Chapter 7: The Printout

Luca's POV

I did not take my hands off the wheel until Bianca's footsteps were gone.

Valeria sat very still beside me. She was looking at the windshield, and her cut had stopped bleeding.

"Drive," she said.

I drove.

I took us to her flower shop on Hope Street, because she said she needed work for her hands.

She did not speak on the way. Neither did I.

My thumb still remembered her cheekbone, and I kept it curled against the wheel.

I knew what Bianca had just handed her.

It was the same thing I had carried for three years, and I had never once been able to say it to anyone.

Three years ago, I woke up at noon the next morning.

My head felt full of wet cement. I could not lift my arm. I lay on the bed in the room where my wife had stood, and I did not know what day it was.

The sheet next to me was warm. It smelled of vanilla.

Stefano was sitting in the chair by the window.

"Valeria saw you," he said. "She saw all of it. She ran down the stairs and fell. I'm sorry, Luca. She lost the baby."

I do not remember what I said to him.

I remember the hospital corridor, and her mother at the end of it with two security guards.

I remember the lawyer my father sent, with the papers, and the words he used: "Mrs. Sorrentino does not wish to see you."

I did not fight.

That is the part I carry. I took my brother's word and my father's word and I signed.

At the urgent care that afternoon, because I could not stand up straight, the doctor had run a blood test.

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