Chapter 18: Nonno

Quentin's POV

I found my son in the garden at seven in the morning, standing on a stone bench.

Vittorio Bellandi held the back of Jamie's cardigan.

"Nonno," Jamie said, and pointed at a fountain. "Shiny."

"It is brass," Vittorio said. "Your great-grandfather bought it in Naples."

"Shiny Nonno."

"Yes," said the most feared man in New York, and his voice broke on it. "Yes, shiny."

I stopped at the edge of the lawn.

Twenty-nine years, and nobody had ever told me there was a second man.

Vittorio looked up and saw me.

He lifted Jamie down onto the grass, and Jamie ran straight for a pigeon.

"Mr. Wexley," he said.

"Quentin."

"Quentin." He tried it slowly.

His hands hung at his sides with nothing to hold.

"I told your mother I would not say it until you asked."

"I know."

"I'm an old man and I keep my word. I only want to say it once, in the open."

I looked at the chin, and the cuff, and the heavy hands.

"Say it," I said.

"You are my son."

It was very quiet in that garden.

Something loosened in my chest that I hadn't known was knotted.

It hurt, and it was also the first clean thing I'd felt in a week.

"I had a father," I said.

"I know you did."

"He'd have broken your nose for what you did to her."

"He'd have been right."

"I'm not going to call you anything yet."

"I'm not asking for anything yet," Vittorio said. "I'm only asking to stand in the same garden."

Jamie came back with a feather in his fist and held it up to both of us.

"Papa," he said. "Nonno. Look."

We looked.

That was the whole morning, and I'd have kept it.

Sabina found me in the study that night.

It was Vittorio's study, on the ground floor, with a wide window onto the drive.

She stood in the doorway in a long grey robe with her hair down.

"Jamie's asleep," she said. "Rocco's on the landing with a book he isn't reading."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's an alibi."

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