Chapter 86 The Day I Met You
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO•••
The grave was new enough that the earth over it was still dark and loose, not yet settled into itself. Someone had placed flowers at the head of it, wildflowers, the kind that grew at the edge of the tree line rather than anything bought or arranged and they had already begun to wilt.
The boy sitting in front of it had been there long enough that the knees of his trousers were soaked through from the wet ground, he didn't move at all to fix this. He was four years old, maybe five, small for whatever age he was, and his eyes were so swollen from crying that they had taken on the puffy, half-closed quality of someone who had been at it for hours. It had gotten to the point where he had no more tears to shed and his face just settled with an expressionless guilt.
He stared at the mound of earth and said nothing.
The footsteps that came from behind him were unhurried, it was the footsteps of a man who was not trying to sneak up on anyone but was also not announcing himself loudly. The man moved calmly as he approached a child who might bolt. His footsteps stopped a few feet back.
"How long do you intend to sit there?"
The boy's shoulders tightened but he didn't turn around.
"I've been watching you for a while now," the man said. His voice was not unkind but it was direct, it had a gentleness in it. "You've been here since before the sun settled. That's a long time for anyone. Longer for someone your size."
The boy turned his head then, slowly. He looked at the man behind him with eyes that were red and swollen and underneath all that swelling, it was burning with something that was not grief alone. Still, it was too blurry to make out anything beyond shapes.
The man looked back at him.
He was not an old man, not yet, somewhere in his middle years with a face that had been shaped by weather and experience into something honest rather than pretty. He was looking at the boy with the specific attention of someone who had seen a great many things and had learned to read them accurately, and what he was reading in this child's face was something that made him pause for a moment.
“I’m Matteo. Mind telling me your name?”
No response.
"You know," Matteo said, "the people who did what they did to your mother. They'll come looking for you next. You understand that."
The boy's jaw tightened. On a four-year-old's face, the expression was both out of place and completely legible.
"You're not afraid of that," Matteo said, and it was not a question. "You're angry about it. That's different." He paused. "The anger makes sense. I'm not telling you it doesn't. But anger at your age, with no one behind you and no roof over your head and the people responsible for your mother's death still walking around with their full strength, that anger will get you killed before you're old enough to do anything useful with it."
The boy looked at him with those burning, swollen eyes and said nothing.
Matteo crouched down to his level, one knee up and one down, bringing himself closer to the boy's height.
"I knew your mother," he said. "Not well. But enough to know she was not a woman who deserved what happened to her. And I know that you sitting in front of this grave for the rest of the day won't change what happened or bring her back or get you any closer to the people who did it."
The boy looked at the grave and then back at Matteo. His voice, when it came, was rough from hours of crying and hoarse from the cold air. "Then what will?”
Matteo looked at him for a long moment.
"Time," he said. "And becoming someone they will regret having made an enemy of." He held the boy's gaze. "But not yet. Not now. Now you are a child sitting in the mud at a grave and if you stay here much longer you will either be found by the wrong people or you will make yourself sick, and neither of those outcomes helps anyone including your mother's memory."
The boy's eyes went back to the grave. Something moved across his face that was the specific expression of someone trying very hard not to cry again.
Matteo waited.
"I want to make them pay," the boy said. His voice was very small and very certain at the same time, which was a combination that Matteo found he did not have a simple response to.
"I know you do," he said.
"They killed her."
"I know."
“She was always kind to everyone.”
“I understand.”
"She didn't do anything."
"No," Matteo said. "She didn't." He was quiet for a moment. "And I am not going to tell you that what they did was survivable or that you should let it go or that she is in a better place or any of the other things people say in these moments because they don't know what else to say. I won't insult you with any of that."
The boy looked at him.
"What I will tell you," Matteo continued, "is that revenge pursued by a child is not revenge. It is a death wish wearing revenge's clothing, and the people who killed your mother would look at you running toward them in amusement, they would not be afraid. They would laugh. And you would be gone, and your mother would have no one left who remembered her face or the sound of her voice or anything she ever said to you." He let that settle before continuing. "The best thing you can do for her memory is survive. The best revenge you could ever take on people like that is to become a man who belongs entirely to himself, who answers to no one he hasn't chosen to answer to. Who builds something they could never take from him because he built it on ground they don't control."
The boy stared at him.
"That kind of man," Matteo said, "is the thing they don't know how to fight. They know how to fight anger, they know how to fight grief. They have been fighting both of those things for years and they are experienced at it. But a man who is free in himself and has chosen his own life?" He shook his head slightly. "That is something else entirely."
The boy was quiet for a long time. The forest around the grave was still, the evening light coming through the trees at an angle that had shifted considerably since the morning, and the wildflowers at the head of the grave moved slightly with the wind.
