Russo Blood Debt Chapter 10
The Voicemail
Three months in.
Russo Imports has filed for Chapter 11. The brownstone is on the market. The clinic where my daughter died is closed pending a state investigation that my father’s lawyers helpfully encouraged.
Dante has moved into a one-bedroom in Long Island City.
He’s selling everything.
The watches. The cars. The art his mother collected. Nonno’s signet ring went to a buyer in Singapore last week. He didn’t even haggle.
He drinks. He goes to the cemetery. He sits at the grave with my name on it and he talks to the dirt.
Some days he brings flowers.
Some days he brings a bottle.
Some days he brings nothing and just sits there for nine hours until the groundskeeper makes him leave.
Gia tried to stage an intervention. He threw her out of his apartment. She hasn’t been back.
I haven’t watched the cameras in two weeks.
The revenge stopped being satisfying around the time Bianca walked out with her check. After that it was just — administrative. My father’s people doing their jobs. Boxes ticked.
I sit on the terrace in Tuscany and I do not feel triumphant.
I feel — empty.
A specific kind of empty I cannot fix by buying things or running the Family or sleeping with men who don’t know my real name.
My father comes out with two coffees and sits beside me.
“Cuore.”
“Sì, Papa.”
“Are you done.”
I think about it.
“Almost.”
“What’s left.”
I don’t answer.
What’s left is a phone.
The phone is in a drawer in my bedroom. It’s the phone I had during the marriage. The number is still active — Papa’s tech consigliere keeps it forwarded to a server, and the server records every voicemail Dante has left on it for ninety-three days.
There are forty-seven voicemails.
I have not listened to a single one.
That night, after Papa goes to bed, I take the phone out of the drawer.
I sit on the edge of my bed and I listen to all of them.
Most are short.
“Cara. I miss you.”
“Cara. I sold the Maserati today. You always said it was too loud.”
“Cara. I went to confession for the first time in twenty years. The priest told me I have to forgive myself. I told him to go to hell.”
The last one is from yesterday.
It’s longer.
“Sera. I know you can’t hear this. I know.
But I needed to tell someone, and there’s no one left, so —
I sold the rest of it today. Everything. The brownstone, the last of the company, the warehouse on 38th. There’s a number now. A real number. Enough to live on.
I’m splitting it three ways.
A third goes to a charity in your name. Maternal mortality. The hospitals where women like you bleed out because nobody comes. They’ll put your name on a wing.
A third goes to Bianca and the boy. He didn’t ask to be born into this. He shouldn’t pay.
The last third —”
He laughs. It is the worst sound I have ever heard come out of him.
“The last third is for me. Just enough for a plot. Right next to yours.
I bought it last week. The groundskeeper looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I am.
Sera. If there’s a next life — and the priest says there is — I’ll find you. I’ll be the dog. I’ll be the chair you sit in. I’ll be whatever you want.
But I don’t get to come back as a man. Not after what I did.
I love you. I never said it enough. I love you.
Goodnight.”
The voicemail ends.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark.
I do not cry.
I have not cried in ninety-three days.
But I sit there for a long time, holding the phone, thinking about a man I used to know — who held my belly on the couch and felt our daughter kick, and laughed, and said she’s going to be tall like you —
And I think about the same man, three weeks later, telling a nurse to adjust the dose.
Both of them are real.
That’s the part nobody tells you about people. They are all of it. The man who feels your daughter kick and the man who lets her die are the same man. You don’t get to keep one and throw the other away.
I put the phone back in the drawer.
I close it.
I go to the window.
The vineyard is silver in the moonlight. The grapes will be ready in three weeks. My father will host the harvest dinner. Old families will come. Suitors will be politely arranged. I will smile and pour wine and talk about ports.
I am twenty-eight years old.
I am the heir to one of the Five Families.
I have everything.
Tomorrow I will fly to New York, one last time, and I will look at the man who killed my daughter, and I will let him see my face.
Then I am done.