Page 66 of My Unexpected Surprise
Instead, I sit on the floor beside Nico’s bed in the dark for a long time, back against the wall, knees drawn up like I’m twenty years younger than I am.
When I finally stand, I don’t go to my room. I go outside.
The cottage door clicks shut behind me softly. The night air off the lake is cold enough to clear my head, or at least cold enough that I can pretend it does. I walk down to the dock, the same one where I caught Livia’s waist yesterday during the boat transfer drill, and I stand there with my hands in my pockets, looking at water.
I pull my phone out after a while and begin dialing.
Beckett answers on the fourth ring, voice thick with sleep. “This had better be an emergency, Ferretti.”
“It’s not.”
A pause. “It’s past midnight.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Then why,” Beckett says, and I can hear him sitting up, the rustle of sheets, “are you calling me at midnight to tell me it’s not an emergency?”
I look out at the water. The question I want to ask is absurd. It is, on its face, a question a teenager asks, not a grown man in charge of security operations across four continents.
“If a child has a nightmare,” I say, “how do you know what to do?”
The silence on the other end stretches long enough that I wonder if the call dropped.
“Valentino,” Beckett says slowly, “are you asking me how to parent?”
“I’m asking a hypothetical.”
“At midnight.”
“The timing is irrelevant.”
“You called me at midnight,” Beckett says, and I can hear the grin forming in his voice even through the phone, “to ask a hypothetical about comforting a child who had a nightmare. Ferretti, that's father-adjacent behavior.”
“It’s a work situation.”
“Of course it is.”
“There’s a child at the retreat. He had a nightmare. I went to him.” I keep my voice level, the same tone I’d use briefing a client on a logistics plan. “I want to know if I did it correctly.”
Another pause, shorter this time, and when Beckett speaks again, the teasing edge has softened. “Did the kid go back to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Quickly?”
“Within minutes.”
“Then you did it correctly.” A beat. “What did you say to him?”
I hesitate. The lake is very still. “I spoke to him in Italian. Told him he wasn’t alone.”
“Huh.” Beckett’s voice has gone quiet, thoughtful, the version of him I’ve heard maybe twice in the years I’ve known him. “You know what the trick is, with kids and nightmares? It’s not the words. They don’t understand half of what you’re saying half the time anyway. It’s that you showed up. That’s it.”
“That seems inefficient.”
“Everything seems inefficient to men like us,” Beckett says, and there’s something dry and knowing in it. “We’re used to fixing things with leverage, contingency plans, money, force if it comes to it. And then a four-year-old wakes up scared in the dark, and none of that means anything. All that matters is whether someone comes when they’re called.”
I don’t answer right away. Out on the water, something breaks the surface, a fish or a bird, gone before I can place it.