The boy looked at Matteo with those eyes that were swollen, burning, and full of hurt, he stared at Matteo's face, taking it in. He wondered if this adult in front of him was telling the truth or telling him what he wanted them to hear.
Whatever the boy found in Matteo's face seemed to satisfy something.
He looked back at the grave. He put one small hand flat against the top of the mound, against the dark loose earth, and held it there for a moment in a silent promise. Then he took his hand back.
He stood up.
His trousers were soaked through at the knees and there was dirt on his hands and his face was still carrying everything the last several hours had put on it, but he was standing.
Matteo looked at him and nodded once.
"I can't promise you it will be easy," Matteo said. "I can't promise you the anger goes away or that there won't be days where what happened here feels as fresh as it does right now. I won't promise you things I can't deliver." He paused. "What I can promise you is that I'll take you in. You'll have a roof and food and someone who won't let the wrong people get to you while you're still too small to stop them yourself."
The boy looked at him with cautiousness but also quiet gratitude as he shuffled a bit closer to Matteo.
"Though, I have one condition," Matteo said.
The boy frowned a bit, as if to say that he knew this adult man wasn’t being kind for nothing, but he waited and listened.
"You let the revenge go. Not forever, not necessarily. But for now. You don't chase it, you don't make decisions around it, you don't let it be the thing that drives you while you're in my care. You grow up first and grow up strong." He held the boy's gaze. "I’ll train you. After all, it’ll be a foolish waste of years, going after people with nothing but anger and no preparation. I've watched men do it. I've watched what happens to them." He shook his head. "And, you're too interesting to waste."
The boy looked at him for a long moment, still frowning. Then he said, "You don't even know me."
"I knew your mother and her brother and the people who did this to you," Matteo agreed. "Plus those eyes?” He smirked. “I’ll make you the strongest warrior they’ve ever seen.”
The boy looked away. Looked at the grave one more time. He didn’t know this man. Whether he was an enemy or someone simply bluffing.
But the words felt genuine and he’d already been kicked out of the pack.
His stomach growled loudly and he looked back at Matteo, still with a little frown.
He didn't say yes despite seeing the knowing smirk on the older man’s face. He didn't say anything. But he didn't say no either, and Matteo appeared to understand the difference.
Matteo shifted his weight and the boy noticed for the first time what he was carrying.
He had been so focused on the man's face and the words coming out of it that he had not fully registered the bundle at Matteo's chest, held in the crook of his left arm with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to it. A bundle of cloth. And inside the cloth, visible now that the boy was looking properly, was a baby.
He lowered himself to let the little boy take a good look at the baby.
Not a newborn. A few months old, past the earliest stage, with a face that was settled into the peaceful quality of a baby in deep sleep, the hands curled loosely and the mouth slightly open.
The boy stared at it, and Matteo watched the frown fully let up from his face.
"She'll need a friend," Matteo said. His voice had changed slightly, something in it now that had not been there in the previous conversation. Something that went deeper than practical. "Growing up in this world is complicated enough. Growing up in this world without someone beside you who actually knows who you are is harder than it needs to be." He looked at the baby and then at the boy. "I'll need a son. She'll need a companion. And you'll need somewhere to put all of that living you're going to be doing for a while."
The boy looked at the baby.
And as if feeling his attention, the baby stirred. The small hands moved, and then the eyes came open, taking in the light and the trees and the man holding her, and then the small face in front of her that belonged to the boy looking at her with his swollen red eyes and his dirt-covered hands and his soaked trouser knees.
The baby yawned then completely looked at him.
And then she smiled.
It was the full-face smile of a baby who had not yet learned to be selective about joy, the kind of smile that had nothing calculated in it, and then she laughed, a small delighted sound at whatever she found funny about his face, and the boy stared at her and something happened in his expression that had not happened in it since before the morning.
The burning went quiet for a moment.
Just a moment. Just long enough for something else to be there instead.
Matteo looked at the boy, and the expression on his face was one he did not show to many people and was not showing to anyone in particular now, just wearing it in the privacy of a clearing beside a new grave with no one watching except the boy who was too distracted to notice.
“Tell me your name, child.”
“Maddox…” the boy muttered, too focused on the baby.
"This is my daughter," Matteo said. "Grace."
The baby laughed again at the boy's face, reaching one small hand out toward him, and the boy looked at her and then looked at Matteo and then looked back at her.
Then, he lifted his hands and let her grab his pointer finger. The baby giggled and immediately took it to her mouth.
Maddox quickly pulled away, he knew his fingers were dirty and didn’t want her getting sick.
It was a hard feeling to explain, but he felt the impulsive need to keep her safe.