Chapter 10: Father

They took his blood in a small room with a green curtain, while I stood at the door and did not go in.

When the nurse wheeled Bianca away to the pediatric ward, the bag of red hung beside her.

Santo came out last, with a cotton ball taped in the crook of his arm.

He was gray under the skin, and he swayed once and caught the wall.

"Sit," I said.

"I'm fine."

"I'll hit you if you don't."

He sat on a plastic bench in the corridor, and I stood in front of him with my arms folded.

It was four in the morning.

A cleaner pushed a floor machine at the far end of the hall, and its hum was the only sound.

"Tell me," I said.

He looked at the floor between his shoes.

"Their mother was twenty-six," he said. "I was twenty-four. I'd just started driving for Aurelio."

I said nothing.

"She was lonely. He was forty-six, and he was out all night."

"She used to sit in the back seat and ask me what I did on my days off."

"And you told her."

"I told her everything." He rubbed his face with his good hand.

"I'm not making excuses. We were both wrong, and we knew it."

"And Nico was the result."

"Nico was the result."

His voice cracked on the name.

"When she told Aurelio she was pregnant, he went very quiet."

"Then he told her what he'd kept from everyone since he was a boy. A fever. He couldn't have children."

I closed my eyes.

"He knew the child wasn't his," Santo said. "He knew it from the first minute, and he looked at her and said, he'll be mine."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because he wanted a son more than he wanted to be right."

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