Chapter 181 Enrico

Chapter 181 Enrico
Enrico

Marco looked at me and said, “It’ll be fun.” He’d said plenty of things over the years, stuff that really mattered, like operational calls or risk assessments that affected a lot of people. I trusted him, mostly. But baseball? Not so much.

“Forty thousand people,” I reminded him when he first brought it up.

He just shrugged. “It’s Fenway,” like that was supposed to calm me down.

“Forty thousand people crammed into an enclosed space, one exit layout, zero sight lines.”

“Enrico, please.” He gave me that patient face he saves for moments when he knows I’m making sense but he’s dead set on ignoring all logic. “It’s a baseball game. People bring their kids.”

“People bring their kids to places I wouldn’t ever recommend.”

He bought the tickets anyway. So there I was Thursday night, wedged into Fenway’s lower deck, surrounded by forty thousand baseball fanatics, holding a beer I didn’t want and a hot dog Marco insisted I couldn’t skip.

At the concession stand: “You gotta have the hot dog,” he said.

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s tradition.”

“Whose tradition?”

“Everyone’s.” He’d already got two. “Just eat the hot dog, Enrico.”

I ate the damn hot dog. It was…fine. I kept that opinion to myself.

The game itself was a mess, jarringly loud one moment, crawling the next. It threw me. Long stretches where nothing happened, then pockets of chaos. Marco sat there with genuine interest, chatting up the guy next to us, Gerald, who’d apparently held season tickets for years and was more than happy to explain everything.

Marco listened to Gerald go on about batting averages with the same laser focus he brought to debriefs.

“You actually care?” I asked during one of the quieter moments.

“Of course. If you’re gonna do something, understand it.” He shot me a look. “You don’t want to know?”

“I get the gist.”

“Gerald says bullpen management this season… »

“Marco.”

He grinned, leaned back. Then: “This is nice.”

I scanned the field. The crowd. The ordinary chaos of a place that had zero overlap with anything we'd been managing for the past year. “It’s loud,” I observed.

“That’s the point.” He paused. “Nobody here needs us for anything.”

That hit instantly. Relief, forty thousand strangers, not a single one cared who we were or wanted anything from us.

He turned, suddenly thoughtful. “Tell me something.”

“About what?”

“Before Sal. You never talk about it.” He kept his eyes on the field, which helped. “I’ve known you eight years and I know nothing about who you were at twenty.”

I hesitated.

Honestly, I didn’t talk about before Sal. Not because it was some guarded secret, but because it never felt relevant, and because I’d left that version of myself long ago. But Marco was asking now, genuinely, not fishing for intel but actually wanting to know. So I answered.

“Angry. I was angry.”

“At what?”

“Everything you can think of.” I took a sip of beer. “When you grow up bouncing between places, never really fitting in anywhere, anger sticks with you. It's the only constant. Doesn’t go away.”

He waited.

“The fighting was the first thing I got right,” I said. “Not rage-fighting…technical. Focused. I got really still inside, really fast outside. People paid to see that.” I paused, thinking about it. “It was the first time I felt like I mattered. Maybe not the message I should’ve taken from it.”

He nodded, remembering. “Sal found you at a fight.”

“In a garage in Chelsea. I'd busted two ribs and refused to stay down.” I faced the field. “He said later it was the not-staying-down that caught his eye. Anybody can be tough if they’re unhurt.”

Marco's expression shifted. “He was good at finding people. He found me in Somerville. I was fifteen. My mom had died, and I had no clue what to do with myself. He sat across from me on this crappy plastic chair and said, ‘You’re Elena’s son. That means something to me.’ And I thought, at least someone thinks so.”

The game surged, crowd moved, but we ignored it.

“Those first years,” Marco continued, “trying to earn it, his trust, his approval. I’d finish a job, wait for some feedback, and he’d just nod and move on. And I’d think: Was that enough? Did I do it?” He sighed. “I spent so long trying to prove I belonged, I didn’t even notice when I stopped needing to prove it.”

“When did it stop?”

He took a moment. “Cincinnati job. When I came back, he looked at me like I’d always been right there, like there’d never been a question.” His voice softened. “I worked eight years for that look.”

Fenway churned around us.

“Do you miss him?” I asked.

He watched the field. “Every day. Especially when I’m lost and wish I could call someone who’s already figured it out.” He paused. “Do you?”

“Yeah. But I never would have told him about Isla.”

Marco turned, surprised. “Why not?”

I hesitated. “Because he would’ve been right to object, and I would’ve done it anyway. I don’t think I could face him through both.”

Marco looked at the field. Gerald chimed in with some excited comment.

“He knew, you know..before it all hit the fan. He said once…” Marco stopped, searching for the words.

“What?”

He looked at me.

“He told me: ‘The only person I’d trust her with completely is the one person I can’t ask to do it professionally.’ He meant you.”

The crowd erupted around a play we didn’t see.

We sat there for a while in the middle of forty thousand strangers, in a place Sal would never see. Carrying the particular weight of being known by someone who’s gone.

It wasn’t bad, though.

Honestly, it was the best kind.