Page 48 of The Devil's Demise

But with Aida, I can do anything. I couldn’t wait to marry her, and last month, I finally got the chance. My wife. That’s another title she now wears, and every time I relive our small wedding on Corvo Island, not far from the home we built there, overlooking the water, it brings me peace. It was the only thing on my bucket list which mattered—making her my wife.

“You okay?” Dante asks as we ride in the back of Dom’s SUV, heading to Dad’s grave.

“Yeah, I’m cool.” I jerk my chin up to him and he nods, accepting my answer. Enzo is here too, texting, probably with Jade. It’s nice to see each one of my brothers happy.

Some time ago, Dom purchased a plot in the same cemetery Mom is buried in. We may not have Dad’s body, but we could pretend. We needed somewhere we could go and visit. People need that—a way to connect to the ones we lost. It gives us closure, and none of us ever had that.

And me, I’m still trying. I see him on his knees in that warehouse like it’s happening all over again. Maybe one day these images will be more tolerable, less painful. But for now, I hold on to them. I’ll never forgive Agnelo and the Bianchis for everything they put our family through. It’s not something I’m capable of. But I could figure out a way to move on at the same time.

After the car stops, we hop out, each of us with a bouquet of fresh flowers for Mom—all different kinds and different colors.

It’s unfair that my parents weren’t buried together. They never bought plots beside each other, so there was nothing we could do about it, but they’re close enough.

“Hey, Ma,” Dante says, kissing his palm, then placing it against the gray headstone. We each say a few words, placing the flowers there, taking a few private moments alone to talk.

“I miss you, Mom,” I tell her when it’s my turn. “I wish you could meet Aida. You’d love her.”

In this moment, I look up at the sky, taking a long breath, and it’s as though I could see her if I look hard enough, there, above the clouds, looking down at us.

* * *

AIDA

The girls talk among themselves in the café, but I’m barely listening. Smiling at the right times, my mind drifts toward the past at the oddest moments. Like when I see a man walk in who resembles one of Agnelo’s men or when I hear a man’s voice and it sounds like one of the ones who hurt me. It’s like a string pulling me in, summoning me to the ugliness still embedded within.

It may have been a year, and I thought a year was a long time to get over it. That I’d find solace and healing by now. But I haven’t. Not really.

Everything takes time. That’s what my therapist likes to say.

Don’t rush it, Aida. Everything takes time.

But I’m impatient, I guess. I want to be okay. I want to be normal. Just a girl sitting in a coffeeshop, not thinking about ugly things.

Picking up my cappuccino, I sip, and I sip, and I sip some more, hoping to push down the past. But the pain? The reminders? They still wade up my throat.

I don’t know how long it took me to accept that we were safe. That the life we once only imagined is ours now. That he is mine and no one will take him away from me.

Being his wife, it brought on another layer of safety, like an invisible veil, protecting me. I know in reality it means nothing. We can still get hurt, be killed. But he’s my husband and I’m his wife, and that’s more than we thought we’d one day have.

Everything takes time, Aida.

I’ll get there. I’ll heal, together with the boy who always loved me, with the man who never gave up.

Helping Hand, the center Jade started, has been a place I find myself going to every week. Not just for the therapy, but for the women who are just like me. Our paths may have been different, but we’re all the same in more ways than we’d like to be.

I hear their stories in group, see the tears they shed, the bruises that will take time to heal. Because it does take time. I have to repeat that to myself like a mantra. Don’t rush it. One day at a time.

I’ve come a long way since the beginning, since that very first session when all I did was stare at the wall, hoping it would speak for me. Because how could I tell a stranger everything I went through? The things the man who I thought was my father made me endure. It was difficult. And when I didn’t talk, I cried. I cried so much, it became normal. Once the tears purged my soul, I began to speak, until the words fell out of me like the tears once did.

There’s freedom in giving that hurt to someone else. It felt like I was cutting it out and handing it to her in my trembling palm. I still felt the bruises on my flesh but I no longer carried the burden. And gradually, I gave her more and more, until I barely had any of it.

“Where shall we do damage next? The Jimmy Choo store?” Chiara asks, drinking her iced coffee while we take a break between stores. It was her treat. She’s a giver. I think it makes her feel that she’s doing something for us.

“As long as I can pick my feet up and sit my preggo behind somewhere, I don’t care,” Raquel says, a hand on her stomach. She’s due in three months and her feet have just started to swell, but she insisted on coming with us.

“We’ll sit you down on the sofa they got there and bring you a virgin drink of some kind,” Chiara adds.

“You okay, Aida?” Jade asks quietly, leaning into my side while Chiara and Raquel continue talking.

---