Chương 13
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“That it confirms biology.”
“She’s consistent.”
“Consistency is sometimes what people call boundaries when they dislike them.”
Damiano folded the copy carefully.
“Can I write to Elena?”
“You can write. Whether she receives it is Maeve’s decision.”
He began the letter that night.
He wrote, Dear Elena, then stopped.
He tried again.
I am sorry your first memory of me will be in a room with money and a gun.
That sounded like a man arranging regret for display.
He tore it up.
On the third attempt, he wrote:
Dear Elena,
Bruno is yours. I should have said that first.
I found out Sofia bought him a yellow raincoat. She claims it was necessary. I suspect she wanted to embarrass him.
Your mother is right that the test does not decide what happens next. I will not ask you to call me anything. I will answer questions if you have them, including questions whose answers make me look bad.
I am sorry I did not find you sooner. I am also sorry for the kind of life that made your mother believe hiding you was safer.
Damiano
Maeve did not give Elena the letter for another week.
When she finally did, Elena read it at the kitchen table in Sofia’s apartment because their own apartment remained part of an investigation. Bruno, wearing the yellow raincoat indoors, chewed the corner of a cardboard box.
Maeve sat across from her with one arm held close to her ribs.
“Is he in jail?” Elena asked.
“Yes.”
“Because he saved you?”
“No. Because of things he did before.”
“But the police took him after.”
“They took him because he told them some of those things.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Yes.”
“Is he bad?”
Maeve looked at the child’s face, at Damiano’s eyes inside it.
“He has done bad things.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.”
Elena waited.
Maeve rubbed the edge of a bandage on her wrist. “I loved him once.”
“That’s not what I asked either.”
“I know.”
“Adults don’t answer.”
“We answer the part we can live with.”
Elena looked down at the letter. “Can he be my dad from jail?”
Maeve’s breath caught. She covered it by reaching for her tea.
“He is your biological father,” she said.
“That’s a science answer.”
“Yes.”
“Do you hate him?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you like him?”
“Sometimes.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It is.”
Elena folded the letter along the crease Damiano had made.
“Can I write back?”
Maeve looked toward the window. Across the street, a man struggled to parallel park while another driver waited with both hands raised in furious disbelief. The ordinary scene held her attention longer than it deserved.
Finally, she said, “Yes.”
Elena wrote:
Dear Damiano,
The raincoat is bad. Bruno hates it.
Mommy says you did crimes. She says crimes is too big a word because some crimes hurt more than other crimes but they are all still crimes.
Why did you have a gun by the money?
Did you know your men scared people?
Did you love Mommy?
Why didn’t you look for her?
Do not lie because I can ask her.
Elena
P.S. Bruno bit Sofia’s slipper but not hard.
Damiano answered every question.
He had placed the gun there to frighten Nate into telling the truth. He had known his men frightened people, though he had pretended rules could control how far fear traveled. He had loved Maeve. He had looked for her at first, then stopped because anger was easier to carry than rejection.
He did not tell Elena he loved her. Not yet. The word would have asked her to carry something for him.
Over the next four months, the letters continued.
Elena wrote about school, Bruno’s accidents, Maeve’s bad eggs, and the fact that Sofia had killed another plant. She asked why men listened to Damiano. She asked whether he had killed anyone. On that question, Larkin advised caution.
Damiano answered that he had ordered violence and had known violence happened because of him. He did not describe details. He wrote that being honest did not require making a child hold pictures she could not put down.
Maeve read every letter before Elena received it. Sometimes she removed one and returned it to Larkin with a note.
Too much justification.
Too vague.
Do not make her comfort you.
Damiano rewrote them.
His cooperation agreement took months. Prosecutors wanted complete information and offered no guarantees beyond considering the value of his assistance. Other defendants challenged the records. Attorneys argued that Maeve’s copies were incomplete, that Nate had motives to lie, that Enzo was seeking leniency, and that Damiano blamed dead men and absent men for his own crimes.
Some arguments were dishonest.
Some were not.
Damiano spent long days reviewing documents with agents, discovering how much had been done in his name without his specific knowledge and how often he had benefited anyway. He learned the names of shop owners he had never met, families who had paid inflated debts, workers whose wages had been skimmed through contractors.
Ignorance did not return the money.
Assets were seized. Businesses closed. Employees who had never known anything lost jobs. A restaurant supply company collapsed because its accounts were frozen. One driver with three children wrote to a newspaper that Damiano’s sudden conscience had arrived after everyone else’s rent was due.
Damiano read the article twice.
He had no defense that did not sound like another form of theft.
Maeve returned to work part-time after six weeks. She and Elena moved into a small apartment arranged through a victim-support program. The location was confidential. Sofia remained involved, though her emergency placement ended.
Maeve did not reconcile with Damiano.
During their first supervised video call, she sat beside Elena but outside the frame. Damiano saw only a section of her sleeve when she reached to adjust the tablet.
May you like
Elena held Bruno up to the camera.
The puppy had grown. His ears were still too large for his head.
