*Olivia*
The next day, I lay on the floor of the living room after lunch with Dahlia and Elio while Gio worked upstairs.
One of my many baby books said a focus on fine-motor skills in the first year was vital for the developing infant, so I’d spent weeks researching and buying child-safe paints. They were finally all here, so I’d moved the furniture to the side, rolled out so butcher paper, and allowed Elio his first brush with the world of art in the form of a huge finger-painting canvas. Within minutes, he was covered in every color of paint, making grateful I’d changed him into a romper he was growing out of.
He scrawled a big green circle and pointed to it enthusiastically. “Mama! Moo!”
I smiled. “Moon.”
Without all his teeth, he still struggled with ending consonants.
Dahlia laughed. “The moon’s not green, little man.”
She picked up the bowl of white, which had sars of almost every other color in it by that point, and scooped up a careful dollop to paint a much neater circle next to Elio’s.
“That’s the moon,” she said.
Elio screwed up his face and placed his sticky hands on the paper to study her drawing more closely.
I laughed. He looked exactly like Gio when he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
Elio looked at , brow still furrowed, and pointed to Dahlia’s circle. “Moo?”
I nodded. “The moon is white and cos out at night.”
I grabbed the blue and black, mixed them together in my palm, and scribbled a loose approximation of the night sky around Dahlia’s moon.
“Ny,” he mumbled to himself. “Ny-ty.”
“Nightti!” I chirped.
Satisfied, He leaned away from the painting, leaving behind two perfectly ford handprints. My eyes welled up a little. Whatever happened to the rest of this page, I would be keeping that piece forever, I knew.
Dahlia t my eye and chuckled. “He’s well on his way to Einstein, of course, you’re proud.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. Elio repeated the gesture, then collapsed into delighted giggles.
I tickled him and hoped Gio never found out he learned that move from .
After a mont, he began squirming. “Mama! Pay!”
“Pay” was his word for paint, so I released him easily. He dove for the bowl of yellow and began smacking fistfuls of it onto a blank corner of the canvas.
I smiled. “Einstein or Michelangelo, who’s to say?”
Dahlia laughed at again. “I should’ve known you were going to make an artist out of him.”
I put my hands up. “It’s not my fault he likes it!”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “You explain that to Gio.”
We fell into a companionable silence, watching Elio paint haphazardly.
“So,” she said.
I wrinkled my nose. That was her “you owe details” voice.
She leaned back against the couch. “That dinner with Salvatore was last night, right?”
“You know good and well it was last night.” I shook my head. “You helped pick out shoes.”
She smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Of course! I just thought I might’ve gotten turned around because you haven’t told anything about it yet, and my dearest, bestest friend in the world wouldn’t have forgotten such a thing.”
Elio bounced his own hand off his head, leaving a sar of paint, and giggled. Dahlia and I both fell upon him to convince him out of the habit before it stuck, and both of us were a bit more paint-covered by the ti we actually got a chance to talk again.
“It went... well.” I took a deep breath. “He apologized, a lot. He seed genuinely happy Mom remarried, and genuinely interested in hearing about my life and interests.”
Dahlia smirked. “Oh yeah? How much of the conversation was about art history?”
I blushed. “More than most people let get away with!”
She chuckled. “Seems like a decent sign to . Now tell the scary thing you’re worried you shouldn’t say.”
I barely restrained myself from sticking my tongue out at her again. I should’ve known she could read too well. I couldn’t keep anything from her.
“He also explained why he left.”
Dahlia’s eyebrows shot up, but she simply nodded without saying anything.
I bit my lip. “You know how my mom said she thought he might be in with so cri family? Well, he confird it–organized cri, back in New York before we moved.”
Dahlia grimaced. “I’ve heard the New York scene is rough–a lot of competition, not a lot of people who make it further than the bottom rungs.”
“That makes sense.” I took a deep breath. “He said he was low-level.”
She furrowed her eyebrows. “If he was so low, why’d he have to leave? Mostly, bottom-rung guys get hit before they have the chance or never matter enough to need to.”
“Mau!” Elio yelled, pointing to an orangish blob on the paper. I couldn’t tell what it was saying, or what it was supposed to be, so I simply nodded and smiled.
“He said he saw sothing he shouldn’t have.” I shrugged. “Didn’t say what, just that he knew the heat would co down on Mom and if he stayed.”
Dahlia nodded. “Have you told Gio yet?”
“I had to,” I said. “He deserved to know, and I don’t want to imagine how angry he’d be if he found out later.”
“Wouldn’t be good.” She doodled a small flower on the edge of the page. “How’d he take it?”
I huffed out a breath. “Gio-ly. He has a ‘bad feeling’ and that definitely didn’t improve when I ntioned the mob thing. But he agreed to back off for my sake.”
Dahlia nodded slowly, dotting a yellow middle onto her flower. The silence dragged between us as Elio mixed red and green into a muddy brown. I picked up the paintbrush I’d brought out for myself, stole a little of the multicolored white, and began sketching Dahlia’s profile onto the page.
After another few monts, I started to go insane.
“Well?” I asked. “What do you think?”
She smiled a little sadly. “I was thinking I didn’t know if I should get a say about your dad because mine was always around.”
