CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
PRISON
The bus to Stateville Correctional Center was airless, the seats dank with years of enmeshed body odour. I curled up by a window near the back and flicked through the playlists on my iPod. I listened to Joshua Radin and watched Chicago fade into remoteness.
I arrived early in the afternoon. My hair was flat against my head where I had leant against the window to sleep. I wound it into a ponytail. My clothes were sticky. The humidity hadn’t broken yet and the heat outside was stifling. The sky was overcast, a thick blanket of blinding white pressing down on me. The air was charged, the ends of my hair floating with static.
A storm was coming.
Inside Stateville, the meeting room smelt like disinfectant. Three prison guards lined the walls, watching with glazed indifference. I tried not to catch their eyes, afraid they might see through me and find out the things I knew.
My father shuffled in to meet me. He was a little slumped over, like the act of keeping his head up required too much energy. He was still wiry and thin, with greying hair that flicked out behind his ears and dipped into big, grey eyes. They used to be bluer, like the ocean.
He lifted his head and his smile lit up his features. For a passing moment, he could transform himself into the father I used to know outside of these walls. ‘Sophie, it’s so good to see you.’
I wasn’t allowed to hug him, so I struggled with what to do with my hands. I settled on an awkward wave/salute.
We sat down. I was studying his face, his neck, his hands – any part of him that I could see – searching for signs of injury. He was studying me just as closely. It threw me a little. The bruises on my face had gone now, and the swelling around my nose had disappeared. I was paler than usual, but other than that, my injuries no longer marked me. Still, he knew about them now, so it made sense that he would try and search them out.
There was a crack running down the back of my plastic chair. It dug into me and I shifted, trying to get comfortable. There was no point. I folded my hands on my lap, searching for the right words. How should I begin? How much should I say?
The discomfort on his face mirrored mine and I almost smiled at how similar we were. He dipped his head and gave me a look. The room around us faded, until it was just the two of us, secured in our own little bubble. He dropped his facade and his face crumpled.
His words tumbled out. ‘I know what happened, Soph. Your mom told me.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I said, lacing my fingers together in front of me. ‘Jack’s an asshole.’
Grief etched itself into the planes of his face, pulling them down until he looked old and weary. ‘I’m so sorry. That’s all I can say. I am sorry all of this has happened to you. I’m sorry your life was in danger and I wasn’t there to help you. I’ll never forgive myself.’
Something settled deep inside me, burning, and I had the sudden urge to clutch at my stomach and rip the feeling out.
‘You don’t have to say sorry,’ I said, sounding angrier than I had meant to. But I was angry with him, about what had happened, about the mess he had made for all of us. ‘It didn’t have anything to do with you.’
He dropped his head into his hands. ‘You’ve been through too much. And I wasn’t there. I’m never there.’
I looked at the crown of his head, where tiny white hairs were beginning to sprout beneath the grey and brown. ‘Dad, I’m fine.’ No thanks to you. I didn’t say it though, I couldn’t be cruel.
He lifted his head. ‘You’re not fine. And neither is your mother. She’s terrified, and I don’t blame her. I’m trying to give her advice but she won’t listen to me. She’s angry at me, Soph. And she has every right to be, but she’s not coping and I’m worried about her.’
‘You and me both.’
I asked the question that needed to be asked, the one flashing at the front of my brain. ‘Have you heard from the man of the hour?’
‘Not yet.’ My father’s breath whistled through his nose. When he spoke again, his words quivered with anger. ‘The things he’s done, the position he’s put you and your mother in. He was supposed to keep you safe in my absence, not risk your lives.’
‘Did you know?’ My fingernails were digging into my hands, making crescent shapes in my skin. ‘Did you know what he was up to all that time?’
‘No.’ I had barely finished my question before he snapped out his answer. ‘Of course I didn’t know.’
‘Did Mom fill you in on everything?’
‘As much as she could,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about my girls.’
