Chapter 9: What Leo Asked
Three weeks passed.
Marcus Hale was formally charged on a Tuesday.
Securities fraud.
Wire fraud.
Tortious interference.
His attorney entered a not guilty plea.
The financial news ran the story for four days.
I read the first paragraph of the first article and set my phone face-down on the desk.
I didn't read the rest.
Carla Voss gave a full recorded interview to federal investigators.
She cried twice.
She said she had told herself for years that she hadn't known how far it would go.
The investigators were patient with her.
Diane told me later that her cooperation would likely reduce her exposure significantly.
The second board member who had resigned was quietly removed from two other boards within the week.
His name disappeared from the kind of places names like his usually appeared.
I did not feel triumphant.
I felt tired in the way that comes after something long and hard is finally over, when your body realizes it had been braced for years and slowly begins to unknot itself.
Luca called once.
Left a voicemail.
Said he was available whenever I was ready and not before.
Said he hoped the children were well.
Said nothing else.
I listened to it twice and didn't call back.
On a Saturday morning in November, Leo found me at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold and sat down across from me the way he sometimes did when something was on his mind.
He was six years old and he had his father's eyes and his father's way of going quiet before he said something important.
"Mom," he said.
"Morning, bud."
"That man from the restaurant." He put both hands flat on the table.
"Is he our dad?"
I set my cup down.
I had prepared for this question.
I had thought about it for weeks, turned it over, considered every version of the answer.
And now that it was here, sitting across from me in a dinosaur pajama shirt, every prepared version dissolved.
"Yes," I said.
"He is."
Leo looked at his hands.
"How come we never met him before?"
"Because grown-ups sometimes make mistakes.
And sometimes those mistakes take a long time to fix."
"Did he make a mistake?"
"Yes."
"Did you?"
I looked at my son.
"Yes," I said.
"I did too."
He thought about this with the same seriousness his sister brought to everything.
"Is he nice?" Leo asked.
"I think he's trying to be."
"Can we meet him?"
I reached across the table and covered his small hands with mine.
"Would you like to?"
He nodded.
Once.
Decisive.
Very like his father.
"Then we will," I said.
"Soon."
Maya appeared in the doorway.
She had clearly been standing there long enough to hear most of it.
She came and sat beside her brother without being asked.
"Will it be weird?" she said.
"Probably a little," I said.
"At first."
"That's okay," she said.
"We can handle weird."
I looked at both of them across the kitchen table.
These two people who had rebuilt my entire world.
Who had grown up in a home where I had tried to make sure they never felt the absence of something they didn't yet have a name for.
"Yes," I said.
"We can."
I called Luca that afternoon.
He answered on the first ring.
"Saturday," I said.
"Lincoln Park.
The zoo.
Eleven o'clock.
Bring nothing.
Just yourself."
A pause.
When he spoke, his voice was different from every other time I had heard it in the past month.
Quieter.
More careful.
"I'll be there," he said.
"Luca."
"Yes."
"They're extraordinary," I said.
"I want you to know that before you meet them.
Whatever happens after — they are extraordinary."
He didn't answer right away.
When he did, his voice was rough at the edges.
May you like
"I know," he said.
"I can already tell."
