The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 14
The next day, I went to a restaurant and ordered the barbecue I’d been craving for months, then bought myself my first-ever iced Americano.
A few weeks later, I was getting off my shift when I saw Marco standing outside the campus supermarket.
He hadn’t shaved, and his shirt was wrinkled. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
I brought him inside.
One of my coworkers glanced at him. “Friend of yours?”
I didn’t answer.
I brought a bowl of meatball soup from the staff meal counter and set it in front of him.
Steam rose between us.
He lowered his head, and his eyes reddened almost instantly.
“How have you been?”
“Good.”
It was the truth.
Here, if I wanted something, I could earn it myself.
All the things I could never have before, I could now buy, one by one.
I didn’t have to wait for permission slips to be honored.
And I didn’t have to wait for a protection that never arrived.
Marco was silent for a long time before he finally scooped up a meatball.
Halfway through eating it, tears fell into his soup.
“That night… the surgery… I thought you were just fighting for attention.”
“I saw you calling over and over. I even told Ava how quiet it got after I blocked you.”
His voice grew rough.
“Ms. Albright said your appendix was close to perforating.”
I slid a napkin across the table toward him.
I didn’t comfort him.
Before he left, Marco took out a bank card.
“There’s tuition money in here from Dad, Mom, and me. The PIN is your birthday.”
“You don’t have to come home, but don’t refuse the money. Back in Newark… they really miss you.”
I didn’t take it.
“The money they give Ava is part of a promise. It’s protection.”
“Every dollar they try to give me comes with a condition: that I go back and obey.”
I pushed the card back to him and turned to straighten the shelves.
From the day I walked out of that house, I had no intention of ever letting them use money to decide my place in the world again.