‘Well, I want to talk about the drugs and the Golden Triangle Gang and everything else that’s put us in hot water. I want to talk about everything you missed.’ So I did talk about it. I told my father everything that had happened up until the warehouse shoot-out – I told him about Jack’s shadiness, about the drugs and the gang he had been a part of, how he walked my mother into the warehouse, how he stood over me and tried to kill the Falcone underboss. I talked until my voice nearly ran out. I talked until I was sure I had toppled Jack over in my father’s mind, until I was sure he saw the cold, hard truth about his little brother.
Then I let up, breathing long and deep, as a small weight shifted inside me and I felt less bound up than before.
My father, who had been listening intently, unblinking as he watched me, straightened in his seat. ‘Soph, I promise I’ll make him pay for endangering you and your mom,’ he said. ‘I’m so disappointed in him – in his choices, in the path he’s chosen. I should have cut him off long ago.’ Compared to all the words I had just hurled at the space between us, his answer felt like nothing, but I could see how his face had changed, how everything in his brain was slotting into different places. He was completely wrung out. He scrubbed his hands against his forehead. ‘But I can’t get to him. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.’
That was the moment. Indecision flickered inside me. To tell or not to tell. To stir or not to stir. But I needed guidance. A plan for when Jack came back – I needed my father to intervene so I wouldn’t have to. So I decided to give him this chance to step up and protect us, the way he’d said he would. ‘I know where he is,’ I said, without batting an eyelid. I sat back in my chair, instinctively pulling myself away from him in case the force of his reaction was too great. ‘Jack’s with the Marino crime family.’
‘No,’ he said, quickly. ‘No way.’ Well, that answered the question of whether he had heard of the Marinos before. ‘Jack would never be so stupid. He would never openly consort with the Marinos.’
‘He is,’ I insisted.
My father shook his head.
I pressed on, determined to push Jack from whatever pedestal my father had placed him on. ‘I don’t know what he’s offering Donata Marino but he’s with them, I swear. He’s not even hiding it.’
‘God,’ my father exhaled. He looked like he was about to pass out. He raked a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. ‘After everything. To do something so dangerous. What is he thinking?’
It didn’t really feel like he was talking to me any more, but since I had the answer, I figured I’d supply it.
‘Protection,’ I said. ‘That much is obvious. The Falcones want Jack dead, so he’s hiding with the one family who will happily go against them.’
My father’s eyelids fluttered at half mast. He looked genuinely ill rather than angry. I slid my hands across the table as close to him as I could without touching. I willed my strength into him. ‘Do the Falcones … do they know where Jack is?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ My brain flashed with scenes from Eden. ‘They’ve known for about a week. There was a … showdown of sorts … It was on the news,’ I tacked on, deciding that telling my father I was actually there would be the world’s stupidest mistake. He’d freak out, even more than he was now. ‘I know Jack was there, though … someone I know saw him.’
He recoiled from the information, his eyes growing wide. ‘He was at the Eden shoot-out?’
‘You heard about it?’
His eyes were darting, panicking, as he processed the information that his only family in the whole world apart from my mother and me was now in the middle of the city’s most dangerous blood war. Jack was courting violence and murder, and my father couldn’t get to him – he couldn’t be the protective big brother he was used to being. Jack was on his own.
‘Of course I heard, Soph. Donata Marino’s teenage daughter was just murdered by the Falcones.’ My father indicated behind him in the general direction of the prison. ‘Franco Marino is serving his sentence here. He howled the walls down. A Falcone was murdered in his cell yesterday morning, but nobody’s talking.’ My father composed himself, his mouth turning hard. ‘Listen to me, Sophie, I need you and your mother to leave Cedar Hill immediately.’ He lurched forwards, his hands thudding on the table. ‘Leave the house, leave the diner and get as far away as you can.’
‘What?’ I hissed. ‘But that’s your place. That’s our place. I can’t just leave it.’
He grabbed my hands and squeezed them. ‘Soph, right now, I need you to leave it behind. And I need you to do it tonight.’
A prison guard shouted at us to separate. I snapped my hands away.
‘When you get home, pack your bags, pack your mom’s bag, get in the car and drive.’
