Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Minna was already waiting beside the limousine, and Louis was already in it, kneeling backward on the seat with the air of a boy who'd spent the interval conducting a thorough inspection of every button the vehicle possessed.
"Papa." He didn't even wait for the door to finish closing. "Can we go home first? I need to pick up my favorite toy."
"Of course."
The limousine pulled away from the hotel, which its new owner did not give a second glance, and Louis resumed operations.
"Do you have a helicopter?"
"Three."
"Do you get seasick?"
"No."
"Does Aunt Minna work for you or with you?"
"For me," said Valerio, at the exact moment Minna said, "With him," and neither of them elaborated, and Louis nodded as though both answers had confirmed something.
"Are you really a stuntman?" Louis asked next. "Because Brooklyn's mama said you own the hotel, and I looked, and stuntmen make forty-one thousand dollars a year."
Aislinn choked on nothing. Valerio, unbothered, glanced at her once, and something passed between them over the top of their son's head, eight years of it, an intersection, an orange, a lie he'd told with fruit in his hand.
"No," he said. "I was never a stuntman. Your mother decided I was one, and I..." A pause. "I liked who I was when she believed it."
"Then what are you?"
"A businessman. A very rich one." He said it the way other men said their blood type, information, not achievement. "And a long time ago, before you were born, I was someone who made bad mistakes. Mistakes that hurt people. I've spent a long time putting them right, and I'm not finished yet."
Louis considered this with the unblinking gravity he brought to all major disclosures.
"Okay," he said. "What kind of helicopter?"
And that was that, and Aislinn sat in a limousine between the two halves of her whole heart, listening to rotor specifications, learning eight years too late that she'd fallen in love with a billionaire because she'd ordered him to be a stuntman and he'd obeyed.
Their building did not improve with a limousine parked in front of it. It stood there in the late afternoon, three stories of tired brick and one broken buzzer, and Aislinn felt the old reflexive apology rise in her throat and made herself swallow it. Louis was already out and up the first step. Minna elected to stay with the driver, on the grounds, she said, that the vehicle contained her billable hours.
They were halfway up the outside stairs when Louis stopped, dug into his backpack, and held out a folded piece of paper to his father with both hands, formally, like a treaty.
"What's this, son?"
"A list."
"What kind of list?"
"Of the people who hurt Mama."
Aislinn gasped and snatched it away so fast the paper cracked, her face going hot, because she'd caught a glimpse, that was the horrible part, a glimpse of neat pencil columns with names and dates, her seven-year-old had been keeping records, but Valerio only smiled.
"It's fine. I've already memorized the list."
"You're lying," she said, half-laughing despite herself.
"Do you think our son is a genius by accident?"
"Well, he takes after me, of course."
"Of course," Louis and Valerio said, in perfect unison, right away.
She made a face at the both of them. "Very funny."
The apartment was one room and a half, if you were generous about the half. Aislinn had scrubbed every inch of it into submission, and none of that scrubbing changed what it was. A water stain on the ceiling shaped like Australia, a window painted shut by some previous decade, a space heater standing in for a furnace that worked when it felt spiritual about it, and a kitchen where you could touch both walls at once, which Louis had once described as efficient and she'd loved him so much she'd had to leave the room.
She watched Valerio see it.
She watched his eyes go around the room once, cataloguing, the stain, the window, the heater, the neat stack of secondhand textbooks, the twin mattress and the smaller mattress beside it, and she watched his face turn to stone by degrees, and it was Louis who cracked first, because apparently their son could not stand that face any better than she could.
Three years, she'd lived like this. Three years of flinching at a particular knock, of keeping the chain on even during the day, of doing the math on rent a week before it was due because being a day late meant a visit, and a visit meant standing very still in her own doorway being told how patient he was being, how understanding, how not every landlord would put up with a single mother, while his eyes stayed on her a beat too long, the way a man looks at something he believes he's owed and is simply waiting to collect. She had never told anyone how small that made her, not even Stephanie. She'd folded it up and carried it the way she carried everything, so it wouldn't become one more thing Louis had to be brave about.