Chapter 7 - The View from the Steps
The world around Violet moved in slow motion, smeared through the prism of her gathering tears. She watched her father’s face, unable to tear her gaze away from the spectacle of his joy. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and it was the most agonizing thing she had ever witnessed.
For two years, Violet had walked on the tips of her patent leather shoes inside the Moretti estate. She had learned to close doors without letting the latches click; she had learned to muffle her sobs into her down pillow at midnight; she had learned to hide her drawings of three-person families because seeing them made her father’s jaw clench into that terrifying, impenetrable iron mask. She had believed, with the quiet, devastating logic of an eight-year-old child, that happiness itself had died along with her mother. She had believed that the gray, suffocating silence of their home was simply the price they both had to pay for the hole left in their lives. She had thought her father’s heart was broken beyond repair, turned to dust and stone, incapable of warmth.
She had blamed herself in the secret, dark corners of her mind. If I were better at the piano, if I looked less like Mommy, if I didn't cry when the thunder came, maybe he wouldn't look through me like I'm made of glass.
Yet there he was.
The sunlight illuminated every crease of his smile, highlighting the warmth that flooded his handsome face. He wasn't broken. His heart wasn't made of stone. The capacity for joy had been there all along, buried just beneath the surface of his tailored shirts and dark tattoos, waiting for a key. But it wasn't Violet’s key. It had taken a five-year-old girl with a duct-taped backpack and an ordinary schoolyard riddle to break through the armor that Violet had spent seven hundred days trying to soften.
Beside her, two little girls in lavender uniforms giggled, whispering to each other as they hurried past toward their parents' SUVs, entirely unaware of the private tragedy unfolding on the steps.
May you like
Violet looked down at her dress. The rose chiffon, the sparkling tulle, the pink satin bows that she had spent twenty minutes tying in the mirror this morning—everything she had chosen in the desperate hope that he might look at her and say, You look pretty today, Violet. She felt ridiculous. She felt invisible. Her fingers squeezed her backpack so tightly that the decorative pink crystals bit into her palms, but she couldn't feel the physical pain; her chest was consumed by a cold, burning hollow that threatened to swallow her whole.
Down at the curb, Dominic’s laughter began to settle into a rich, lingering chuckle. He shook his dark head, his eyes shining with an amusement that seemed to strip away a decade of exhaustion from his brow. He looked down at Zoe, his entire posture relaxed, disarmed, and fully present in a way none of his closest associates had seen in years.
