Page 60 of Give In to Me
His hands unclasp. He presses them flat on his thighs, the way I press mine when my circles stop, and the mirror of it catches in my throat.
“I was ten. The boy was two. I took him in the night. I gave him to the woman—the one with the food—and I gave her money I had stolen from my father’s desk, and I told her to run, to disappear, to take the boy somewhere no one would find them. I told her to raise him as her own. To never tell him who his father was. To never let him hear the name Salvatore.”
The garden is perfectly still. No wind. No footsteps on the gravel. Just his voice and the cold iron under my hand and the circles I’m not drawing.
“She did.” Quieter now. “She ran. She kept the boy safe. He grew up without knowing what he came from. Without knowing what his father was, or what his brother was trained to be.” A pause. His thumb presses into his thigh. “He’s a man now. He built his own life. His own name. He doesn’t know I exist.”
He hasn’t named the brother either. Not the woman, not the child, not the man the child became. He’s telling me the most important story of his life, and every person in it is unnamed, protected, kept outside the reach of the Salvatore shadow by the simple act of not saying who they are.
He protects people the way other men breathe. Without deciding. Without stopping.
“Four years later, I ran.” He straightens slightly. His spine finds a fraction of its usual posture, the discipline returning. “Iwas fourteen. I hid in a forest outside the city. Three months later, the Salvatore family went to war with the Encarnacion family, and they destroyed each other. Everyone. Both sides. The survivors were too broken to continue. By the time I came out of the forest, there was nothing left.”
I know this part. He told me in his office, the night he saidplease. But hearing it again, after the schoolroom, after the brother, after the unnamed woman with the food—it hits differently. The boy who ran at fourteen wasn’t just running from his father. He was running from a house where he had already saved everyone he could.
“I built everything after that.” His voice is steadier now. Still raw, but with discipline returning. “The company. The security work. The teaching. I brought my father’s soldiers’ children with me because they had no one else, and because I understood what it meant to grow up in that world and need a way out.”
“Joe,” I say, quiet.
“Joe.” He nods once. “Giuseppe. He was nine when his father died in the Encarnacion war. I found him three years later, living in a church basement in Florence. He’s been with me since.”
He falls silent. His hands are on his thighs. Mine are on the armrest. Between us, the arm’s length of bench. The garden is cold and damp and the trees are bare and somewhere inside the building behind us, Agnes Cuthbert is sitting in an office that smells like lilies, and she’s afraid.
“I teach because I’m afraid of what I’m when I stop.” He turns his head. Looks at me for the first time since he sat down, and his eyes are dark and wet. “Every semester I stand behind that podium and I make myself into someone who explains thingsinstead of breaking them. And every semester I’m terrified that if I stop—if I walk away from the lectures and the students and the structure—the other thing is still there. The thing he built. Waiting.”
His jaw works. “I don’t teach because I love it, Elsa. I teach because without it, I’m his.”
“What you are,” I say, “is a man who stole a baby to save him.”
His face breaks.
Not the hairline fracture from the office, not the rawness from the confession. Something deeper, something I’ve no name for. This is the man at the bottom of all of it, the one who was five years old in a stone room and ten years old carrying a baby through the dark and fourteen years old alone in a forest, and he’s looking at me like I just said the only thing he’s ever needed to hear and didn’t know it until this moment.
“I pushed you away because I believed it.” His voice is rough. Wrecked. “That I would ruin you. That my name would follow you, that Agnes was just the beginning, that everyone who stands near me eventually gets touched by what I came from. I told myself it was protection. That I was saving you.” A pause. “I wasn’t saving you. I was saving myself from watching it happen.”
“You deserve sunlight, Elsa. I’m not—”
“Stop.”
He stops.
I lift my hand from the armrest. His right hand is resting on his thigh, and it’s clenched—a fist, tight, the knuckles white. I reachacross the arm’s length of bench and I lay my hand on top of his fist.
He goes rigid. Every muscle, every line of him, taut and still.
I open his fist. One finger at a time. My thumb on his index finger, pressing gently until it uncurls. Then the next. Then the next. His hand resists, not against me but against itself—against years of holding tight, of gripping, of keeping his fists closed around everything he’s afraid of losing. I carefully open each finger the way you open something that’s been sealed for a long time, with the understanding that what’s inside might be fragile.
His hand lies open on his thigh. Palm up. The lines of it visible, deep, the hand of a man who has done things with these fingers that he’s just told me about, and I don’t flinch, and I don’t pull away.
I draw a circle on his palm.
One circle. My fingertip on his skin, tracing the motion I’ve been drawing on every surface of my life for two years. The circle that started in an alley when I was eighteen and terrified and my hands needed to convince my body I was whole. The circle that stopped when he cut me loose and started again ten minutes ago on a cold bench because my hands remembered who I’m.
I draw it on his palm, and his fingers twitch, and his hand is warm.
“You’re the man who saved me.” My voice is clear. Not loud. Not fierce. Certain, the way Nebraska sky is certain—wide and even and going on forever. “Everything else, we figure out together.”
He closes his hand.
