Page 74 of Masked Don

And I think about the boy in the basement, crying out the words girl in the green dress. Alive. I’ve turned that word over all day, and I keep landing in the same place. Luca doesn’t want me. He never really did. He wants Enzo Accardi’s woman, because taking her is the only way left to hurt Enzo. Away from this house, I’m a waitress with a kid and a bus ticket. I’m nobody to him.

Matthew loves it here, and that’s what makes my hands shake as I fold his clothes. He loves Marta like the aunt he never had. She saves his drawings; he tells her about his scary dreams in the morning while she makes him comfort pancakes.

And Enzo. God. Matthew looks for him all the time, walks into rooms and scans them for his father, disappointment taking hold when he’s not there. He’s already attached to him, already orbiting him, as if he knows on some level just who he really is.

And I’m about to take all of it away from him in the dark, because I’m his mother, and the job is to choose his whole life over his happiness right now, even when it breaks both of our hearts.

The worst part is that I love Enzo, too.

I do, and there’s no point in lying to myself about it as I pack in an empty room at midnight. I love him, and that’s exactly why I have to go. I never doubted the love, not really. That’s the problem. A man who loves you like that will watch you through a laundromat window for eight months and call it love. He’ll send a boy to the river and come upstairs and wash his hands.

I’m folding the last of Matthew’s shirts into the suitcase when the door opens. Marta stands in the doorway in her dressing gown, taking in the bags, the open drawers, the documents on the bed. I freeze, braced for it, the judgment, the alarm, the calling for Enzo.

It doesn’t come. She steps in quietly and closes the door behind her. She just looks at me for a long moment, this woman who has run this house for thirty years and has seen everything that happens in it.

“Are you sure?” she asks. That’s all. No outrage. Just the question.

“No.” It comes out cracked. “I’m not sure of anything, Marta, except that my son deserves better than bloodshed. That’s it. That’s the whole list.”

She sits on the edge of the bed near the open bag and folds her hands. “You think he’s going to become his father, Enzo,” she says. “You think this house turns everyone into the old man eventually.”

“I think it might. I watched Michael today, Marta. I heard what he did to Genevieve. I heard Enzo tell me, to my face, that he’d raise my son to meet bullets with bullets, and he didn’t even see what is wrong with that.” I shake my head. “I can’t unhear it.

“And he watched me, Marta. For eight months before I ever walked in here. There’s a folder in his desk with my whole life in it. Matthew in a laundromat window.”

Marta doesn’t look surprised. That’s the worst part. “I know,” she says. “I told him it was wrong. He told me it was the only way he could sleep.”

“Then he should have told me,” I say.

“Then say that to his face,” she says. “Don’t do it like this. Don’t disappear in the night with the boy and a bag the way you did before. He told me…” She stops, careful. “He’s told me a little about that first night. The ring on the pillow. What it did to him, finding you gone. If you do it again, in the dark, without a word, that ends him, do you understand? Not the leaving, the way of it. Tell him to his face. Give him that much.”

“I can’t.” The words come out of me without thinking.

“But why?”

“Because if I tell him, he’ll talk me out of it. You know he will. He’ll say the right thing, the comforting thing, like he always does. It may take him some trying, but he’ll eventually land on the right combination of words to get me to stay. And then I will. I’ll stay because I…”

I almost say the words, almost speak them out loud. But I stop myself. Not that it does any good: Marta blinks away tears, and I understand she knows what I almost said.

“I’ll stay because Matthew is happy and the bed is warm and the cage is beautiful. And a year from now, I’ll be exactly the woman Genevieve warned me about, telling myself the bars are love because the bars are nice. I already disappeared once, and from a man worse than this. I survived. I know how. But the staying is what I don’t know how to survive.”

But I don’t put down the shirt in my hands.

I turn to Marta and take her hands. “Marta, please. I need you not to tell him. Not yet at least. Just… just give me until dawn. A few hours. That’s all. Let me get clear and then you can tell him whatever you want. Tell him I’m a coward and call me every bad name you can think of. I don’t care. Just give me a few hours.”

Marta looks at me for a long, long moment, and I watch the loyalty war in her, to Enzo, and to me and my son, whom she’s somehow come to love in a few short weeks.

“A few hours,” she says at last, heavily. “I’m going against everything I think is right, because I think you’re wrong, Stevie. I think you’re making the same mistake twice and calling it wisdom.” She stands. “But I’ll give you the hours on one condition you won’t like hearing.”

“What?”

“That you know what you’re doing.” Her eyes are sad and clear. “Secrets are what almost destroyed this already. And here you are, ready to do it again.” She sighs. “I don’t know if he’s going to survive this.” She places her hand on her heart. “In here, at least. He won’t come after you, after Matthew. He wouldn’t want to scare the boy like that, but I truly think this will break his spirit in a way nothing has before.”

She goes to the door, then turns back to me. “I hope you’re right, child. I hope this ends up being the right thing to do. But I’m afraid you’re not. Good luck.”

The door closes softly behind her.

I sit down on the floor beside the half-packed suitcase in the room that was never mine and let myself break. I sob, doing it quietly so Matthew doesn’t hear me through the doors. I’m going to get him up soon and lead his groggy body out through the back entrance and into a cab. I can already imagine the questions: Where’s Enzo? Where’s Carmine and Marta? Can we still play in the garden?