บททั้งหมดของ IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS : บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 10

They say your life can change in two minutes. Mine changed in two pink lines. I'd been staring at the pregnancy test for so long that the word "positive" had started to blur at the edges, like if I looked at it hard enough it would rearrange itself into something less catastrophic. It didn't. It just sat there on the edge of my bathroom sink, glowing on that little digital screen with the kind of calm confidence that I absolutely did not have, while the November rain hammered against the single window above the toilet like it was personally offended by everything happening in this room. I was twenty-one years old. I was a junior at Velmoor University studying literature because I loved words more than I loved common sense, apparently, and I was supposed to be thinking about my thesis and my internship applications and the very long list of responsible adult things I had been putting off since September. I was not supposed to be standing barefoot on cold bathroom tile at seven in

Five minutes. That's all Luca Wolfe gave me, five minutes to say goodbye to the life I had before he walked through my door and detonated it. I stood in my bedroom doorway staring at the duffel bag he'd packed, at my clothes folded inside it with the kind of ruthless efficiency that made my chest hurt, and I thought: this is it. This is what the end of your old life looks like. A bag you didn't pack yourself, sitting on a floor you're about to walk away from. Downstairs I could hear my mom's voice. Low. Scared. The specific scared that mothers get when they know something is wrong but don't know how wrong yet. "Natalie, who was that man?" I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because the answer was the father of my twins, and I wasn't ready to say those words out loud to anyone else. I could barely say them inside my own head without the floor doing that disappearing trick again. I grabbed my phone and the hoodie, Bryan's hoodie, my hoodie, the one I had stolen at a bonfire in tenth gra

I didn't go back to sleep. I told myself I was going to lay down, I closed my eyes, pulled Bryan's hoodie tighter around me like it could block out the sound of a woman's laugh drifting up through the floor of a house I didn't know in a life I hadn't chosen. But sleep wasn't interested in me tonight, and honestly, after everything that had happened between seven this morning and whatever time it was now, I wasn't sure I deserved it. So I lay in the dark and I listened. Not obviously. Not with my ear pressed against the floor or anything that would have felt as desperate as it actually was. Just... listened. The way you listen when your body is too exhausted to do anything else but your brain refuses to stop. Voices below low, occasional, the kind of conversation that had a history to it, a familiarity, the easy back and forth of two people who had been in the same rooms enough times that they didn't need to fill the silence. Her laugh again. Twice more before it stopped. I

The phone call lasted four minutes. I know because I counted. Standing in the driveway with my mom's hand in mine and Maya's eyes still fixed on the ultrasound images and the folder shaking slightly in my grip, I counted every second of the silence that had fallen over the compound the moment Luca answered that call and his whole body changed. Not dramatically. Not the way it happened in films, where someone gets bad news and staggers or drops things or makes a sound. Luca Wolfe did not do any of those things. He simply went still in a way that was different from his usual stillness, turned slightly away from all of us, and spoke in a voice so low I could not make out a single word from where I was standing. Four minutes. Then he hung up. He stood with his back to us for a moment longer than was necessary. Just a breath. Just one. Then he turned around and his face was exactly what it always was and I would not have known anything had changed except that I had been watching

I didn't come down for dinner. I told myself it was because I wasn't hungry, which was partially true. The rest of the truth was that I had spent the last two hours sitting on the edge of a bed that was becoming mine in the slow, reluctant way that things become yours when you don't have a choice, and I was not ready to sit across a table from Luca Wolfe and pretend that the conversation we'd just had in that hallway hadn't rearranged something inside me that I didn't know how to put back. I was not in love with him. I was standing at the edge of something that looked, from certain angles, in certain light, disturbingly like the beginning of it. And the difference between those two things was becoming harder to hold onto with every day I spent in this house. There was a knock at the door. One knock, because Luca only ever knocked once, and then it opened anyway. I did not look up from the window. "You need to eat," he said. "People keep telling me that today." He set somethin