“Zoey, itis—”
The video call ends before I can finish my sentence, and I press my hands to my mouth while I lean way back in the chair.
The silence in the room stretches again until Meyer mumbles, “God damn, Vin. You really fucking did it this time.”
I shove out of the chair again and whip around to face him. “Don’t you think I fucking know that, Meyer?” I flatten both palms against my chest. “I fucking know. Making me feel like shit over it ain’t gonna help—”
“You know what, just shut the fuck up,” Meyer snaps, shoving me as hard as he can against my chest. He catches me off guard, and I stumble backward, bumping against the mahogany bar behind me. “This is exactly the fucking problem. This is alwaysthe fucking problem, and it’s you.” He thrusts his finger through the air toward my face. “When you’re insecure or scared or someone hurts your stupid fuckin’ feelings, you turn into the fucking Hulk and rip them to shreds, even though youare always the fucking problem. She probably didcatch that shit from that sketchy-ass guy who drove her back to Texas, and maybe if you’d controlled yourself, she wouldn’t have gotten in the car with him. But you can’t control yourself. You’re a loose fucking cannon, and this time, you’re not gonna be able to fall back on talent and fake as fuck charisma to avoid the consequences.” He points at the laptop. “Because the consequence this time is that poor womandying. Just like Lenny Weissman. Just like Chuck D’Alessio. Just like Frankie Torrio. So if you feel like shit right now,good. Feel like shit. Maybe this’ll teach you that hurting people ain’t gonna make you stop hurting.”
He’s not wrong about any of that. Right now, all I want to do is fuck something up. I want to hurt somebody. Because inside my mind, all I can hear is Ava’s tiny, little, exhausted voice. All I can feel is the part of my soul that’s tethered to hers stretching and pulling and on the cusp of snapping in two. All I know is it’s entirely possible that sheis pulling away from this world, and nothing has ever hurt this much.
I have no idea what to do right now, and I simply leave the room. I march through the house, and climb up the stairs, all the way to the room she shared with me. I lock the door behind me and locate my iPad, then open the FaceTime app, and start calling her.
She doesn’t answer. I call again. Still no answer.
I call over and over and over and over again, I never get an answer, but I keep trying.
I must be pestering the nurses because one of them answers after about an hour.
I can’t even see this woman’s face due to the amount of protective equipment she’s wearing, but I can see the look of exasperation in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mr…?” she prompts.
“De Luca,” I say, staring her down and daring her to hang up on me, “Vincent De Luca.”
“Mr. De Luca, Ava’s asleep right now.”
“Then prop me up next to her bed and leave me there.”
“She really needs to rest,” the nurse counters.
“I’ll let her sleep,” I assure her. “But you need to let me watch her in case she wakes up. I need to be there when she wakes up.”
The nurse exhales loudly, and the screen of the iPad scans the room until it sits still while focused on Ava sleeping. “Very well. Stay quiet until she wakes up on her own, or I’ll mute you.”
“I will.”
Gratefully, Ava’s face is turned toward the camera, and that makes me feel a little better. I can see the subtle, intermittent flinch of her eyelids as though she’s deep in the middle of a dream. Her long, black eyelashes lay flat against the skin just above the apples of her fever-flushed cheeks. Her long, warm brunette hair is wild and spread haphazardly across the pillow under her head. A plastic oxygen mask obstructs the view of her nose and mouth, but I don’t need to see either to remember what they look like.
Everything about her is beautiful, and right now, she’s so tragically beautiful that I can’t help drawing the tip of my finger across the screen as I imagine myself stroking her cheek and her lips and kissing her with every ounce of longing that’s threatening to drown me.
I recline on the bed, propping up the tablet on my chest, and I miss her, and miss her, and miss her. And I don’t say a word out loud because I know she needs to sleep, but in my mind, I promise her over and over thatwhenshe makes it through this—because shewillmake it through this—that I will hitchhike all the way to Austin if I have to.
When she makes it through this, there will never again be a single doubt in her mind that I love her and that there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. That I will spend the rest of my life proving to her that there’s nothing I want more than her. That I’ll give up everything just to be with her if she’ll have me.
That I’m now convinced that everything I’ve worked so hard to achieve was just a vehicle to make our lives intersect and meld together into one.
That everything I survived had only one ultimate purpose: that I would find her and make her mine forever.
Twenty-Four
Lucky
I stayedon FaceTime for as long as I could stay awake, and I was awake for nearly twelve hours after calling Ava. After dozing off and shaking myself awake, I saw that she was still sleeping and figured I’d take a break to get some sleep.
I slept for about five or six hours, then woke up, showered, and dressed before repeating the process of maniacally calling again, this time using the FaceTime app on my phone, until one of the nurses answered.
“I’m sorry, Mr…” this nurse prompts just like the previous one.
“Vincent De Luca,” I say, staring at the screen while I carry the phone out of the room and through the hall and down the stairs, “and I know Ava’s asleep, but the other nurse left the call going so I could see her. I need to see her when she wakes up.”
