Chapter 136 -
Christian found Lucia in the room they had been given at the end of the east corridor.
He knocked. He had stopped walking in without knocking sometime in the last two years, after the fight about it that he had technically won but had never felt good about. She opened the door, looked at him, and stepped back to let him in without saying anything. Gabriel was asleep in the adjoining room, the door half-open so she could hear him.
Christian sat in the chair by the window. Lucia sat on the edge of the bed.
"You told the Don about the backup location," he said.
"Yes."
"You didn't have to. You could have said nothing. Santiago is your blood. Nobody would have faulted you for staying out of it."
"Santiago killed Andrea," she said. "Andrea was my blood too before she was your Don's daughter, she was my cousin and my friend. We grew up in the same house for three summers when my mother was sick and the Don took us both in. She used to steal bread from the kitchen at midnight and bring it to my room wrapped in a napkin because she knew I didn't sleep well in new places."
She looked at her hands. "I stayed quiet for three years because I thought I was wrong, because Santiago was so certain and so calm and I told myself I must have misread something." She paused. "I didn't misread anything. I just didn't trust what I saw."
"You were twelve years old when you saw it," Christian said. "You were protecting yourself."
"I was protecting him," she said. "That is not the same thing."
The room was quiet.
"Lucia," he said.
She looked at him. There was a particular wariness in her face that had been there for most of their marriage, the look of a woman who had learned to brace for the wrong thing to come out of the next sentence.
"I've been thinking about the last six years," he said. "Not looking for someone to blame, just thinking about what actually happened, and what I was responsible for."
He stopped. "I married you because the Don asked it and you were willing and it made political sense. I told myself that was enough of a reason. That marriages built on less had worked fine. My own parents had an arrangement in the beginning."
He looked at the window. "What I did not do was ask what you needed. Or tell you anything honest about what I needed. I just expected us to settle into it and I got cold and difficult when we didn't. And then I blamed you for the coldness, which was a thing I put there."
She was very still now.
"I got angry at you," he said. "For not fitting into something you were never told the shape of, and that was not fair."
"No," she said. "It wasn't."
"I'm not asking you to forgive me tonight. I'm not asking for anything tonight." He turned from the window and looked at her directly. "I just needed to say it out loud at least once. That it wasn't your fault. The fighting, the distance, the way this has felt for six years. It wasn't you."
Lucia looked at him for a long time.
"You sat with Gabriel all night," she said.
"Yes."
"He told me. He came to find me in the morning and the first thing he said was that Daddy sat in the chair all night so he wouldn't be scared."
She held his gaze. "He wasn't scared, Christian. He said it the way children say things they want adults to believe. He just didn't want to be alone and he knew you needed to feel useful, so he gave you the reason."
She paused. "He's five years old. He managed you better than I have in six years."
Christian was quiet now.
"My son is a more careful person than I have been," he said.
"He gets it from somewhere. He gets more of it from you than you think."
Christian looked at her. That was not a thing Lucia said without meaning it.
"I don't know how to do this differently. I've been one way for a long time and I don't know what the other way looks like."
"Neither do I. I've been building walls for six years. I don't even know where they all are."
"Then we find them. Not tonight, but we find them eventually."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached over and put her hand briefly on the back of his, the way someone checks if something is real before they decide whether to hold on to it.
"Okay,"
"Okay what?"
"Okay, we find them. The walls." She pulled her hand back slowly. "But I need you to know it won't be easy. I've had six years of practice building them and I'm very good at it."
"I know," he said. "I built half of them."
"More than half," she said. But there was something softer in it than there would have been a week ago.
The door to Gabriel's room opened. He appeared in the doorway in his pajamas, hair flat on one side from the pillow, blinking at both of them.
"You're both here," he said.
"We were talking," Christian said.
"In the night. Hmm…"
"Yes."
Gabriel processed this. He looked at his mother's face, then his father's, performing a careful welfare check.
"Is it good talking or the other kind?" he said.
Lucia made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Good talking," she said.
"Okay." He rubbed his eye with his fist. "Is there food?"
"It is three in the morning," Christian said.
"Yeah, but I'm hungryyyyy…. Rosa's kitchen always has food."
"You are not going to Rosa's kitchen at three in the morning."
"But I said I'm hungryyyyy…."
"Gabriel."
"Papa." He looked at Christian. "I am a growing child."
The corner of Christian's mouth moved. He stood up and crossed to the doorway and looked down at his son.
"Come," he said. "I will find you something from the kitchen."
Gabriel took his hand without hesitation, the way he always had, as if it had never occurred to him the hand might not be there.
Christian looked back at Lucia over his shoulder .She was watching them. Something in her face that she was not trying to control, not trying to put away, open in a way she had not let herself be in a very long time.
"We'll bring you back something," Christian said. "If Rosa doesn't catch us."
"She'll catch you," Lucia said. "She always does."
"Probably," Christian said.
He took Gabriel down toward the stairs, the small hand in his, the boy talking in a low voice about the specific kind of biscuit he was hoping for.
Lucia sat in the room alone for a moment, then she got up and followed them.