A week without Sera in my bed, and I was getting ready to crawl out of my skin. I was sick. Not from my liver injury—I’d recovered from that. Just a twitch of pain here and there. The doctor cleared me for the gym. Light lifting. I should’ve been happy as fuck, but I wasn’t.
I was sick—sick of not having my wife’s affection. It was killing me. I didn’t sleep well without her. I tried getting in her room the first night, but somehow she’d rigged the door so it wouldn’t open. That pissed me off so much, it caused me more sleepless nights.
I was a zombie by morning.
I felt like one.
Sera still accompanied me to my checkups but she didn’t coddle me like she used to. I would have been relieved if we weren’t in this place of limbo.
And my whole family was conspiring against me.
Renz most especially. He sent me an invoice marked paid for the goods Sera ordered for the Merciful Sisters of St. Rita charity. That was the other thing that had been occupying my wife in the last week. She didn’t even ask if I wanted to come and help her. She brought Trevor. Granted, he was her assigned bodyguard, but it still pissed me off.
Everything about this was pissing me off.
I screeched into the parking space behind Jabbin’ Java. I got out of the vehicle, getting ready to have it out with my brother. If this was a leftover grudge from five years ago, then it was time we faced it. No way was he fucking over my chances of reconciling with my wife.
I found him in the kitchen.
He was taking out a sheet pan from the oven and I tried to ignore how good it smelled. My stomach had been queasy since the night Sera found out the truth about my scheme with Daniel.
Renz smirked when he saw me.
I tossed the printout of the invoice. “You’re rubbing this in my face, huh?”
“Trying to get your attention.”
“For what?”
He crossed his arms. “I don’t like to see you floundering. I’ve decided to give you a hand.”
“Don’t do me any favors.”
“Fuck you,” he said, but there was no heat on his face or in his words, just sympathy. It made me feel worse. “You drop Sera off here almost every morning and you couldn’t find time in your day to find out what she’s doing?”
“She doesn’t want me anywhere near her.” My voice rose.
“So you’ve given up on your marriage?”
My fists clenched. “I’m giving her space,” I roared.
Liz walked into the kitchen. “Tone it down. People can hear you on the floor.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry, babe.”
Liz looked at me and then at my brother. “It’s way past time you two put what happened behind you.”
Then she walked out.
Renz stared at me.
I stared at him.
He whipped out his phone and shot off a text. Afterwards, he said, “Come on.”
“Where?”
He didn’t answer but walked into the café and told Liz, “I’ll be on the rooftop with Matteo. Becca will be in at ten. The muffins are fresh from the oven.”
“Got it.” Liz gave me a look I couldn’t decipher.
Without waiting to see if I was following him, Renz pushed out the side entry door that led into the building’s hallway. There, we ran into Dad walking out of The Grindhouse boxing gym.
Shit.
He raised a brow. “Where are you boys off to?”
“He’s helping me winterize the plants,” Renz said.
Dad fixed the towel he had around his neck and dabbed at his forehead. “I’ll walk you guys up.”
“Dad,” I said tightly. “This is between Renz and me.”
“I left my gym stuff at the apartment,” he told us as all three of us headed up the stairs. “I’m waiting for Ava and Sam to come back from the park.”
I knew Liz and Renz decided to keep my niece home since possible threats from Santino still loomed. Keeping an eye on the youngest in school would have been hard. Last we’d heard about the state of the Galluzo leadership, Santino was meeting resistance from Vincenzo’s supporters. Gustavo had also gone to ground. Dom told me the bloody skirmishes between the two sides had spilled to the streets and in broad daylight that the Italian government and the general public were taking notice. Something the rest of the underworld didn’t want and why the Archer Syndicate existed.
“Thanks for watching out for Sam. The season is getting busy, ” Renz said, then glancing my way, he added, “That’s largely in part to your wife and Ivy, by the way.”
“If you want to expand Jabbin’ Java, let me know,” Dad said. “Your mom and Sera were talking about it the other night.”
“This is the first I’ve heard about it,” I muttered. I was glad at least that Sera hadn’t shut out my family.
“You were at the office,” Dad said.
When we reached the third floor, Dad paused at the apartment doorway. “I have some things to say to you myself—”
“Dad, if this is about the Mancini situation—”
“You will listen,” he told me in a voice he hadn’t used in a long time, letting me know it brooked no argument. He was still Cesar De Lucci, a man feared and respected by the underworld and above it. “I’ll come find you guys later.”
