All Chapters of IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

He said it and walked away. That was the thing I kept coming back to, turning over in the quiet of the next two days like a stone you keep picking up because you haven't decided yet whether to put it in your pocket or throw it into the water. So do I. Three words delivered in a hallway and then he was gone, and I had stood there with my hand on my stomach and my heart doing something irregular and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with the information. I did not bring it up. Neither did he. We existed around it the way you exist around something large that has been placed in the middle of a room, navigating the edges of it, pretending it is not taking up the space that it is. Breakfast happened. The doctor came again, listened to two heartbeats, said everything was progressing well and looked at Luca's list of questions with the expression of someone who had not expected to be quite this prepared. Dinner happened. The compound was quiet in the way it had been since May

The study door opened forty minutes later. I know because I counted again, the way I had started counting things in this house, measuring time in minutes because minutes were manageable in a way that the larger shape of my situation was not. Selene and I had sat at the dining room table for all forty of them, not talking exactly but not in silence either, existing in the particular company of two women who have more in common than either of them planned for and are still deciding what to do about it. She had told me, somewhere around the twenty minute mark, that Don Adriano had been preparing for this visit since the morning after the twins were confirmed. That he had made calls. That people had been repositioned. That the machinery of the Vitale family had been quietly, efficiently rearranging itself around the existence of two children who were not yet born and already changing things. "He moves fast," I said. "He always has," she said. "It's how he built what he built." "And

I did not sleep that night either. I went back upstairs eventually, when it became clear that Luca's phone call was not going to be brief and that standing in the doorway of the study waiting for it to end would have been both undignified and unhelpful. I lay in the dark with my hands on my stomach and listened to the compound and thought about everything that had happened in that room and what it meant and what Selene could possibly be saying to him at midnight that required a conversation that long. I told myself it was probably the arrangement. Don Adriano's declaration at dinner that it remained in place, Selene calling to discuss what that meant for her, for Luca, for the shape of things going forward. I told myself it was administrative. Political. The machinery of the Vitale family doing what it did, which was operate at all hours and regardless of what else was happening in the rooms it moved through. I told myself all of that and mostly did not believe it and lay in the d

Marco found me in the kitchen at noon. I had been trying to eat something that was not toast, which had been my primary food group for the past week, and I was standing at the counter with a bowl of something warm watching the compound through the window, watching the new guards move through their new positions with the particular efficiency of people who had been briefed thoroughly and were taking their assignment seriously. Everything looked different today. Same walls, same gate, same glass and concrete house. But the air inside it had a different quality, tighter and more deliberate, like the compound itself had drawn a breath and not yet let it out. Marco sat at the island without being invited, which was new, and looked at me with the expression that had become familiar over the past weeks, the expression of a man who had more information than he was required to share and was deciding, in this particular instance, to share some of it. "You want to tell me something?" I as

Maya came the next morning. Not announced. Not with warning. She appeared at the gate at nine with her car and her expression and a coffee she had clearly been holding for too long because she did not trust the compound's coffee, which was fair, and she looked at the new guards with the specific Maya Rollins assessment that she gave everything she was not yet sure about, and then she looked at me when I came to the door and her face did the complicated thing it had been doing every time she saw me lately, the thing that was love and anger and worry all mixed together in proportions that shifted depending on the day. "Bryan called me," she said, when we were inside. Not in the kitchen this time. In the sitting room, away from Marco's quiet presence, the door pulled to. "Last night. After he lost the signal." I looked at her. "He told you what he found." "He told me what he found," she confirmed. She sat down across from me and put the coffee on the table between us and looked