Page 282 of Mario

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My throat closes.

Matteo leans forward slightly.

“You think you abandoned her,” he says.

I do not answer.

Because yes.

That is exactly what I think.

Every day for ten years.

“You didn’t,” he says.

I look at him.

For a moment, I do not see the grown man sitting across from me.

I see the boy at seventeen, pale and silent in a black suit, accepting condolences with the same steady face because he thought that was what I needed from him.

I had needed him to be a child.

I had not known how to ask.

Tomasso speaks next, voice rough.

“You lost her too, Papà.”

Too.

Such a small word.

It guts me.

For ten years, I have thought of Anna as my guilt and their grief.

I did not understand they had been watching me carry the guilt and calling it grief because they had no other name for it.

“I was responsible for her,” I say.

Tomasso shakes his head. “She would hate hearing you say that.”

A ghost of a smile crosses my face. “She would.”

“She’d throw something,” Matteo says. “At your head.”

“Probably not the good china, though,” Tomasso adds.

A silence follows.

This one is different.

Not easy.

Never easy.

But not closed.

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