He didn’t wait for my reply and entered the apartment, shutting the door.
Renz and I stared at the closed door. Then we looked at each other.
“This better not be some kind of intervention,” I said.
“I don’t know, bro, do you need one?”
We went up the stairs that led to the roof.
“I don’t need one. I know what I’m doing, especially with the Mancini thing. Dad is letting his friendship with them color his judgment.”
My brother pushed the rooftop door open, letting us through.
We walked over to where a couple of pots sat in the middle of raised beds.
My brother gave me a pointed look. “Can you manage twenty pounds?”
“I can fucking carry more,” I answered. “I’ve been cleared to go back to the gym.”
“Sera is okay with that?”
“If she’s not, I wouldn’t know,” I said testily. “She doesn’t give a damn what I do now apparently.”
“Move that one.” Renz nodded to the rosemary bush while he lifted the bigger one, eyeing my suit. “You should change into something else.”
“I’m fine.” I did, however, shed my jacket, and rolled up my sleeves.
“What exactly are you doing to fix things between you two,” he asked.
“She won’t talk to me.” I lifted one of the pots. Then I remembered what she asked me. “Well, scratch that. She said she’s tired of opening up about herself and too guarded to ask me for more.”
Renz didn’t say anything. He returned to his planters and instructed me to help move them closer to the wall surrounding the stairs. On our third round trip, I spotted the hand-truck that was leaning against one of the raised beds. “Couldn’t you have used that?”
“It’s good exercise. What’s the matter? You don’t wanna get your hands dirty?”
“You’ve seen me with the Jaguar.”
“Waxing your precious sports car and polishing the leather is different from getting your hands in good old dirt.”
“I’ve changed basic parts under its hood.” I ignored his reference to soil because fuck him if he thought I should be like him. “I don’t mind grimy hands.”
“Good,” he said. “Liz wants one of the raised beds to have tulips. Plant those bulbs in the corner. That’s not too hard for you, right?”
“Stop with the sarcasm and stop with the hedging. Why exactly are we up here? What’s the point? Are you going to help me figure out what I need to do with my marriage or not?”
Renz sighed.
“What’s that sigh for?”
“Brother,” he said. “I’m trying to help you figure things out, but you’re not helping yourself if you’re not willing to stop questioning everything I’m asking you to do because what I’m going to challenge you with is a lot harder than planting bulbs in a raised bed.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not pulling a Yoda-Luke on me, are you?”
Renz barked a laugh. “Maybe.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Must be hard taking advice from me.”
My eyes slitted further. “What do you mean?”
Renz gave another annoying deep exhalation. He looked into the distance before returning his gaze to mine. “Because I’m younger. Because you think you’re the older brother who should know what’s right for everyone.”
“That’s not true. I asked you what I should do that night Sera found out.”
“Grudgingly.”
I dragged a hand down my face. “Okay. Maybe.”
He propped a shoulder against the wall. “What do you think of my rooftop garden?”
“That’s a trick question, right?”
“And there, I think, is another one of your problems.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I think Dad might be better to talk to about it.”
“You’ve talked to Dad about me?”
“No. But I’ve discerned enough from conversations between you, Nico, and Dad,” he said. “But just to clue you in a bit…not everyone is out to get you.”
I wanted to retort, but it made me stop and think. Was Renz telling me that I was imagining the prejudice I felt with the older Italians? Fuck that. But I didn’t want to argue with him about this.
“And I didn’t need a college degree to see that,” he added, eyeing me carefully. And there it was, the conflict that had been festering between us. “Do you love Sera?”
I was a coward. That night before everything went to shit, I was finally going to say the three words that were still missing from our marriage. The three words I needed to hear from her too.
“Dammit, Matteo, you’ve never told her, have you?”
“Before I proposed, I admitted I might be falling in love.”
He shook his head. “And after? Why are you so fucking stubborn?”
“Let’s just say, I’m not as impulsive as you.”
“Oh?” He crossed his arms. “We’re digging up that thing now, are we? All right. What was it that you told me that started this whole shit between us?”
I forced those damning and, now, stupid words from my mouth. “I told you you were too young to know what love is. And you’re using the De Lucci myth to explain your recklessness.”
“Recklessness? Or my raging hormones that got Liz pregnant?”
The words continued to spill out of my mouth. “I told you you didn’t have to marry her and you punched me.”
There had been a brawl. I had insulted the woman he loved. It took Nico and Dad to pull him off me. It didn’t end there. “I’m sorry I called Liz a gold digger.”
