but never used, and crept in the dark down to the library.
There, she began to write it all down.
~ 19 ~
Elisabetta Pagano was buried on a snowy, frigid day in early January. By then the don’s patience with Alex sleeping each night in Lia’s bed had waned, and Alex had gone back to work in the warehouse, too, but he was still spending most of his free time with Lia, doing what he could to offer her and her family comfort and support.
Lia’s mood was uneven, running a serpentine gamut each day from tears to a facsimile of normal, settling most often into a sighing malaise. When he could get her away from the house for an hour or so, she did okay. He’d taken her and her sister and brother to the Quiet Cove boardwalk on New Year’s Eve, and they’d almost had a good time. Every now and then, they’d gotten caught up in the familiar First Night traditions and felt a moment or two of sincere enjoyment. But each one of those instances of forgetfulness was followed by a crater of remembrance and guilt.
He’d had cause to grieve in his life, too. He hadn’t grieved when his father abandoned them—he’d been too furious for grief, was still too furious for grief—but when his grandfather died, he’d been bludgeoned with loss and sorrow. His mother had, too. Helping her through her loss had helped him through his.
But what Lia and her family were going through, it was different. His grandfather had been old and sick. It was still sudden, maybe death was always sudden for the people left behind, but losing a grandfather was a thing one knew one would do someday. Losing a young person, who’d died in a flash of violence, that just wasn’t normal. It wasn’t a thing anyone could imagine they’d have to do.
Alex hadn’t known Elisa at all, but the grief in the Pagano house was so deep and thick, even he felt sad when he was there.
Lia’s mother was the nexus of it all. She’d been improving, becoming increasingly present each day, coming down from her room, finally showering and changing her clothes, trying to have meals with her family, being involved in the funeral arrangements.
Sometimes, she managed to have an almost-normal conversation with her husband, or one of their kids, or any of the multitudes of other family members overtaking the house. But the air was always different when she was near. Everything darkened and got heavy with the stultifying potency of her sorrow.
Don Pagano was stoic. Whatever was going on with the war was happening above Alex’s head now, which was fine with him. He was still shook from that night in the warehouse and had no need to repeat it again anytime soon. But the war took Nick away from his family for a few hours every day, and he came back with his jaw twitching.
When he was home, however, he was focused on his wife and kids. Over these days, Alex had lost some of his fear of the don—not his respect, certainly, nor his intimidation, especially not after seeing the rumors made real, but that fear of the unknown, of the bogeyman. Now, he also knew Nick Pagano as a husband and father. He knew him as a man who loved and grieved.
He respected him all the more, and it was rooted in something much more real than it had been before. Now Alex knew Nick Pagano was worthy of the respect and loyalty he commanded. He was more than a legend, or a bogeyman. He was a man.
Alex had been folded into the family patterns enough that he sat with the family during Elisa’s funeral. The church was packed solid, standing room only, but mostly with family and Pagano Brothers men and their families, and associates and friends of the don. Trey was there; he’d been discharged from the hospital the day before, and was apparently recovering well. But the effort of the funeral was obviously testing the limit of his healing. He was pale and stiff. His wife, Lara, sat with him, at the end of the pew. She always looked pale and stiff. Their son, who was three or so, sat quietly on her lap and watched his father as if he understood something wasn’t right.
There weren’t as many young people among the mourners as Alex would have expected for the funeral of a girl who’d had her twenty-first birthday not much more than