Page 68 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
I should say something kind. Instead I say the thing that’s true, because he just bled for me and I won’t insult it with anything less.
“I know what that is,” I tell him. “Carrying a death that was your fault.”
He goes still now too.
“I was nineteen,” I say. The words come out rusty. I have never told this to anyone either, not Crystal, not in seven years. The words drag coming out, seven years of rust on every one, and he listens the way I’d want God to listen, still, unsurprised, on my side.
“I told you I was a dancer before this. I didn’t tell you how it ended. There was a competition, a regional final, the one that would have gotten me the contract, the company, the whole life. I begged my coach to drive me home that night instead of waiting for the bus, because I was impatient, because I wanted to celebrate, because I was nineteen and the world was finally about to hand me everything.”
My throat closes. I push through it. “There was a wreck. I walked away with a wrecked knee. He didn’t walk away at all. He died because I didn’t want to wait for a bus. Everyone knew it, and nobody ever said it out loud, which was worse. I have spent seven years believing I’m the kind of person whose wanting gets other people killed. That if I reach for a thing, somebody pays for it. So I stopped reaching.”
I look at him. The scariest man in Nevada, sitting on the edge of a bed, looking at me like I’ve reached into his chest.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you about the baby,” I say, and here it is, my half, the thing I owe. “It wasn’t only fear of the cage, thoughthat was real. It was that the second I knew, I wanted it so much it terrified me. And wanting things is how I get people killed. So I hid it. I told Crystal instead of you. I made her swear to keep it, and that secret is the thing they tortured out of her, the thing that got her taken apart in the desert.”
My voice breaks all the way now. “You want to talk about a lie that put a gun in someone’s hand. I hid the realest thing in my life from the one person it belonged to, and my best friend died carrying it for me. So don’t sit there thinking you’re the only one in this room who gets people killed by keeping secrets. We are exactly the same animal, you and I. We just wear different clothes.”
He huffs something that’s almost a laugh, wet at the edges, and I understand I’m watching the closest this man has ever come to crying in front of another living person. Two tears, total. Paid out slow, like they’re rationed.
For a long moment neither of us says anything, because there’s nothing to say into the size of it, the two of us sitting in the wreckage of everything our silences cost, recognizing each other completely for the first time. It’s terrible, being known. It’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. Both at once, both all the way.
“I have spent my whole life,” he says slowly, “believing I destroy what I love. That it’s a law, like gravity. That the only safe thing is to never love anything at all.”
“I know,” I whisper. “I believed the same thing about myself. Different words. Same prison.”
“You didn’t get Crystal killed, Cynthia.” He says my name soft, the way he does now, the way that still undoes me. “Morozov gotCrystal killed. Vadim got Crystal killed. A barrel and a man with no soul got Crystal killed. You loved her. You tried to protect her, and you were dealt an impossible hand by people who do this for a living. The secret was a mistake. It was not a murder.”
“Then neither was yours,” I say. “You didn’t murder your brother. You were in a firefight, your hand was on a gun, and the worst thing in the world happened in a half second you’ll never get back. That’s not a man who destroys what he loves. That’s a man who lost something and has been punishing himself for being alive ever since.” I’m crying now, openly, and I don’t care. “God, Sevastian. We’ve both been serving the same sentence for years. For the crime of surviving when someone we loved didn’t.”
He goes still the way he went still in the desert the first night, the full-body stillness of a man hit somewhere the wool doesn’t cover.
He reaches out and wipes my face with his thumb, this enormous gentle hand that killed a man last night. We’re a mess, the two of us. Coffee going cold, faces wrecked, sitting on a bed in the late gold light trading the worst things we own like kids trading cards nobody else would want. His own eyes are wet, which I would not have believed possible a month ago.
He doesn’t apologize. Later I’ll understand that’s the whole point. He doesn’t say sorry, because sorry is cheap and we are both far past cheap. Instead he tells me what he’s going to do.
That Crystal will be honored, properly, that her name will mean something in this family forever, that he has already put people on it. There will be a real goodbye, he says, on her terms, with the women who loved her, not some quiet thing tucked away to spare anyone discomfort. She was family the moment she camethrough that gate with cheap champagne, and family gets buried like family. I have to look at the window for a moment when he says that, because it’s the first time anyone with power in this world has called her what she was instead of a casualty.
He keeps going. That the women she danced with, my crew, the ones with no walls, no protection, will be watched over quietly for the rest of their lives, not because I asked, but because they were hers, and what was hers is mine to keep now. That the grip he’s kept on every single thing around him for a decade, the control he has worshipped like a god, he is going to have to learn to loosen, because it nearly cost him the only thing that ever mattered.
A man who would cage his own pregnant woman to feel safe is a man who has to change, and he says it plainly, like a fact he’s already decided, not a promise he hopes I’ll reward.
“I am not asking you to forgive me,” he says. “Not today. Maybe not for a long time. What I did, the lie, what it cost, what it cost her, that doesn’t get wiped clean because I finally said it out loud. I am only telling you that you are the first person I have ever let see the whole of me. And whatever you decide to do with that, you’ll be deciding it knowing everything, which is more than I’ve given anyone in my life.”
It costs him to stop talking there, with nothing asked for. I watch him pay it.
I don’t forgive him, not all the way, not cleanly, because he’s right that it can’t be cheap, because Crystal is still in the ground, a lie helped put her there, and no confession un-digs a grave. But I take his hand. I hold the hand that killed his brother and killed for me. I let him hold the hand that hid the secret that got my best friend killed. We sit there in the gold light, two peoplewho have done unforgivable things, choosing anyway, in this moment, to stop holding them up as walls between us.
“We start here,” I say. “Both of us. We put it down. Not because it doesn’t weigh anything. Because we can’t carry it and each other at the same time. I’m tired, Sevastian. I’m so tired of carrying it alone.”
“Then don’t,” he says. “Neither of us alone. Not anymore.”
Outside, the sun finishes going down. Neither of us turns on a lamp. Some conversations only fit in the dark, and we give this one the whole night’s worth.
It isn’t forgiveness, finished and tied off with a ribbon. Forgiveness, it turns out, is less like a gift than like rehab. You show up. You do the boring exercises. Some days the joint holds, some days it doesn’t, and you show up again anyway. It’s the beginning of it, the first stone laid, earned the hard way, on both sides, with the rest of it still ahead of us. But it’s real, it’s ours, and for the first time since the desert handed Crystal back in pieces, the hole in my chest has someone sitting beside it instead of me guarding it alone.
He stays. I cry for Crystal in his arms until there’s nothing left, and he doesn’t try to fix it or talk me out of it or write a check. He just holds the grief with me, which is the one thing I never thought this man could do, and the last wall I’ve been keeping up against him comes down somewhere in the dark, quiet, unmourned.
Tomorrow there are decisions. Tomorrow there’s a choice I have to make that he can’t make for me, about staying, about leaving, about what I actually want now that the war that decided everything is over. Tomorrow.