My chest was suddenly too tight—as though I was having a heart attack. Through the years I’d seen how my unfair assessment of Liz was way off the mark. Renz was the lucky one. Despite what she had gone through because of us, she was so forgiving and sweet yet so strong. “If I could take back those words. If anyone insulted Sera, I don’t know if I’d let that person live.”
“You’re lucky you were my brother or I would have buried you six feet in the ground.”
I stared at my shoes. “I just wanted you to go to college.”
“I know. You were looking out for me and I was too bullheaded to see where you were coming from.” He put his hand on my shoulder. In this moment, he was the one with wisdom, and I was the one floundering, not knowing how to win back the woman I loved. “Have you forgiven yourself?”
My eyes lifted and connected with his serious ones. “I thought I had, but every time I see Liz’s limp—”
“We were both at fault. Dad didn’t want me to leave the security of the De Luccis when things were so hot with Caruso.”
“But I’d been such an asshole…” I scrubbed my face. “Forgive me, Lorenzo,” I said. “I don’t think I ever apologized.”
He gave me a sad smile. “We both had to live and learn. I was barely eighteen, and you were twenty-three. Your mind was on education and continuing our legacy and my goals were so far from it. I think that was why Dad and Mom didn’t force us to fix our shit. We had to learn to do it in our own time. I had to prove that I did the right thing by sticking up for the woman I loved.”
“I don’t think I ever told you, and maybe I was in denial,” I said. “But seeing what you’ve done to this place? I’m so proud of you.”
“Well, shit.” His face split into a grin. “Forget the tulip bulbs. Let’s have a beer and celebrate.”
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“What, you’d rather talk to Dad?”
“We’re in the process of airing out our shit anyway, might as well get it out of the way.”
My brother’s grin grew wider. “I have an idea.”
“I was not expecting to have my elbows deep in dirt,” Dad muttered.
He was exaggerating, of course, but Renz got him to bring us beer as well as hoodwinked him into helping us plant these blasted bulbs and winterize his garden. Honestly, college degree or not, my brother had the negotiating skills of a De Lucci.
“You boys got your issues squared away?” my father continued as he pushed one tulip bulb into the soil.
“You can say that,” Renz said. “Why do you think we’re drinking beer this early?”
Dad wiped a brow. “Because it’s goddamn hot up here. It’s weird to be winterizing.”
“It’s only for today,” my brother said. “We’ve been in a deep freeze this past week and the upcoming week is looking the same. Stop arguing, old man. You’re as argumentative as this one here.”
“Hey, don’t rock the boat.”
“How are you and Sera doing, son?” Dad asked suddenly. “I didn’t see any thaw at breakfast this morning.”
“He’s giving her space.” Renz’s mouth twitch with suppressed amusement.
Dad and my youngest brother exchanged a look.
“What?” I gritted. “That’s the right thing to do.”
“How’s that working for you?” Dad asked in a tone that didn’t leave any doubt he expected it not to be working.
I held back an expletive and said instead, “Are you saying I shouldn’t have allowed Sera to sleep in another room?”
“Space is fine.” Dad took a swig from his beer. “But in the meantime, what are you doing to win her back?”
“It’s hard to win her back when she’s not receptive.” Every time I repeated that statement, the ache in my chest manifested into physical pain. “She has it in her mind that all that transpired between us was built on lies, therefore, all that we’re feeling right now can’t be trusted.”
“Have you made an effort?”
“Of course I have, but things she wanted to know wasn’t things I was ready to share…but.” I dug a hole in the dirt, plopped a bulb in it, and glanced at Renz. “I wasn’t ready to talk to her about what happened between you, Liz, and me because that wasn’t my proudest moment.” But the next breath I exhaled made me feel lighter.
“Then she’s a godsend,” Dad said. He rose and moved to the shaded area by the stairwell and slid down to take a seat against the wall. He waved the beer bottle between the two of us. “Both of you made mistakes. It took a lot from Ava and me not to interfere because we thought in time the issues would work themselves out. And it did, but admittedly, it was at a level where things weren’t back to where they used to be. I’m not sure if they ever will be, but this…” He pointed at me. “You, Matteo, needed to feel exactly what Renz feels for Liz. That’s something you won’t understand until you have someone like Sera to show you.”