My heart ward, and I would have hugged Dahlia were there not several feet of wet butcher paper and a sticky toddler between us.
“I want your opinion.” I smiled. “You’ve got seniority.”
Her smile evened out into sothing more pleased, then dropped away as she shrugged.
“I think you can’t know if he’s got so sinister intention”—she wiggled her fingers like a witch in a movie—“until he does sothing. Just look at Elena. Both of you did research out the wazoo, but that can’t accommodate for flukes of human nature. Sobody can be the best person in the world on paper and still screw you, and vice versa.”
I took a deep breath and let her words wash over . She was right, of course. Perhaps that was why I chafed against Gio’s surveillance habit so much; there was never a way to know what was truly going on in soone’s head, no matter how many secret pictures you took of them. Sal either earnestly intended to have a relationship with , or he didn’t. My only role was to let him try, if he wanted to.
“The only thing I’ll say,” Dahlia said suddenly, “is that it is a little weird he showed up kind of right after you and Gio got married.”
Instinctively, I shook my head. “It’s been over two years since then. That’s not right after.”
She shrugged. “Mob ti is different than real ti. With how tight-lipped Gio kept the ceremony, it kind of is. You already lived here, already shared a room. Anybody watching would have to notice the ring to figure it out, or soone finally talked.”
I swallowed down the defenses leaping to my lips and forced myself to hear her. The wedding was so long ago in real ti, as Dahlia put it, that I hadn’t even considered it might’ve been on Salvatore’s radar. Honestly, in my paranoid monts, I was more worried Elio’s birthday had been the trigger. But if she was right about mob ti, it could definitely be related.
“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe that’s just how he found . Like, maybe he found the marriage certificate, or he did stumble across a caterer in his search.” I cast my mind back. “I’m pretty sure we had a few from Arica, and he ntioned he was looking at ex-pats.”
Dahlia carefully traced a stem under her flower. “I an, that’s definitely an option.”
Her profile took on an angrier look. “But you don’t think so.”
She sighed. “I don’t know! And I don’t think anyone can. It just sounds like kind of a weird coincidence to .”
I started a new painting, of Elio grinning with paint-spattered teeth. “What would you do, in my place?”
“I’d trust my gut,” she answered simply.
Elio lunged over her to reach the yellow on her far side, saring paint on her pants and ruining the leaf she was adding to her stem. She put her hands in the air, laughing helplessly, and I lifted Elio off her lap.
“We talked about asking for things you want,” I told him seriously.
He pouted. “Lello.”
“I know Aunt Dally took the yellow. But you should’ve said, Aunt Dally, can I have the yellow, instead of making a big ss.”
He kicked his feet, trying to wriggle out of my arms. “Pay! Pay!”
I shook my head. “Not until you ask Aunt Dally nicely.”
He scrunched up his face. I positioned him on my lap, facing Dahlia, who’d begun scrubbing at the stains on her pants.
“Lello, Dally?” Elio burbled.
She grinned and handed him the bowl. “Why, of course, Elio. Thank you so much for asking.”
He snatched the bowl out of her hands and settled on the paper in front of . I carded my fingers through his hair.
Could I really trust my gut? I’d been so angry when Salvatore first showed up, but after only one dinner, I was planning to integrate him into my life, even let him et my son. All of Gio’s careful lessons about keeping myself safe in a world that might view as a pawn in a bigger ga flew out of my head the mont he smiled and said he was glad Mom remarried.
Part of would always be eight-year-old Olivia, standing at the front of the class alone on Bring Your Parents to School Day because Mom couldn’t get off work. The teacher still made give a speech about Mom’s job, and I’d burst into tears in the middle of it before running off to hide in the reading corner. I’d ended up staring at a book called Nelly Gnu and Daddy Too and wishing desperately my father would walk in the door, scoop in his arms, and lead triumphantly back to the front of the class.
I looked at Dahlia. She’d found after all the speeches were done and told she asked her dad if he could be mine, too. Jas, being the man he was, said yes and carried on his shoulders into the cafeteria afterward, while Dahlia bounced around his feet and declared that she got to go next.
No matter how kind that had been, it didn’t take the sting out of the humiliation, nor the power out of the desire. I’d spent my childhood wanting a dad so bad my heart still ached with it.
I couldn’t be unbiased about this.
Gio strode into the living room. “If it isn’t my little artists!”
He scooped Elio out of my lap and cradled him, heedless of his fine suit jacket. He looked so strong and safe and goddamn sexy holding our son. No matter what else happened, Elio would have the dad he deserved.
“Are you hungry?” he asked Dahlia and once Elio was done screaming with laughter.
“God, starving,” Dahlia answered.
Gio and I laughed.
“I’ll tell them to get dinner started,” he said. “And throw this little ragamuffin in the bath before he becos paint.”
He spun on his heel, pulling more peals of laughter from Elio, and marched right out the door he ca in through.
I sighed and began gathering the paint bowls. My worries about Sal could wait. If Dahlia was right about anything, it was that I couldn’t solve this problem without ti, or without Sal.
As I loaded the last of the paint bowls into my arms, my phone rang. I glanced at the floor, where it lay face-up, and read the caller ID.
Salvatore Montgory.
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