I could have crushed the table beneath me. Here was the father I needed, the man who wanted to keep us safe, and he was stuck behind bars barking orders at me. I was so frustrated, so scared. And I felt utterly alone. I was starting to feel wobbly, like my head wasn’t properly attached to my neck. He had just asked me to do the impossible. We had no money, no destination. All we had in the whole world was our house and the diner. That was it.
‘Mom won’t leave. She’s just getting her life back on track.’
‘She’s not.’ His expression turned grim. ‘She’s not sleeping, she’s not eating properly. Her conversations are erratic. She’s having flashbacks. She’s afraid to leave the house. She’s not holding it together, Soph.’
Every word was like an ice pick in my heart. If he had managed to tell how shaken she was without even seeing her, then maybe she was even worse than I thought. ‘She won’t listen to me,’ I repeated.
‘You’re the only person she’ll listen to. You’re her reason to get up in the morning.’
‘Dad,’ I said, half-hushing him. I watched the veins in his temples bulge. ‘You’re panicking. You just need to calm down.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, clenching and unclenching his fists. ‘You don’t understand how powerful these families are, how close you are to everything now Jack’s tied up in it all.’
‘I do understand,’ I insisted, my own voice turning hard to match his. ‘Trust me, I get it.’
‘Then leave,’ he urged. ‘Before it’s too late.’
‘And what about you?’ I asked, knowing he wasn’t safe in prison after all. Even inside, they could get to each other if they wanted to. A dead Falcone attested to that. And if Jack slipped up, then who better to punish for it than his only brother?
‘I’m keeping my head down, Soph.’ He dipped his head as he said it, too.
‘Five minutes!’ shouted a guard.
Dammit. There was never enough time.
‘Promise me, Soph.’ He took my hands in his.
We were yelled at for contact and I pulled away, scrunched my hands into fists.
‘I—’ I paused. I was thinking about Millie, about the diner, about my bedroom, about the garden that was just beginning to look like a garden, about my school, about my father stuck inside these dangerous walls … ‘I’ll try.’
‘You won’t try,’ he snapped, the urgency of everything catching in his mood. ‘You’ll do this for me, Soph. This whole shitstorm has only just begun. If you stay in Cedar Hill, you’ll be swept up in it. You need to lie low until they burn out from coming at each other. Until a boss is dethroned, until there’s a ceasefire. Until they get the hell out of your town.’
He was right. This was the advice I had come for – what I needed. I had allowed myself the illusion of walking away, but I hadn’t taken any steps; I had only shut my eyes. The truth was, I was stuck between the two sides of this Mafia war, caught up in their murders, in their plans, in their anger, and my heart clenched fearfully for both of them. Something was coming. I could feel it, as though the earth was bubbling underneath my toes, and sooner or later it would burst through.
‘OK.’
The guard was calling time on our meeting. All around us, chairs were screeching away from tables. We stood up. ‘I don’t know when I’ll get to see you again, Dad.’ I felt a sudden overwhelming sense of desperation at the thought of being so far away from him. My breathing started to hitch and I had the most unpleasant sensation in the backs of my eyes.
He pulled me into a hug. ‘I love you, Soph.’
‘I love you, too.’ They were wrenching him off me and pushing him into line. I stumbled backwards. I didn’t notice the tears until they started dripping down my neck. My palms were sticky and it felt like there wasn’t enough space in my lungs to inhale.
I ended up outside the prison without remembering how I made it there. The humidity enveloped me, creeping into my hair and underneath my clothes. My legs felt like lead as I walked.
I sat down on the bench and waited for the bus. The air was heavy and it wasn’t just the promise of rain. Jack and Donata were on the move, and that meant I had to be too. I couldn’t be a sitting duck.
I was so caught up in a stream of anxiety and fear, trying to come up with the right thing to do and the best way to tell Millie – how we would afford it – if we even could do it – that I wasn’t paying attention when the bench creaked and someone sat down beside me. He slid an arm behind him and lazily tilted his body towards me, until the sudden flash of black hair and olive skin in my peripheral vision, coupled with the familiar waft of his aftershave, struck me.
‘Sophie Gracewell, fancy meeting you here.’