Chapter Nineteen Falling Stars

CHAPTER NINETEEN FALLING STARS

It was just after 2 a.m., and the house was silent as I crept along the darkened hallway on the third floor. Before I could psyche myself out, I knocked on Luca’s door.

No answer.

‘Luca?’ I said softly.

Still nothing.

After a minute of waiting, I decided to indulge my rudeness. I was too antsy to go back to my room. I was too nervous to sleep another night without talking to him, without trying to bridge this strange distance between us – especially after tonight.

I opened the door, still knocking to alert him to my presence. The room was dark, the only light streaming in from the moon outside. I couldn’t help thinking of the last time I had been here, of how tightly Luca had held me to him, of how passionately he had kissed me. That seemed like a world away now.

The room was much bigger than I remembered it. I had never really studied it before. It was about three times the size of mine, with a line of bookshelves, a desk, two wardrobes and a king-size bed. It was cream, with artwork hanging around the walls – contemporary prints I didn’t recognize. There was one with a melting clock, another one of a ship made of strange butterflies. The room was unexpectedly neat, and even the bed was still made.

His phone was on his bedside table, the time showing on his home screen. It was 2.13 a.m., and Luca Falcone was nowhere to be found. The window was wide open. I peered out to where the roof plateaued before tapering off to a three-storey drop below. And there he was, right on the edge of the roof, his legs stretched out in front of him, his weight resting on his elbows as he looked at the sky.

Luca was watching the stars.

Seriously. This guy.

I clambered out of the window, my knees wobbling until my feet found purchase on the roof. I slipped and caught myself on the ledge, cursing under my breath.

Luca’s head snapped towards me. ‘Sophie?’ he said, bewildered. ‘What are you doing out here?’

I offered him an awkward half-wave as I crouched in front of the window to get my balance. ‘Um, star gazing?’ I said. ‘Mind if I join you?’

I couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness, but he tilted his head to one side. ‘Suit yourself.’

I scooted towards him, crab-walking with my hands and feet.

‘It’s really not hard,’ he pointed out. ‘You can walk, you know.’

‘What if I fall?’ I said, horrified.

‘I won’t let you fall.’

I finally reached him. He pulled his legs up, resting his forearms on his knees as he regarded me in the darkness.

I mirrored his pose. ‘Hi,’ I said, feeling a little breathless.

‘Hello.’ Luca tilted his head back, and I looked up, too. The sky was clear, and blanketed with thousands of stars. It was beautiful out here in the countryside where there were no street lamps to steal the natural light, no distractions to block it out. It was bright, and magical, and I had never noticed before. Because I never looked up.

‘There’s a meteor shower tonight,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen one?’

‘I’ve never even seen a shooting star,’ I said, still watching the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of something. When I looked at him again, I found he was looking at me too. We were right next to each other, his fingers so close to mine that if I moved an inch, we’d be touching. It was the closest we had been in weeks.

‘Are you mad at me?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation. ‘I am mad at you.’

A part of me wanted to ask why, but I already knew. I was a different person now. I wanted things he didn’t want me to have. I wanted revenge and he couldn’t stomach it. He couldn’t stomach who I was becoming.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. I didn’t dare look up at him. I could feel the heat of his gaze on my cheeks.

‘Are you sorry that you were prepared to go through with it tonight, or that in the end, you couldn’t?’

I looked at our fingers, almost entwined. ‘I’m sorry that I’m not good enough for this family. I’m sorry you had to fight so hard for me, and this is what you got.’ I hesitated, waiting for my voice to stop wavering. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a coward.’

Luca dipped his chin, the movement dragging my gaze back up.

He was frowning at me. ‘You think shooting someone makes you brave?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘All I know is I couldn’t do it when the time came. All I know is I failed my test.’

‘I’m glad you failed,’ he said.

‘You had to lie for me. You made them all lie for me. You made them lie to their boss.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘But you never lie to Valentino.’

‘This is different.’

‘How?’

He looked at me, nonplussed. ‘It just is.’

‘I don’t understand why,’ I said, my voice just a whisper. ‘I don’t understand why you would do that for me.’

Luca’s lips flickered into a half-smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t, do you?’

‘I wish I had just done it.’

‘I’m glad you couldn’t pull the trigger.’

‘You’re happy I’m a coward?’ I said.

‘You’re not a coward.’

‘I’m not a Falcone,’ I pointed out. ‘Not really.’

‘ Good ,’ he said, his expression turning fierce.

‘If I’m not a Marino and I’m not a Gracewell and I’m not a Falcone, then what am I?’

