IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 10: Bryan's Visit

Bryan called for eleven minutes.

I know because my phone showed me afterward, when I was sitting in the dark holding it against my chest and trying to locate the part of myself that had always known exactly how she felt about Bryan Rollins and figure out why it was suddenly harder to find than it used to be.

He had called to check in. That was what he said, right at the start, his voice doing that thing it did when he was being careful, steady and warm and not asking for anything directly because Bryan never asked for things directly, he just made himself available and waited and trusted that you would find your way to him eventually.

He asked if I was okay. I said yes and meant it more than I had expected to.

He asked if I was eating. I almost laughed, because Luca had asked me the same thing three hours ago and the fact that the two men in my life led with food when they were worried about me was either very funny or very telling and I had not decided which yet.

He asked about the twins. How I was feeling. Whether the compound was comfortable, which was a word that did not exactly fit but I appreciated him trying to find one that didn't sound like what it was.

I told him the truth, which was that I was adjusting, that the twins were doing what they were doing which was growing and making my back hurt and occasionally making me cry without warning, and that I was trying very hard not to think too far ahead because thinking too far ahead right now felt like standing at the edge of something with no bottom.

There was a pause. Then he said: "Can I come see you?"

I looked at the door Luca had walked through.

"I'll ask," I said.

The conversation I had with Luca the next morning was shorter than I expected. I found him in the kitchen before anyone else was awake, which was becoming a pattern, the two of us in the kitchen before the day had properly started, occupying the same space with a careful ease that had not been there a week ago.

"Bryan wants to come," I said, without preamble.

Luca looked up from whatever he was reading. "Here?"

"Yes."

He was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was running calculations I was not party to. "When?"

"Today. If that's possible."

Another pause. Longer. Then: "I'll speak to Marco. There will be conditions."

"What kind of conditions?"

"He comes through the front gate. He's searched. He doesn't go beyond the ground floor. He leaves when I say." He looked at me steadily. "Those aren't negotiable."

I thought about Bryan in a security search at the gate of a mafia compound and almost said something, but the look on Luca's face was the one that meant the conversation was finished and the terms were what they were, so I said "okay" and sent Bryan a text telling him to come at noon and not to argue about anything the man at the gate asked him to do.

Bryan arrived at 12:04.

I watched from the upstairs window because Marco had asked me to stay inside until the initial check was done, and I saw Bryan's truck pull up to the gate and Bryan get out with his hands visible and slightly raised in the way of someone who had googled what to do at a security checkpoint and was doing his very best, and something in my chest pulled tight and warm in a way that had nothing to do with the pregnancy and everything to do with six years of knowing this person.

He was wearing his grey hoodie. Not mine. His own.

I went downstairs.

He was in the hallway when I came down, slightly rumpled from the search, looking around at the house with an expression he was working very hard to keep neutral. When he saw me on the stairs he went still for a second in the way of someone recalibrating, and I understood immediately what had caused it because I felt it every time I caught my reflection now, the way my body had changed, the unmistakable visible evidence of what was happening inside it.

He hadn't seen me since the dorm.

Since then I had grown into my pregnancy in a way that left no room for interpretation, and Bryan was standing in Luca Wolfe's hallway looking at me and I watched him process it in real time, watched something move through his face that he couldn't quite contain before he locked it down.

He crossed the hallway and hugged me carefully, the way you hug someone when you're aware of what they're carrying, and I let myself have it for a moment, the familiar weight of his arms, the smell of him that was the same as it had always been, before I stepped back and looked at him properly.

"You look good," he said. His voice was steady. It had cost him something to make it that way.

"I look enormous," I said.

"You look good," he said again, more firmly, like he was correcting the record.

I led him to the sitting room, which was the ground floor space that Luca had apparently designated as the acceptable zone for this visit, and we sat across from each other and it was strange in the way that things are strange when you are sitting inside a version of your life that you did not plan and trying to be normal inside it.

"How are you actually?" Bryan said.

"I'm actually okay." I paused. "It's been a lot. But I'm okay. The twins are okay. The doctor came yesterday and everything is on track."

