Vendetta(61)

He perked up in his chair and regarded me seriously. I loved that about him — he had always treated me like an adult worthy of respect, even when I was a small child. I knew that meant he would answer me as best he could. “What is it, Soph?”

I decided to dive straight in. “Remember I told you how a new family moved into the old Priestly place? There are five of them and they’re all boys.”

His eyelids fluttered, but he kept his mouth closed in a hard line, waiting for me to finish.

“Well, I think you might know them.”

“Have you spoken to this family?” he asked, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Have they approached you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve spoken to them.”

My father buried his face in his hands and released a heavy sigh. “Jesus,” he said, half-muffled. “Jesus Christ.”

That horrible sinking feeling came over me again, pricking at my eyes and sticking in my throat. “Dad?”

“Sophie,” he said, but this time it was weary, and heavy with disappointment. He uncovered his face, letting his hands fall to the table with a heavy thunk. “I thought Uncle Jack told you to stay away from them?”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he came to see me when he found out they had moved in. And we decided — ”

“Hold on,” I cut in. “What do the Priestlys have to do with our family?”

My father double-blinked, his mouth twisting to a frown. “The Priestlys? Who are the Priestlys?”

“The — ” I stopped abruptly. My whole brain shifted. Think. Who were the Priestlys? We had all just assumed the connection between Nic’s family and the old house. After all, it had never been put up for sale, which meant it was inherited or passed down, surely. Even my mother hadn’t questioned it. But now …

“Sophie,” my father said, his voice so quiet I had to lean toward him. “I don’t know where you got that idea from, but they are definitely not Priestlys. They’re Falcones.”

He might as well have punched me square in the face.

I slumped backward in my chair. How could I have been so stupid? So ignorant? Luca was right. I was wrong. I had been wrong all along. They had never identified themselves as Priestlys — I had plucked the name from an old neighborhood legend and never thought to check whether it was true. The realization came upon me in a succession of lightning bolts. The Mediterranean complexion, the Italian dialogue, the Falcon crest. Nic’s face. Those damn eyes. The sudden hatred.

“Falcone,” I repeated, Fal-cone-eh, my voice sounding very far away as I tripped over the word that had just changed everything.

“Yes.” There was a heavy pause, and then, delicately, my father asked, “Do you remember who Angelo Falcone was?”

It was a painfully unnecessary question. The name was seared in my brain forever.

“Of course I remember.” I rested my head on the cold metal table. I had looked at Angelo Falcone’s picture fifty times, and yet it hadn’t clicked. I had studied Valentino’s portrait of him and hadn’t even made the connection between his face and the man in all the newspapers when it happened. The man with Nic’s eyes. Oh God.

I lifted my head. “He’s the man you killed.”

“That’s right.” My father had placed his hands in his lap so I could no longer see them, but I knew he was fidgeting. If I concentrated hard enough, I could see the vein in his temple pulse up and down against his skin. He started to grind his teeth — it was a habit he had picked up in prison. For a long moment, neither one of us said anything, but every time his molars rolled against each other, I winced.

I would never forget that name or that day for as long as I lived. But we had never talked about it, not properly. Maybe it was time.

“It happened on Valentine’s Day,” I said, breaking the silence. I had gotten a card from Will Ackerman that day at school. He had slipped it into my locker during recess, with his phone number scrawled on the back. It had a teddy bear holding a big heart on the front, and on the inside, a short poem about how he liked my hair. It wasn’t the most impressive literary offering, but I could have died and gone to heaven right then. He had been my crush since forever, and all my friends were burning up with jealousy.

“Yes,” he said. “It was Valentine’s Day.”

“There was a storm,” I continued, my thoughts lost in another time and place. “I had a headache so I took some aspirin and went to bed early. I was just falling asleep when Mom burst into my room. She was crying, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me …” I trailed off. I could see it was hard for him to hear it. It was harder for me to say it, but I was going to, because someone had lost his life that night, and I was only beginning to understand the true gravity of it. Nic’s father was dead. And all I had ever fixated on was how my father had been thrown behind bars because of a mistake he made when he was in the grip of fear during a dark, stormy night at the diner. “Mom said you had been closing the diner on your own when a man ran out of the shadows and started yelling things. You thought he was going to try and rob the place, so you took out the gun Jack gave you for Christmas and you shot him.”