“No,” he said, and I looked up to stare at his determined face. “You will say nothing. I will do all the talking. They’ll never know it was you who shot him. No one will ever know that. Everyone will think I did it— Don’t interrupt me. For once, listen and do as I say. I couldn’t help you when it really mattered, but I can protect you now. That, at least, I can do.”
“But I’m not asking you to,” I said. “I killed him, and I’ll pay for it. I won’t let you go to prison—or worse—for something I did.”
“It isn’t something you did,” he said quietly. “It’s something I failed to do. And if you think I’d let my son be born in prison, you don’t know me at all.”
“It might not be a son.”
He tried to smile, but it died quickly on his face. “I won’t have my daughter born there either.”
Then he went out into the night, never to be the same man again.
Maybe if we’d had the money to get Luca a good lawyer, things would have happened differently. After he was arrested, I called up Caroline and asked if her husband could come down and help Luca. But old pocket-watch three-piece-suit told me he was a corporate lawyer and not a criminal lawyer, and when I asked him were there no criminals in corporations, he assured me there were not.
So the court appointed a lawyer for Luca. He was a nice boy, fresh faced and new to his profession. I think he really wanted to help us, but he didn’t have much experience and Luca wasn’t very cooperative. Knowing himself a poor liar, Luca was afraid to reveal too much and implicate me by accident. The lawyer was afraid to have a trial by a jury of Luca’s peers. Luca had no peers really because he was a foreigner, and foreigners made unsympathetic defendants in a part of the country where most of the people looked on anyone who wasn’t born and raised there as already suspect. So we gave up the right to jury trial, and everything was left up to the judge.
Until the very end, we kept hoping that Luca would be given a suspended sentence, and maybe he would have been, if not for the one question the judge kept coming back to time and time again: Why, if Luca had acted only to protect his family, had Aaron Hamilton been shot in the back trying to leave the house, and not once, but three times?
I could have told the judge some things. That Aaron had tried to rape me once before. That he had watched and waited and stalked me ever since. But why, Luca would want to know, hadn’t I told him any of this? In the moment I had told the big lie, I only saw that one lie. But it’s never just one lie and soon after, the whole spider web of lies I would have to tell presented itself. And even if I’d been willing to tell the truth belatedly, how could I explain why I’d done it? How could I explain that I had never wanted Luca to know those kinds of things really happened in the world, that I had wanted to keep him as one precious and apart from all the ugliness in Galen that only the initiated could see?
In the end, Luca was sentenced to ten years in prison, eligible for parole in five. But I knew as I listened to the judge read his sentence that a part of him, the part I had always loved best, would be imprisoned forever and would never come back to me even when the rest of him did.
They led us to a small outer room so that we could say goodbye before he was taken away. A guard stood by the door, trying very hard not to watch us but curious in spite of himself.
“I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see me now,” Luca said, the trouble darkening his blue eyes to navy. He looked so old to me, older even than that day he’d returned after the mine accident. “My father had such great plans for me in America. What great things I would accomplish here!” He laughed bitterly and motioned to the guard by the door. “And this is what I’ve become.”
I saw the pain in him and wished I could have taken it from him. I knew what to do with it. You held it at arm’s length and never let it touch you. But Luca didn’t know that, and he had taken it right into the core of himself where he would brood on it each day in prison, until there would be nothing left but the pain. “You haven’t become anything,” I said. “You’re still the man you always were. And five years isn’t such a long time.”
“It might as well be forever,” he said, and I knew there was no comforting him. He was still too young in his heart to take the long view about anything. “Something has changed, Darcy, something we’ll never be able to change back.”
“Don’t say that. Please. It’s like a knife in my heart to hear you talk like that. We’ll get through this. You’ll see. I’ll come to visit you as often as I can.”
He took my hands and held them against his chest. “One thing,” he said fervently. “Promise me you’ll never bring Rennie, that you’ll never tell her where I am.”
“But you can’t mean you don’t want to see her for five years.”
With his head in his hands, his words came out strangled. “Can’t you understand? She’s my child. Not an hour will go by that I won’t think of her.” He raised his head pridefully. “But she must never see me in prison, never like that. Promise me.”
“All