He nodded. Looked at his hands. Then looked at me. "Nat, I need you to know that I'm not here to make things difficult. I'm not here to ask you anything or push you about anything. I just needed to see with my own eyes that you were okay, because hearing it over the phone and knowing it are different things for me."

"I know," I said.

"I also need to tell you something and then I'm going to drop it and not bring it up again unless you want me to." He held my gaze. "What I said in the text. It stands. All of it. I'm not taking it back and I'm not pretending I didn't say it. But I also understand that you are in the middle of something that is bigger than both of us and the last thing I want to do is make it harder." He paused. "So I'm here as your friend. Just your friend. Whatever else happens or doesn't happen is your decision and I'll follow your lead."

I looked at him for a long moment. At this man who had shown up at a mafia compound gate and submitted to a security search and was sitting across from me saying all the right things in all the right ways and meaning every single word of it.

"You're too good," I said. "You know that?"

"I have my moments," he said.

I laughed, which was the first time I had laughed without thinking about it in days, and it felt like something unlocking, like a window opening in a room that had been closed too long.

We talked for an hour. Really talked, the way we always had, easily and about everything, about his job and Maya and the thing his mom had done at Sunday dinner that had driven everyone insane, about my thesis which was still technically unfinished and which I had not thought about in two weeks, about names for the twins which I had been avoiding because naming them felt like agreeing to something I was still processing.

"Have you thought about names at all," he said.

"A little." I hesitated. "Luca has opinions."

Bryan's expression did something complicated for exactly one second before it settled back to neutral. "Of course he does."

"He hasn't pushed them on me. He just mentioned them."

"What did he mention?"

"For the boy, he likes Matteo. For the girl he mentioned Aria." I watched Bryan's face. "I don't hate them."

"They're good names," Bryan said, after a moment. Genuinely. Because that was who Bryan was, the kind of person who could hear the name Luca Wolfe had suggested for a baby and find it in himself to respond with honesty instead of ego. "Really good, actually."

Luca appeared in the doorway.

He did not announce himself, did not knock, simply appeared the way he appeared places, and both Bryan and I registered his presence at the same time in the particular way you register something that changes the temperature of a room. He looked at Bryan. Bryan looked at him. The air between them had the specific density of two people who had said things to each other in a midnight hallway and had not forgotten any of it.

"Tea?" Luca said, to the room in general, setting a tray on the side table with a practicality that cut through the tension in a way that nothing else could have. Two cups. A plate of something. He had made tea for Bryan Rollins without being asked and without making anything of it and I did not know what to do with that.

Bryan looked at the tray. Then at Luca. "Thanks."

Luca nodded once and left. Just like that. Back out of the doorway and gone.

Bryan turned to look at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." He picked up the tea. "Just..."

"Just what."

He shook his head slowly. "Nothing, Nat."

We sat in the quiet for a moment and I thought about Luca making tea for Bryan Rollins and what it meant about the kind of man he was choosing to be in this specific situation, and I stored it next to everything else I had been storing without meaning to, all the things that were slowly, quietly, without my permission, building into something I was going to have to look at directly eventually.

Bryan stood to leave an hour later. At the door he hugged me again, longer this time, and I held on for a moment before I let go.

He stepped back. Looked at me. Then at my stomach, just briefly, just once, in a way he had been carefully avoiding the entire visit.

And something in his face, just for a second, before he locked it down completely, broke in exactly the way it had in the dorm hallway.

"Take care of yourself," he said. "All three of you."

Then he was gone.

I stood in the hallway and listened to his truck start outside and pull away from the gate, and I stayed there until the sound disappeared.

When I turned around, Luca was at the end of the hallway.

He had not been there a moment ago. He was there now.

He looked at me for a long moment, with that expression, the one underneath everything, and then he said: "He loves you."

Not accusatory. Not jealous. Just a statement of fact, acknowledged plainly, the way Luca stated all facts.

"I know," I said.

He nodded once. And then: "So do I."

He walked away before I could answer.

And I stood in the hallway alone and pressed one hand against my stomach and thought that complicated did not even begin to cover it.