Chapter 3 - THE FAMILY WE CHOOSE TO KEEPMarcus was arrested forty-one days after leaving me on the floor.
I did not attend.
I watched nothing.
I read no headlines.
Vincent’s attorneys told me there were charges related to financial crimes, obstruction, and the circumstances surrounding what happened in the penthouse.
That was enough.
I had spent seven years organizing my life around Marcus’s moods.
I refused to organize my recovery around his consequences.
Ava came home on a cold Monday morning in December.
Six pounds two ounces.
Pink cheeks.
Dark hair.
An outrageously serious expression.
I stood at the entrance of the hospital with her carrier in front of me and cried before I could take a single step.
The nurse hugged me.
“You’re allowed.”
“I’m not sad.”
“I know.”
That was the strange thing.
People think tears mean one thing at a time.
They don’t.
I was happy.
Terrified.
Grieving.
Alive.
I was taking my daughter home.
But not to the penthouse.
Never there.
I had rented a smaller apartment near Central Park.
Two bedrooms.
Warm wooden floors.
A kitchen no magazine would ever photograph.
A tiny balcony.
When I told Vincent, he offered me one of his properties.
I said no.
He offered security.
I said yes.
Growth.
The first evening home, Ava refused to sleep anywhere except against my chest.
So I sat on the couch beneath a yellow lamp while snow moved past the windows.
At eleven thirty, someone knocked.
Two knocks.
Pause.
One knock.
My security detail.
I opened the door.
Vincent stood outside holding a paper bag.
“No.”
He looked confused.
“You don’t even know what’s inside.”
“It better not be money.”
“It’s soup.”
I stared.
“Soup?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
He checked the bag.
“I don’t know.”
“You bought unidentified soup?”
“My housekeeper made it.”
“That is a less terrifying sentence.”
I let him in.
He immediately looked uncomfortable.
Vincent Moretti could enter a room full of armed men without blinking.
A two-bedroom apartment containing burp cloths and an electric bottle sterilizer nearly defeated him.
Ava made a noise.
He froze.
“She’s awake.”
“She does that.”
“What do I do?”
I laughed.
The sound surprised me.
“Nothing.”
“She sounds upset.”
“She has gas.”
He stared at my daughter as though gas might require tactical intervention.
“Can I hold her?”
The question came carefully.
Not assumed.
Asked.
That mattered too.
I placed Ava in his arms.
His entire body changed.
He held her like someone had handed him a piece of glass filled with sunlight.
“She’s tiny.”
“She was tinier.”
His thumb touched the back of her hand.
Ava wrapped her fingers around it.
Vincent stopped breathing.
I watched my uncle fall in love.
No ceremony.
No dramatic words.
Just one premature baby closing her hand around his thumb.
His eyes filled.
He looked embarrassed.
I pretended to be interested in the soup.
“She has Elena’s fingers.”
I looked over.
“My mother’s?”
“Long.”
He smiled faintly.
“She played piano.”
“She never told me.”
“She was terrible.”
I laughed.
Vincent looked at me.
“Elena would practice one piece for weeks just to annoy our father.”
“What piece?”
“Moonlight Sonata.”
My chest tightened.
My mother had played that every Sunday morning.
I had assumed it was simply her favorite.
Another locked door opened.
“Tell me everything.”
Vincent’s expression shifted.
“Everything?”
“Not tonight.”
I settled onto the couch.
“But eventually.”
He nodded.
“Eventually.”
For the next year, he did.
He told me about Elena at eight, climbing onto the roof because their father said girls belonged downstairs.
Elena at thirteen, stealing Vincent’s motorcycle and crashing it into a rosebush.
Elena at sixteen, feeding a stray dog beneath the kitchen table for six months before anyone discovered it.
Elena at twenty-two, leaving.
“She hated what the family was becoming,” Vincent told me once.
“Did you hate her for going?”
“For years.”
“Why?”
“Because she was brave enough to do what I wasn’t.”
He rarely spoke about his own life.
The more I learned, the less Marcus’s version of Vincent survived.
He was not a good man in the simple sense.
Vincent never pretended otherwise.
He had done things I did not want details about.
Made decisions I would not defend.
He lived by rules formed in a world I had been deliberately protected from.
But with Ava, there was no darkness.
He learned how to warm bottles.
Badly.
