After Cecelia and Ramirez leave, we have thirty minutes until the kids get off the school bus.
Thirty minutes to weasel the truth out of my husband. “Enzo,” I say. “We need to talk.”
He bows his head. “Millie, I am so tired. We need to talk right this minute?”
“Yes, we do.” I fold my arms across my chest—I am not about to let him off the hook this time. “We have been married for eleven years, and all of a sudden, it feels like there’s quite a lot I don’t know about you.”
“I have told you everything important.” “And you get to decide what’s important?”
He stumbles back to the living room and collapses onto the sofa. “What? Do you need to know every detail? Everything I did from the day I was born?”
I follow him back to the sofa and sit down beside him. “No, but if you were some mobster’s henchman, yes, that is something worth disclosing.”
“I was not henchman.”
“So what sort of work did you do for this guy?” “Nothing. Errands.”
I give him a look. “Errands? You mean, like you fed his cat when he was out of town and picked up his dry cleaning? Is that what Cecelia was talking about?”
“What do you want me to say?” He sits up straight but won’t look at me. “I was just a kid, and I made a terrible mistake working for an awful person. I wanted out, but then he was dating my sister, and it was not so easy to get out. And then he married her, and then what could I do?”
“So what did you do for him?” I ask. “Did you go after people who owed him money and break their kneecaps?”
He snorts. “You watch too many movies. Nobody breaks kneecaps.
That is ridiculous.”
“Gee, I didn’t realize you were so knowledgeable,” I retort. “Millie ”
“Okay, so nobody breaks kneecaps. What’s better? What do you break when you want to get some deadbeat to pay back a loan, huh?”
He’s quiet for a long time, looking down at his lap. Finally, in a low voice, he says, “Fingers.”
Oh. My. God.
“Millie.” He raises his eyes. “I am not proud of this. Believe me. It is all my fault that Antonia is dead. If I hadn’t started working for Dario when I was a stupid kid, she never would have married him. She would still be alive.” His Adam’s apple bobs. “I have to live with that. It eats at me every day. That’s why when anyone else needs help I must ”
I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying the terrible thought going through my head. That if he was shaking people down and breaking their fingers (or worse), maybe this is karma coming back to bite him.
“Tell me,” I say, “did you ever kill anyone for him?” “No. Never! I have said that to you.”
“Well, you said a lot of things that turned out not to be true.”
He flashes me a wounded expression. “I was only trying to protect you.”
Bullshit. He concealed so much of his past, and I can’t believe I’m only finding it all out now. He had so many opportunities to tell me the truth. And he knows everything about my past, which isn’t exactly idyllic. I have plenty of skeletons in my own closet.
He could have been honest. He could have told me everything. He chose not to.
“I never killed anyone.” His voice breaks. “I would never. I did not kill Jonathan.”
I look into his eyes. The first time I met him, I couldn’t believe how dark they were—it sent a chill down my spine. But then years later, when we stood together in the courthouse, vowing to love each other until death did us part, I looked into those same eyes and felt nothing but love for this man. I trusted him. He was going to be the father of my child, and I knew with all my heart that he would take care of us. He would do everything in his power to protect us.
I’m not sure how it all went wrong.
Because I feel more and more certain that Enzo has been lying all along.
