Page 90 of Ruthless Daddy
Then he turned in his chair and looked across the table at me.
The bruise at his jaw was already a clean line where my knuckle had been. He did not touch it. He looked at me the way he had not looked at me in the eight months we had been in Chicago, which was to say he looked at me the way he had looked at me when we were boys and one of us had done something that needed to be either fought out or laid down, and we had grown up enough to know the laying down.
“Fratello,” he said. Low. The dialect. “Mi dispiace.”
I’m sorry.
I let it sit. I made myself let it sit, because Sal had let mine sit, and that was the trade.
Then I said: “Lo so.”
I know.
He nodded.
Across the table, Angela had not sat back down. She stood at the head of the table beside Dante’s chair with her hand still on top of the folder, and her chin was still up, and she looked, for the first time since we had walked through the door, like a person who had been heard.
She looked at me.
She let herself, finally, look at me.
I looked back.
Themeetingdidnotso much end as disperse. Dante walked it through the last logistics with the brisk economy he used for the parts of an operation that did not need argument. Angela would start at the workstation at eight in the morning. Marco would have the banking access provisioned by midnight. I would stay with her at the Carriage House for the duration. The family would reconvene every twelve hours—once before dawn, once at dusk—for status. Tonio would coordinate the perimeter with Santo, and Santo would coordinate the Marseilles watch from his own teams. Sal would build the operational follow-up package off whatever Angela surfaced. Marco would handle the data architecture. I would handle Angela.
He used that phrase. I would handle Angela. He said it the way he said everything—neutrally, declaratively—but he met my eye when he said it, and I understood him.
When the assignments were finished, Dante stood.
He pushed his chair back and stood up at the head of the table and the rest of them stood with him without being told. Tonio at the stove turned the heat off under the moka. Marco slid his phone into his pocket. Sal closed the folder one final time and set it under his arm. Santo, already in his jacket, drew himself up off the wall.
Dante walked the length of the table.
He stopped in front of Angela.
Dante put out his hand and she took it.
He held it for a beat longer than a handshake. Not aggressively, not strangely, just for a beat that the room registered as deliberate. His other hand came up and rested briefly on top of hers, closing it between both of his palms, the way he might have closed a small bird he meant to release.
“Welcome to the family, Angela,” he said.
It was very quiet.
She did not speak. She had not been ready for it. I saw the second pass through her face—the moment where the words landed and her own mouth tried to find a shape for the response and could not. Her eyes went bright.
“Thank you,” she said.
He released her hand.
He stepped back. He looked at me, and at her, and at me again, and then he turned and walked back to the head of the table for his coat.
Marco was the first to leave.
He stopped at Angela on his way out and bowed his head a fraction, the small old-world gesture that came out of him in moments he did not want to make speeches in. He said, “Tomorrow morning. I’ll have everything you asked for.” She nodded. He looked at me, said, “Pietro,” with a great deal in it that he did not unpack, and went out into the courtyard. The cold draft of his exit pushed the curtain at the kitchen window.
Tonio came next, but slower, because Tonio was constitutionally incapable of leaving a kitchen quickly. He kissed Angela on both cheeks like she was his cousin and had always been his cousin, and he ruffled the top of my head on his way past as though I were eleven and had skinned my knee, and he said something to me in Sicilian that I did not entirely catch anddid not need to. He took Olimpo with him. The big dog padded out behind him, looking back once at the room as though to ensure it was now closed.
Santo did not say anything. Santo gave Angela the briefest of nods, an inch of head movement, and was gone.
