do with that. And I needed to tell you that I see it, even though it complicates everything I thought I was protecting."

I looked at my best friend of seven years and felt something in my chest that was too large for the sitting room.

"Maya," I said.

"Don't cry," she said immediately. "If you cry I will cry and I did my makeup today and I am not doing that."

I laughed. Properly this time. And she laughed too, and for a moment the compound and the twins and the three rooms and the two men all receded slightly and it was just us, the way it had been just us at fourteen when we met in a school corridor and decided to be friends.

Then she said: "But you have to figure it out, Nat."

The laughter settled.

"I know," I said.

"Not for me. Not for Bryan. Not even for Luca." She looked at me directly. "For yourself. And for them." She gestured at my stomach. "Because they are coming whether you are sorted or not and they deserve a mother who knows what she wants."

I looked down at my stomach. At the visible evidence of two lives that had not asked for any of this and were going to need me to have answers I did not currently have.

"Eleven weeks," I said quietly.

"Eleven weeks," Maya confirmed. "Give or take."

We sat with that.

Luca appeared in the doorway at some point, the way he appeared in doorways, without announcement. He looked at us on the couch, at whatever was on our faces, and then he looked at Maya specifically with the expression he had developed for her over the past weeks, which was not warmth exactly but was the specific respect of someone who understood that this woman was the person Natalie needed most in the world and had never once tried to limit that.

"Tea," he said. To Maya. "Or coffee. There is both."

Maya looked at him for a moment. Then at me. Then back at him.

"Coffee," she said. "Please."

He nodded and disappeared.

Maya looked at me.

"He makes coffee for you," I said, before she could.

"He makes coffee for everyone," she said, in a tone that suggested she was not entirely sure what to do with that. Then, quieter: "He looked at you when he came in the door."

"He always looks at me when he comes in a room," I said.

"I know," she said. "That's what I mean."

I looked at the doorway he had gone through. At the empty space where he had been, the compound sounds coming through it now, Marco's voice somewhere, the particular quality of the house in the middle of the day.

"Maya," I said.

"Mm."

"I think I love him," I said. Quietly. Not the careful hedge of the past weeks, not the I think so of the sitting room with Bryan. Something a step closer to the plain version. "I think I actually love him."

Maya was quiet for a moment.

"I know," she said.

"And Bryan," I said.

"I know that too," she said.

"How do I..."

"I don't know," she said honestly. "I genuinely do not know. And I am not going to pretend I do." She looked at me. "But I think you do. Somewhere in there, underneath all the noise, I think you already know what you want. And I think you are going to have to get quiet enough to hear it."

Luca came back with the coffee. Set it on the table. Looked at me once, just briefly, in the way he looked at me when he was checking something without wanting to appear to be checking, and then he left again.

Maya picked up the coffee.

Looked at me over the rim of the cup.

"Get quiet, Nat," she said softly. "You'll hear it."

I looked at the doorway.

And I thought that quiet was the one thing this life had not been giving me since a November morning in a university bathroom.

But maybe it was time to find some.