Chapter 4: What Marco Knew
I called him from the hallway outside Elena's apartment.
He picked up on the second ring.
"Boss."
"Come to Queens." I gave him the address.
"Now."
A pause.
Brief.
Careful.
"Is everything alright?"
"No," I said.
"It isn't."
I went back inside.
Elena was still at the table.
She had poured two glasses of water and pushed one toward the empty chair across from her.
It was such a small, automatic gesture — the kind a person makes when they've spent years being alone and have almost forgotten how not to be.
I sat down.
I didn't touch the water.
"How long after you left did they contact you?" I asked.
"Three days." She wrapped both hands around her own glass.
"A man came to the apartment I was staying in.
I didn't know him.
He said he was delivering a message from someone close to you.
He said you had found out about the pregnancy.
He said you were furious.
He said—" She stopped.
"What did he say?"
"That you didn't want complications.
That a child would be a liability.
That you had given instructions." She looked at the table.
"He was very specific about what those instructions were."
My hands were flat on the table.
I kept them there.
"And you believed it."
"You were not a gentle man, Luca." She said it without cruelty.
Just fact.
"The world you lived in was not a gentle world.
I was twenty-four years old and I was pregnant and a man I didn't know was standing in my doorway telling me that the father of my child considered us a problem to be solved." She finally looked up.
"What would you have done?"
I didn't answer.
Because she was right.
Not about me — but about the world.
About what it looked like from the outside.
About what someone could be made to believe if the lie was told with enough authority.
"I moved four times in the first two years," she said.
"Different boroughs.
Different names on the lease.
I paid cash for everything.
I stopped using my phone." A faint, humorless sound — not quite a laugh.
"I was very good at disappearing."
"You were."
"And then Gia started school and I got sick and disappearing became harder." She pressed her lips together.
"The pharmacy bag.
That was careless.
I usually go myself."
"You couldn't go yourself."
"No."
I looked toward the hallway.
Gia's door was closed.
"What does she know?" I asked.
"She knows her father isn't here.
She knows I'm sick.
She knows we don't have much money." Elena's voice stayed even.
"She doesn't know your name.
She doesn't know anything about your world."
"She told me I looked like her."
Elena closed her eyes briefly.
"She's very observant."
"She's extraordinary." The word came out before I'd decided to say it.
"She sat next to a dying man on a hot sidewalk and kept watch over him and called for help and didn't leave.
She's six years old."
"She's always been like that." Something shifted in Elena's face.
Pride and grief at the same time.
"She finds injured birds.
She checks on the elderly woman downstairs.
She—" Her breath caught.
"She's going to need someone, Luca.
When I'm gone.
She's going to need—"
"You're not going anywhere."
"The doctors—"
"Tell me what the doctors said.
All of it."
She reached past me and pulled the stack of medical papers from under the coffee mug.
She set them in front of me.
I read the first page.
Then the second.
By the third page, I understood why the hospital notice had said what it said.
I understood why the medication was expensive.
I understood why a woman who had spent seven years hiding from my world had sent her six-year-old daughter alone to a Manhattan pharmacy.
She had been out of options.
I set the papers down.
"This is treatable," I said.
"It's treatable if you can pay for the treatment."
"I can pay for the treatment."
"Luca—"
"Elena." I looked at her directly.
"She sat next to me on that sidewalk.
She didn't leave.
She is my daughter and she sat next to me while I was dying and she didn't leave." My voice stayed level.
"I am not leaving either."
The sound from the hallway was so quiet I almost missed it.
A small foot.
Shifting weight.
Gia had been standing at the end of the hallway for some time.
Neither of us had heard her come back.
She was looking at me with those gray-green eyes.
"Are you going to make Mommy better?" she asked.
I held her gaze.
"Yes," I said.
She considered this for a long moment with the gravity of someone three times her age.
Then she walked to the table, pulled out the chair beside me, and sat down.
She didn't say anything else.
She didn't need to.
But when Marco knocked on the apartment door twelve minutes later, I was still sitting at that table.
And Gia's small hand had found its way onto the back of my wrist.
And I had not moved it.
Marco's voice came through the door.
Careful.
Controlled.
"Boss.
It's me."
I looked at Elena.
May you like
Her face had gone still.
I stood up.