He learned diapers.
Worse.
He bought her a stuffed rabbit so large it could not fit through my apartment door.
I made him return it.
He returned with a smaller rabbit and six children’s books.
“You overcorrect.”
“I’ve been told.”
On Ava’s first birthday, Vincent arrived forty minutes early.
I found him standing alone in the kitchen staring at the cake.
“What?”
He looked embarrassed.
“I’ve never been invited to a child’s birthday party.”
I stopped.
Not one?
“No.”
I thought of my mother’s letter.
Our family has taken enough childhoods.
The sentence hurt differently now.
I handed him a box of candles.
“You’re in charge of these.”
“That seems irresponsible.”
“Probably.”
Ava smashed cake into his black shirt twenty minutes later.
Everyone expected him to be angry.
Vincent looked down at the pink frosting on his chest.
Then at Ava.
She laughed.
He laughed too.
A full laugh.
Head back.
Eyes closed.
For one moment he looked young.
And I saw my mother in him.
That was when happiness became dangerous.
Because once you have survived the worst thing in your life, you begin believing survival has earned you immunity.
It hasn’t.
It never does.
Two weeks after Ava’s birthday, Vincent failed to arrive for Sunday dinner.
He was never late.
At seven thirty, I called.
No answer.
At seven forty-two, one of his men called me.
“Ms. Bennett?”
Nobody called me Sophia when something was wrong.
“What happened?”
A pause.
“Mr. Moretti collapsed.”
The room disappeared.
I was back on marble.
Back beneath cold lights.
Back begging someone not to leave.
“Where?”
“St. Catherine’s.”
I grabbed Ava.
Her babysitter arrived before I reached the elevator.
I don’t remember calling her.
I don’t remember the drive.
I remember only Vincent’s Saint Michael medal.
The one I had finally given him six months earlier.
My mother’s medal.
He had refused it at first.
“It’s yours.”
“So were thirty years you didn’t get.”
“Sophia—”
“Take it.”
He had.
He wore it beneath his shirt after that.
At the hospital, his security detail moved aside.
No one stopped me.
Vincent lay in a private room.
Too pale.
An IV in his arm.
Machines beside him.
For a moment I hated every machine in existence.
He opened his eyes.
“You brought an army.”
“There are four people outside.”
“For you, that’s an army.”
“What happened?”
He looked toward the doctor.
The doctor looked at me.
That was when I knew Vincent had not told me something.
Again.
“No.”
I pointed at him.
“No more secrets.”
Vincent closed his eyes.
“Sophia.”
“How long?”
The question arrived before I knew what I was asking.
His silence answered.
“How long have you been sick?”
“A while.”
“How long?”
“Two years.”
My knees weakened.
“Two years?”
The doctor stepped closer.
“Mr. Moretti has advanced cardiomyopathy.”
My hearing went strange.
Words arrived from far away.
Heart failure.
Medication.
Arrhythmia.
Transplant evaluation.
Not a candidate.
Complications.
I stared at Vincent.
Two years.
The night on the penthouse floor had been fourteen months earlier.
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
“When you saved me, you knew.”
“Yes.”
“When you started coming to my apartment.”
“Yes.”
“Ava’s birthday.”
“Yes.”
My eyes burned.
“You let me think we finally had time.”
Vincent looked at me with unbearable tenderness.
“We did.”
“No.”
My voice broke.
“No, you don’t get to do that.”
I stood.
“You don’t get to show up after thirty years and let my daughter love you and then tell me you were dying the entire time.”
“I didn’t know how quickly.”
“You knew enough.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
His answer came quietly.
“Because your whole life had just become hospitals and betrayal, and I wanted one room in it that wasn’t asking you to be afraid.”
I covered my mouth.
He continued.
“When Elena died, the last conversation we had was an argument.”
Tears slipped into his hair.
“She asked whether I was taking care of myself.”
“What did you say?”
“I lied.”
Despite everything, I laughed through tears.
“That sounds hereditary.”
He smiled weakly.
“I wanted Ava to know me before she learned to worry about me.”
I sat beside him.
“You idiot.”
“Yes.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
I took his hand.
“I just got you.”
His fingers tightened around mine.
That broke me.
“I just got you.”
For the first time since I met him, Vincent looked frightened.
May you like
Not of pain.
Not death.
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