Luca leant closer to me, intensity burning in his eyes. ‘You’re free.’

I pulled away from him, from his heady scent and the hardness in his voice, and rested my elbows on my knees. ‘Then why am I so unhappy?’

Luca stayed where he was, his gaze prickling along the back of my neck. ‘You just lost your mother, Sophie. You need to give yourself time.’

‘I don’t have time.’ A familiar wave of frustration was rising inside me. ‘I want to make them pay, Luca. I know that’s the right thing, but tonight when I held that gun to Libero Marino’s head, and I listened to him cursing at me and taunting me, and calling me a traitor, I just froze .’

He stayed silent, and I don’t know why, but all the things I had been feeling started to tumble out. ‘I hate that I froze. I hate that I failed. I’m so embarrassed that I couldn’t do it, and then when I really think about it, I find myself feeling terrified that a part of me thought I could. That a part of me was ready to end a man’s life. That a part of me felt so powerful standing there with him shaking in front of me. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I’m capable of, but I know tonight was a failure for me.’

Luca turned to face me so I couldn’t look away even if I tried. ‘Let me uncomplicate this for you, Sophie. You don’t want this. I promise you, this is not the path for you.’

Felice’s words from the study came flooding back to me. Was this really what Luca thought or was it a projection of his own desires? ‘How do you know what’s right for me? I’m not you, Luca. I’m my own person. I want to let my mother know she didn’t die in vain. I want to embrace this life, the blood in my veins. I don’t want to be on my own.’

Luca pressed his palms against his eyes, his fingertips scraping through his hair. ‘You’re wrong, Sophie. You are so deeply, unbearably wrong, and I don’t know how to show you that. And it makes me so angry, I could scream.’

‘That’s why you keep avoiding me,’ I said. ‘I get it. You don’t believe I’m cut out for this life. You don’t think I can do it.’

He uncovered his face. ‘ What? ’

‘It’s true,’ I said, frustration turning to anger now. ‘You think I’m going to shoot myself by accident or stab myself, or that I’m not strong enough or smart enough to do the things your brothers do. I know you don’t think I’m cut out for this, and you hate that I’m even trying to be, but I have to. I don’t care if it makes you angry with me,’ I lied. ‘I don’t care if you don’t believe in me.’

He rubbed his temples very slowly, and I watched him work his anger into submission. Then he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the whole world, ‘Of course I believe in you.’

‘What?’

‘I believe that you’re smart and funny and brave and determined. I believe that you’re loyal and kind. I believe that you’re a good person, in your heart. In your soul. You’re right about one thing, though. I don’t believe that you’re an assassin. I don’t think you can kill someone and be OK with it. And that is not an insult, Sophie. That I believe you’re too good and too kind to hurt someone, no matter how much they’ve hurt you. That your heart is too big. That your empathy runs too deep. That’s why I believe in you. I believe in you more than I could ever explain, and you expect me to stand by and watch while you destroy yourself right in front of my eyes. You expect me to let you point the gun at Libero Marino and shout at you to shoot him?’

He was really asking me, waiting for me to answer. ‘I want you to want what I want,’ I said slowly. ‘I want you to support me…’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not raise you up and give you a gun. I will not take you shooting and fawn over how great your aim is. I won’t tell you how brilliant you can be or how many Marinos you can murder if you really put your mind to it. I won’t walk you into danger and clap as you shoot to kill. I will take the gun from you and tell you you’re a thousand times better without it. I will always take the gun from you, Sophie. I will always tell you that you don’t need it. I will always support you, but I will never support that. Never .’ He scrubbed his hands across his forehead, dragging his hair away from his face. ‘You always manage to work me up,’ he said ruefully.

All this time, I thought he put himself on a pedestal, but it was me he had raised up. He thought I was better than him – than his life, than his family – but I wasn’t.

‘We’re the same,’ I said. ‘We come from the same kind of blood. How could you say all these things to me, and not say them to yourself? How do you expect me to take any of it to heart, when it’s said with such hypocrisy? If you really believed your family was truly bad then you’d walk away from it. I know you’re strong enough.’

Luca shook his head. ‘It’s not the same.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too late for me. I’ve done too many heinous things already. There is no getting out.’

I lay back on the roof, a wave of exhaustion washing over me. Couldn’t he see it was the same for me? Couldn’t he understand I felt the same way? It was pointless having this argument with him. We would never agree, and the truth was, he had lied to Valentino to keep me here – and that meant I was staying.

‘I’m tired, Luca. I’m tired of this conversation.’

