Page 72 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
She called the doctor. She brought soup. She stayed two days, sleeping in a chair and pretending not to notice the nightmares that made me cry out.
She never asked what I was running from.
But she held my hand when the fever broke. After that, something changed.
I wasn't just surviving anymore.
I was building something and doing it with the purpose of a mother.
I worked as long as I could.
Saved every coin.
Bought a secondhand crib from a neighbor with twins and took sewing jobs on the side.
I lied at the clinic, said I was a widow from Messina and that I had no family left.
They gave me prenatal vitamins and a calendar.
I read every book I could find. I taught myself lullabies I didn't remember learning.
And when he came, screaming and perfect, with eyes that held the entire ocean in their depths, I knew I'd made the right choice.
Now, five years later, he runs barefoot across this beach with my curls and Enzo's mouth, laughing at the sea and daring it to chase him.
The sun spills gold across the shoreline, warm and diffuse, casting the sea in the kind of glow that makes it hard to remember what fear feels like.
Gabriel crouches at the edge of the surf, scooping fistfuls of wet sand into a crooked mound that keeps caving in on itself, but he doesn't mind.
He's humming something to himself, absorbed in the rhythm of his work, his cheeks flushed and his little hands sticky with grit.
There's a concentration on his face I know too well.
It's his father's face when deep in thought, that same intensity softened by youth and a kind of gentleness I never imagined I would raise.
For a moment, I just watch him, committing every detail to memory, because I know better than to believe that peace is permanent. It never has been, not for people like us.
I shift on the faded blanket spread beneath me, the fabric patterned with blue hibiscus and the salt-stiff corners of a dozen similar afternoons.
The breeze smells of kelp and citrus.
Gulls drift lazily overhead, and the waves curl in long sighs across the sand, but beneath it all, there's a stillness in me that doesn't quite settle, a quiet ache lodged too deep to dislodge.
I've built a life here, one I never thought I would be strong enough to build alone, and yet the cost of that choice sits beside me every time I look into Gabriel's eyes.
He glances up now, abandoning his sandcastle, and pads over with bare feet and sunburned knees.
"Mama," he says, sliding into my lap and wrapping his arms around my neck with the fierce confidence of a child who knows I will always hold him.
His voice is soft but certain. "All my friends talk about their fathers coming home from work and playing with them. They have their fathers read stories before they sleep."
He pulls back just enough to look me in the face, searching for answers I've never been able to give.
"Why does my father never come back from work, Mama?"
My breath catches.
There is no way to explain to a five-year-old that his father is a man forged by a kingdom of blood and loyalty, that the love we shared was buried beneath the ruins of a war we could never win, not together.
