Always.
EPILOGUE
THEY NAMED THEIR daughter after the two people they’d loved and lost too young. Every day, Giuseppa Rocca LaRosa brought her parents a joy that eased the grief that never fully went away.
When their son was born, they named him after the man who’d first showed them that revenge did not really matter when you had a life worth living. Renzo LaRosa was a terror, from the moment he was born kicking and wailing.
“He will either save the world or end it,” his uncle Lorenzo had said on his fifth birthday. A bit darkly, but with the kind of love a family bonded by grief and joy understands is the most important thing.
Teo had needed some time to fully sink into that, believe in it, allow himself to express that same kind of love, but with every passing year it got easier. As his daughter grew into a charming young woman, so like her mother. As his son turned into a man who would indeed save whatever worlds he chose.
As his wife never left his side, no matter what they gained, or lost, or fought over.
As he built a relationship with his two half brothers and their mother, so that even they became something like family. As he reached out to the family his mother had hidden from for their own good, and gave them the gift of answers.
Every Parisi gathering grew larger, louder and more boisterous as the years went on. Until it was the loudness and the love overflowing in every room that became Teo’s normal, rather than the small, quiet love of his childhood.
Teo appreciated them both. Grieved what he’d lost, and loved what he had in every moment with everything he was.
He rarely thought of his biological father, even when he was with his brothers, and felt only an odd, distant kind of satisfaction when Dante got himself into enough trouble with embezzling business funds to lose his business and spend some time in jail.
But mostly, he did not care what the man did. He only cared that, year in and year out, he had finally kept the promise to his mother he’d made as she’d died.
He lived a good life. A happy life. With more love than any one man surely deserved.