“I fucked it up, Dad,” I said. “She’s been avoiding me when it’s just the two of us.” Sera would show up for breakfast at the sunroom. She halted all relationship talk on the drive to Jabbin’ Java. That was the only time I had her to myself and the only condition I would never bend on. I would pick her up at times, but there were days when she would make an excuse to go home with Trevor. They were mostly the days she spent at the soup kitchen and I was too caught up at work. I worried that would become a repeated excuse so she could continue avoiding me and I would lose the chance to see her in the evenings. “By the way, she didn’t like me freezing her out when she saw that Mancini report.” I glared at my dad. “I’m telling you, that deal was cursed from the start.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” he sighed.
“What is there to talk about?” I argued. “They couldn’t come up with a good business plan. I have a developer lined up ready to pay top dollar for the land.”
“It’s your call, but that vineyard has been in the family for over fifty years.”
I was getting frustrated with my father. “We’ve gone over this a few times. It’s simply not profitable. Mrs. Mancini was asking—no—demanding for another loan like we’re her checking account. They’ve been given two years more than what we’ve given other companies. So what else do you want me to do?”
“So it hasn’t sunk in.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Why do you think I kept insisting you give her a chance?”
“To piss me off.”
“No. To face your prejudice.”
My head reared back. “I’m prejudiced?”
“Son, what happened when you just started in the business…what you perceived as a snub in dealing with you had nothing to do with you being half Italian but everything to do with your lack of experience at that time.” I was about to argue when Dad fixed me with his stare. My mouth tightened and I continued to listen. “You rode too much on the De Lucci name, thinking it would automatically open doors for you. You got too cocky and I mistakenly thought my friends who were my business associates would give you a chance knowing that I was behind you.” He smiled briefly. “I had every faith in you and maybe I’d been too cocky too because you’ve done nothing but try to learn the ins and outs of the business since you were eighteen. Maybe I put too much pressure on you.”
“You’ve never told me this before.”
“Because I refused to see it,” he replied. “Don’t get me wrong, I agree with most of your decisions, and I’d probably agree with the Mancini account as much as it would put a strain on almost fifty years of friendship between our families. But this thing with Gustavo affects you. His prejudice with you has nothing to do with you being half Italian but more of the reputation you’ve acquired in the past few years, especially in his business circles.”
The Raptor of Commercial Real Estate.
I was aware that several of the takeover deals I had overseen had been friends of Gustavo.
When I didn’t say anything, Dad shook his head and gave a wave of his hand. “Your mom feels the same as you, by the way, regarding Mancini.”
My mouth curved. “At least I’m not imagining it.”
“All I’m saying, Matteo, is in this business, there’s a difference between greed and need.”
“Greed is good.”
“Don’t spew the Gordon Gekko bullshit.”
“I know, Dad.” Mom was passionate about the teaching moments of the Wall Street movie. She told us to think very hard before taking away a person’s livelihood. Was it because of need or greed?
Greed was when you wanted more to the detriment of others.
Greed was when you had so much of something but you felt it was never enough.
Hunger on the other hand was a need. Hunger was a need to satisfy something elemental to your existence.
I hungered for Sera.
I needed her for my survival.
I loved her.
“How do I get my wife back?”
Dad’s brows rose and then his face softened, but before he could say anything, Renz cut in, “How soon do you want things to get back to normal?”
“Is that even a question? As soon as possible.” I felt like I was functioning without a limb or a beating heart. I was dead inside. “But at the rate I’m going, it’s not looking very good.” I drained my beer and sat beside my dad so we were both facing Renz. I twirled the empty bottle on the cement floor.
“Find out what makes her happy.”
I smiled faintly. “Lobster rolls.”
“Seriously, bro, is that all you know about her?”
“The charity she supports is close to her own need to save her uncle’s soul.”
Renz looked at me strangely, whereas Dad chuckled, indicating he understood this particular oxymoronic behavior related to crime families.
“Then that’s what you need to understand, son,” Dad said. “You know what she likes to eat. You know her passion for charities that might be related to her guilt of belonging to the Moretti crime family.”
Renz was still staring at me strangely. “You made her fall for you in three weeks. You married her.” He let those words hang before adding, “You can do it again.”
“With how this is going, it might take months. She has so much confusion about what’s real and what’s fake.”
“Do you have the patience for that?”
“Honestly? I’m losing my damn mind.”
“I have a radical suggestion,” Renz said.
“I’m all for any suggestions.”
“You’re not gonna like it.”
“How is it worse than my current situation?”
“Oh, it’s going to be worse.”
I frowned at my brother. “Lay it on me.”
He told me.
It was worse.
