Page 2 of Knight
Some of that was me.
When your son carries the blood of the most powerful man in the city, you learn quickly that visibility is a liability. You learn to make him seem less. Less formed. Less threatening. Less worth the effort of reaching for when you want to wound his mother.
I kept him young on paper long after he had outgrown it.
It was the only armor I could give him when I had nothing else.
But let me be clear about who Guido actually was when this story began.
Sixteen years old. Broad-shouldered. Strong-jawed. His father's face wearing his mother's eyes. Not a child who needed protecting from the truth — a young man who had been surviving the truth his entire life and never once asked to be shielded from it.
He was never small in the ways that mattered.
He was never soft.
He simply learned early that the wisest thing a person can be in a room full of dangerous men is the one nobody is watching.
His father would have understood that.
If his father had lived long enough to know him.
And then there is the question of where Guido went.
People assume we stayed together. That our exile was permanent. That Signora Bianca and her quiet son remained undisturbed in their coastal town, watching the sea and waiting for a war that had nothing to do with them anymore.
For a time that was true.
But exile has a cost that no one prepares you for. It is not the smallness of the life. Not the distance from everything you were. Not even the loneliness — though the loneliness is its own kind of weight.
The cost is watching your child outgrow the protection you built for him.
There came a moment — and I knew it before he did — when staying with me meant staying invisible. When my protection had quietly become its own kind of cage. When his brothers werefighting a war that was also his inheritance and he was sitting on a porch playing chess with driftwood, getting sharper and more restless with every passing week.
I made a decision.
Mothers in this world do not get the luxury of easy decisions.
I sent him back to his brothers.
Not because I stopped protecting him. Because I finally understood that protection sometimes looks like releasing the thing you love most and trusting it to find its own footing in a world that has never once made it easy.
He went back.
To the church. To the rectory. To the chaos of three men who shared his blood and his wounds and had no idea what to do with either.
He was not a child when he arrived.
He was not treated as one.
Not by me. Never by me. Not by this world — which has never once offered any of Giovanni's sons the mercy of being allowed to stay young.
There are other threads I could pull.
Other versions of events I could correct. Other stories that traveled across water and arrived wrong and settled into the shape of truth simply because no one with the actual knowledge was willing to speak.
But I have learned — over years of surviving in the silence of my own exile — that full disclosure is its own kind of violence in this world. You do not lay everything bare. You give people enough to find the door themselves.
What I will tell you is this.
