Chapter 12
Three days later, my mother handed me a train ticket.
Chicago to Toronto.
Passenger name:
Daniel Ellison.
My hands began shaking.
“He’s alive.”
“Yes.”
“Does he know what happened?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know I know?”
My mother nodded.
“He wants to see you.”
I cried before I could stop myself.
Not quietly.
Not politely.
Nine years of anger came apart in my mother’s kitchen.
“He let me think he left.”
“He thought staying dead would keep you alive.”
“He could have called.”
“I know.”
“He could have written.”
“I know.”
“He missed everything.”
“I know.”
She let me be angry.
That mattered.
Two days later, I stood beneath the great clock inside Toronto Union Station.
Nico stood far behind me.
Not because I needed a mafia boss at my reunion.
Because Rafael still had people outside the Bellandi house.
And Nico had promised that nobody connected to his family would make my father run again.
The crowd moved around me.
Then I saw him.
Gray hair.
Canvas coat.
A limp I did not remember.
My father.
Daniel Ellison stopped twenty feet away.
He looked at me.
His face collapsed.
“Mara.”
I hated how much his voice still sounded like home.
“Dad.”
He took one step.
Then stopped.
As if he did not believe he still had the right.
I crossed the distance.
I hit him once in the chest.
Not hard.
Then again.
He let me.
“You left.”
“I know.”
“You let me hate you.”
“I know.”
“You let Mom lie.”
“I know.”
“You missed my graduation.”
His face broke.
“I know.”
I hit him once more.
Then wrapped my arms around him.
He held me the way drowning men hold rope.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into my hair. “I thought if Rafael believed I was gone, he would never look at you.”
“He looked anyway.”
My father started crying.
“I know.”
After a long time, Nico approached.
My father stiffened.
Nico stopped several feet away.
“Daniel Ellison.”
My father swallowed.
“Mr. Bellandi.”
“You pulled Tomas out of Lucia’s car.”
“Yes.”
“You stayed with my sister.”
My father looked down.
“Until I couldn’t.”
Nico’s voice changed.
“What did she say?”
My father closed his eyes.
“She said to tell Tomas she wasn’t afraid.”
Nico turned his face away.
For several seconds, none of us spoke.
Then my father reached into his coat.
He removed a small metal key.
“The archive.”
Nico looked at it.
“My sister told me where your grandfather hid it.”
“Where?”
My father smiled tiredly.
“Not in a bank.”
“Of course not.”
“Inside the old Bellandi church.”
Nico almost laughed.
“A confessional nobody uses.”
My father nodded.
“Behind the panel where men spent fifty years asking God to forgive things they intended to do again tomorrow.”
That sounded exactly like a Bellandi hiding place.
The archive eventually destroyed half the mythology both families had built around themselves.
Orders had been forged.
Deaths blamed on the wrong people.
Old bosses had prolonged the war because war kept frightened men loyal.
Nico released records that could be released.
Destroyed information that would only create more victims.
And began pulling legitimate businesses away from the criminal structure his father had left him.
Not overnight.
There was no magical morning when a mafia family became respectable.
Real life did not work that way.
But things changed.
Rafael Conti went to prison.
Vittorio Rinaldi died before trial.
Serafina testified.
Tomas began sleeping through the night.
My father came home.
And me?
I went back to the Bellandi mansion once.
I still wore the black housekeeping dress.
Nico found me in the upstairs hall carrying folded towels.
He stared.
“What are you doing?”
“My job.”
“No.”
I frowned.
“No?”
“You are not cleaning bathrooms in this house after uncovering two infiltrators, finding my grandfather’s archive and hitting an armed man with a pocket watch.”
“I need a paycheck.”
“That can be arranged.”
“For what?”
Nico thought about it.
“Household security.”
I laughed.
“You want the maid running security?”
“I want the woman who noticed what my professionals missed.”
“That is a terrible job title.”
“We’ll improve it.”
He started walking away.
Then stopped.
“Mara.”
“Yes?”
He held something out.
A velvet box.
My stomach tightened.
Inside was the real Bellandi necklace.
Repaired.
Cleaned.
The old solder line still visible beside the emerald.
History intact.
“I’m not wearing that.”
Nico almost smiled.
“It isn’t for you.”
“Good.”
“My aunt wants it back in the vault.”
“Then why are you giving it to me?”
“Because I want you to inspect it first.”
I looked at him.
“You don’t trust your jeweler?”
“I do.”
“Then why me?”
Nico glanced toward the room where Tomas was laughing at something on television.
Then back at me.
“Because I’ve learned expensive things are not always genuine.”
He paused.
“And genuine people are not always the ones wearing expensive things.”
I rolled my eyes.
“That was terrible.”
“I’m a crime boss, not a poet.”
“Former crime boss, supposedly.”
“Careful.”
I lifted the necklace.
Heavy.
Cool.
Real gold.
The old repair beside the emerald.
Tiny scratches earned by women who had worn it before either of us was born.
I turned over the clasp.
There it was.
A small B inside an oval.
I closed the box.
“It’s real.”
Nico nodded.
This time, neither of us was talking about the necklace.
Outside, Tomas called my name.
My father was waiting downstairs.
My mother was arguing with Teresa about dinner.
The house was loud.
Messy.
Still dangerous in ways nobody could erase.
But for the first time since the night Serena asked me to fasten a lie around her throat, nobody inside it was pretending the lie was real.
And sometimes—
May you like
that was where surviving finally began.
THE END
