Finch just chuckles. “Don’t blame them, baby. You told Marco yourself to take me wherever I wanted to go, didn’t you? Besides, he sent you his daily report on me already. It’s not his fault if you don’t check your emails regularly. And Celia, well, she just wants me to be happy.” He puts his fork down in his empty bowl and locks his fingers under his chin, looking at me. “What you don’t understand, husband of mine, is that you are my escape. Pops has no real interest in taking me away from you. In fact, he thought I might be useful; that I’d snitch on you given the chance. But I will never leave you. I will never betray you. And—” The phone starts ringing. “—now I’ll get to prove it to you.”
He puts a finger to his lips, signaling me to keep quiet, and then answers the call, putting it on speaker. “Hiya, Pops,” he says brightly.
“Howie. So Maggie got you the phone.”
“She did, Pops, and she told me there was some crazy plan for me to turn on Luca and somehow take down the whole Morelli Family.”
My hands clench into fists, and I grit my teeth to stop from saying anything.
After a pause, Howard Donovan asks, “Are you alone, son?”
“I sure am, Pops,” Finch replies. “And I wanted to tell you, forget the plan, okay? I’d rather be in New York than anywhere else on earth, and I’ll never be safer than I am now. Luca D’Amato is protecting me.”
“Luca D’Amato is a two-bit gangster who’s only got as far as he has because his Boss has a thing for him. The same Boss who had your mother killed.” Finch goes pale at that. “And now you’re telling me you’d rather suck Italian dick than avenge your mother?”
Finch puts his head down so I can’t see his face. “Are you really sure it was them, Pops?” he asks quietly. “You’ve never said before that it was them.”
“It was the Morellis,” Donovan says stubbornly. “And if you were any kind of man, you’d start that payback by killing D’Amato in his sleep. But I know you won’t. You’re soft, Howie. It should have been you that died that day, not your mother, bless her soul.” Donovan’s voice is rising, but cracks as he tries to shout. “God cursed me when he sent you into my life. Now you listen to me, and listen good! Don’t contact me or Maggie or anyone in this family until you’ve got something worthwhile to tell us!”
The line goes dead.
Finch sits there with his head down for a moment. I say nothing. I’m still trying to figure out if this whole thing is some scheme, something to make me believe again that Finch is on my side.
“Wow. You think he’s gonna write me out of the will?” Finch looks up, and his grin is full of pain.
This was no setup. I can see the truth of it in his eyes, the hurt, the bewilderment, the anger. He might have known deep down that his father was an asshole, but now he has proof definitive. Besides, he didn’t have to show me the phone. He didn’t have to tell me about any of this.
Finch stretches out his arms, hands flat on the table and looks at his wedding ring. “Well,” he says to it. “I guess I burned my last bridge. You get that, right?” He glances up at me. “You’re it, now. My last, best hope.”
“Morelli didn’t take out your mother,” I tell him. There’s something in me that just wants to see his pain ease. Make him see he made the right choice when he chose me over his father.
“You don’t know that. How could you? It happened years before you were even in the Family.”
“I guess I don’t know it,” I concede. “But I can’t believe it. Tino is old-school. He wouldn’t take out a hit on a civilian like that, and besides, the Commission would never have agreed to it. Something like that, taking out the wife of an Irish Mob Boss? Tino would have had to run it by the Commission, and they would have told him no. Too risky, too likely to stir up retribution. And Tino plays by the rules.”
Finch just shakes his head. “My Pops is no Mob Boss. He’s legit. We might have had ties back in the day, but—”
“Angel. Your Pops was head of the Donovan Family before your mother died. How do you not know this? He ran Boston for years. He got out after your mother’s death, but…” I stop, because the logic is coming around to bite me in the ass. If someone wanted Howard Donovan out of the fight, they found the way to do it.
But not Tino. I won’t believe it.
I want to keep talking about Finch’s mother, keep trying to figure it out, but I don’t want to press him. He’s had enough unpleasantness for one evening, and some of it has been at my own hands. I reach across the table and put my fingers over his. “I made a vow. I will protect you. Even against my own people, if it comes down to it.”
He nods. “I know you will. And I’ll protect you.”
I hide my smile at that, and then remind myself: there was a time, long ago, when he did protect me.
Finch stands and begins to gather the plates.
“That really was a good sauce,” I say awkwardly, following him back into the kitchen. “You gonna make that tomorrow night for—” I break off. Stupid.
“You can say his name,” he tells me as he begins stacking the plates in the dishwasher. “Make it for Tino? No, baby. I will not be forcing my attempts at a classic Italian pasta sauce on the Godfather himself.”
“I didn’t know you could cook.” I want to change the subject. He seems okay now, but who knows what the fallout of that phone call with
