Vendetta

“Falcone,” I repeated, Fal-cone-eh, my voice sounding very far away as I tripped over the word that had just changed everything.

“Yes.” There was a heavy pause, and then, delicately, my father asked, “Do you remember who Angelo Falcone was?”

It was a painfully unnecessary question. The name was seared in my brain forever.

“Of course I remember.” I rested my head on the cold metal table. I had looked at Angelo Falcone’s picture fifty times, and yet it hadn’t clicked. I had studied Valentino’s portrait of him and hadn’t even made the connection between his face and the man in all the newspapers when it happened. The man with Nic’s eyes. Oh God.

I lifted my head. “He’s the man you killed.”

“That’s right.” My father had placed his hands in his lap so I could no longer see them, but I knew he was fidgeting. If I concentrated hard enough, I could see the vein in his temple pulse up and down against his skin. He started to grind his teeth — it was a habit he had picked up in prison. For a long moment, neither one of us said anything, but every time his molars rolled against each other, I winced.

I would never forget that name or that day for as long as I lived. But we had never talked about it, not properly. Maybe it was time.

“It happened on Valentine’s Day,” I said, breaking the silence. I had gotten a card from Will Ackerman that day at school. He had slipped it into my locker during recess, with his phone number scrawled on the back. It had a teddy bear holding a big heart on the front, and on the inside, a short poem about how he liked my hair. It wasn’t the most impressive literary offering, but I could have died and gone to heaven right then. He had been my crush since forever, and all my friends were burning up with jealousy.

“Yes,” he said. “It was Valentine’s Day.”

“There was a storm,” I continued, my thoughts lost in another time and place. “I had a headache so I took some aspirin and went to bed early. I was just falling asleep when Mom burst into my room. She was crying, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me …” I trailed off. I could see it was hard for him to hear it. It was harder for me to say it, but I was going to, because someone had lost his life that night, and I was only beginning to understand the true gravity of it. Nic’s father was dead. And all I had ever fixated on was how my father had been thrown behind bars because of a mistake he made when he was in the grip of fear during a dark, stormy night at the diner. “Mom said you had been closing the diner on your own when a man ran out of the shadows and started yelling things. You thought he was going to try and rob the place, so you took out the gun Jack gave you for Christmas and you shot him.”

“And he died,” he finished.

“Yes,” I echoed. “He died.”

“And it turned out he wasn’t armed.”

God. “Right.”

“And the gun I used didn’t have a permit.”

It gets worse. “Oh.”

“I shouldn’t have been carrying it,” he said, frustration spilling from his voice. “But it was late and I was nervous. Your uncle had warned me about the gangs around Cedar Hill at that time and I thought I needed the extra protection. I thought that man was going to attack me.”

“So you shot him.” My expression was unreadable. Inside, I was ice-cold. “And now you’re doing time for manslaughter while Angelo Falcone’s sons — ”

“Are living in Cedar Hill beside my daughter,” he finished, biting down on his lip before a curse word slipped out.

I was clenching my fists so hard my nails were digging into my palms. “And you didn’t think to share this massive piece of information with me?”

“Jack and I didn’t want you or your mother panicking about it.”

I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. “So you thought it would be better if one of Angelo Falcone’s sons filled in the blanks?”

“I thought Jack would make sure you stayed away from them!” he countered, his mounting anger beginning to match mine. If we kept this up, I’d be asked to leave by one of the prison guards.

“You should have told me,” I said, lowering my voice. “I wouldn’t have freaked out. I could have handled it.” Probably. Maybe. Eventually.

“OK, what if you weren’t afraid, then?” he countered. “There was always the chance you might approach them, to try to apologize or make amends for what I did. I know you, Soph. You’ve got a good heart. It’s not foolish to expect something like that from you.”

“That’s crazy, Dad!” Maybe it wasn’t, but I was so riled up I wasn’t going to consider the chance he might be right. “And what about them staying away from me?” I hissed. “They came into the diner right after they moved in! A less cryptic heads-up would have been nice. I thought Jack was just being weird!”

My father shook his head and sighed, his expression defeated. “Maybe we should have gone about it differently,” he conceded.

“Yes,” I said. “You definitely should have.”

He watched me quietly for a moment. His eyes grew big and round until they dominated his weathered face; there was barely any blue left in them now, just stormy gray. “Sophie, now that you know the truth, please stay away from the Falcones, like Jack told you. There’s no knowing how deep their resentment toward me runs, or why they’re back in Cedar Hill again.”