“Maybe he doesn’t want anything,” she said calmly. “Maybe he’s just hurt. Maybe he’s just heartbroken. Maybe he doesn’t know how else to channel that pain. Maybe yelling at you gave him closure on what happened.”
“No. I think it opened the hostility again.”
“Think about it.” She scooted to the edge of the cushion and rested her arms on her knees. “Vanessa is the closest thing he’s ever had to family. He resented her for the life she had. He wanted to kill us because of the life we took away from him. And then you did it again when you took away Vanessa.”
I wasn’t following her. “What’s your point, Button?”
“He’s a very strong man. He’s very powerful and successful. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who expresses a lot of emotions. But this is something that has always haunted him, that’s always bothered him.”
“What, exactly?” I asked.
“Family,” she whispered. “He doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t have somewhere he belongs. Maybe he doesn’t even understand that’s what’s missing, but it clearly is. He’s angry at you because you took his mother and father away. Then you took Vanessa. You keep taking everything away from him, and he can’t stand it anymore. He doesn’t want you to have that power over him. He wants you to…”
“What?” I asked.
“He wants to be part of our family.”
“As in, he wants to marry my daughter?” I asked, not following Button’s thought process.
“Well, yes. But that’s not what I mean. Crow, when I first came here, I was scared. I was in a foreign place, and I just wanted to go home. But as I grew comfortable here with you and Cane, I realized there was nothing waiting for me back home. You became my family. Cane became my family. And then we made our family grow.”
I understood that well. I understood that I gave my wife everything she’d been missing. When we had Conway, she told me that her life finally felt complete, that she filled the void she’d been carrying around. Once she became a Barsetti, she finally found the place where she belonged.
“He wants to be part of our family, Crow.”
I dropped my gaze and looked into the scotch again. “I told him I accepted him for my daughter. I shook his hand. I thought we moved on. Why is that not enough?”
“Accepting someone is the bare minimum, Crow. Make him feel like he belongs here.”
I squeezed the glass, wanting to shatter it. “I’ll never forget what he did for our family, but let’s not forget what he did to Vanessa. Let’s not forget the reason we hated him in the first place.”
“People change, Crow. I think he’s proven to us that he’s not the man we once despised. He’s proven that love changed him, that Vanessa made him into a great man. The two of you are a lot alike…whether you choose to see it or not.”
I finished the glass before I set it on the table. I didn’t deny her claim, knowing the similarities were striking. Griffin and I both were hard criminals who only turned soft when we found the right woman. There was no doubt in my mind that he wasn’t a threat to my family, that he would treat Vanessa right and protect her. But I refused to admit that fact out loud.
“You can’t apologize for what you did. But you can move forward and change the relationship.”
“Button, I don’t think he wants a relationship with me. He made his feelings for me very clear…”
“It won’t happen overnight. It’ll take time. But you need to start somewhere.”
I didn’t even know where to begin. I didn’t know how to talk to him. I didn’t know how to relate to him. It was easy with my kids because I’d raised them. They were younger versions of Button and me.
“Crow.” Button kept her blue eyes on me.
I met her look, my jaw tight.
“If you want to make this right, that’s what you need to do. After what he’s done for us…I think he’s earned it. It’ll finally end the blood war for good, and we can start a new chapter.”
If someone told me that my greatest enemy’s son would be part of my life, I would have said that wasn’t possible. If someone told me he would love my daughter, I would have refused to believe that. It was reality, but even now, it was still hard to believe.
“We all need to make him feel welcome in this family,” Button said. “But it needs to start with you.”
Twenty
Bones
When I woke up that morning, I rolled on top of Vanessa, fucked her, and then got out of bed. I did my workout in the living room, hopped in the shower, and then sat at the kitchen table in my sweatpants while I read the newspaper. A mug of hot coffee sat on the table in front of me, and I sipped it as the sunlight slowly filled the apartment with the rising sun. Now that the painting was out of our lives, I finally felt comfortable in the space. The painting she replaced it with was one she’d made of me.