Luca lay down next to me. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m tired too.’

We welcomed the silence, and the respite it brought. He wasn’t the enemy and neither was I. Our world was the problem, and we were both stuck in it. We lay side by side, at an impasse, but not wanting to separate. My chin brushed against his shoulder. Our arms stretched out next to each other, my pinky finger brushing his. I ached for the fleeting closeness we had once had, couldn’t help but wonder whether we would ever have it again.

‘Tell me about the life you would have had,’ I said, into the big expanse above us. ‘Tell me about the person you would be if you weren’t a Falcone.’

I had never delved this deeply before, and I didn’t know if Luca would let me. But the moment was quiet again, and I just wanted to talk, to be with him, even if the conversation was hypothetical, even if it didn’t really matter.

‘I would have gone to college.’ His breath fogged the air above us. ‘Studied astrophysics. I would have been the biggest nerd .’ He imitated my voice on the last word. ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut more than anything.’

‘Did you have those sticky glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What aspiring astronaut doesn’t?’

‘So what happened? Didn’t you think you were smart enough?’ I said, teasingly.

‘Oh, I’m definitely smart enough, Sophie.’ His laughter echoed mine. ‘I just didn’t like the idea of having to eat cardboard food for months at a time. When I was seven, my dad bought me a star for my birthday. It came with all these specific coordinates and a certificate with my name on it, and we waited for it to get dark and then found it through the telescope.’

‘Of course you had a telescope,’ I interjected.

I caught his smirk. ‘So we found the star – The Gianluca Falcone Star – and my dad helped me get the coordinates until it lit up right in front of me. When I pulled back from the eyepiece, he clapped me on the back, and asked me what I thought about it.’

Without meaning to, I had rolled on to my side and hitched my head up with my hand, so I could see him better. I liked looking at him when he was telling a story. One, because he was abnormally handsome, and two, because his face lit up when he spoke. ‘And?’ I prompted.

He glanced sideways at me, a smile flickering at the edges of his lips. ‘I turned around to my father, who had just spent all this money on a really thoughtful, unique gift, and I said…’ He cleared his throat, and did his best impression of himself as a child. ‘?“Dad, are you aware that the light from this star takes so many years to reach Earth, that in reality it’s probably already deteriorated into a ball of dust and ash, and so the gift, technically speaking, is dead, and therefore useless?”?’

‘Oh, man,’ I said, lying on my back again, my laughter warm inside me. ‘Remind me to never ever buy you a gift.’

‘Just make sure it’s a real star, not the memory of one,’ he said. ‘In my defence, I was only seven. I didn’t know about conventional rules of present-acceptance. I thought I knew everything.’

‘Some things never change.’

‘Well, the only difference is, now I actually do know everything.’

‘What else? What else would you do?’

His attention was trained on the stars again. ‘I’d visit Machu Picchu and do the Inca Trail, I’d travel Route 66 on a shoestring budget in an old Camaro. I’d study the Renaissance in Florence, I’d sleep under the Northern Lights in Iceland…’ He trailed off, and I could feel it, just as I knew he could – the sense of sadness creeping over us. He had really thought about it. All the things he would be, all the things he would do. Whispers of a life unlived, of dreams unmade. It hurt, right down in my core, to know that he would never have those things – the things that made his eyes light up and his smile stretch like a little boy’s again.

We lay together under the stars and the melancholy, and I tried my hardest to think of something that might make him feel better, to wade into that dark, empty space inside me and pull out a spark of light for him, but there was nothing, just hollowness and fear and anger.

He rolled on to his side, his whole body brushing mine as he looked down on me. ‘What about you, Sophie? What would you do?’

I had a million things I wanted to do – they used to play on a loop in my head, before all the nightmares took their place. ‘When I was a kid, my uncle used to take me to the Oriental Theatre in the city whenever there was a new musical playing.’ I rushed on, thinking of my old uncle Jack as a separate entity to who he really was – Antony Marino. ‘I saw Wicked four times in one year. And Billy Elliot and Aladdin , all these wonderful stories brought to life, and I remember thinking when I was only eleven years old that if I was going to do something for the rest of my life, it would be that. Stories. I’d work in movies or musicals, behind the scenes, bringing it all together. I’d be the producer or the director, or I’d stand there all day and happily hold a boom mic. I didn’t care, I’d just be part of it. Something bigger than me.’ My breathing had doubled, and the excitement of my rant was catching in my cheeks. I didn’t realize I was smiling, and Luca was so close to me, I could see the scar above his lip stretch as he smiled back.

‘What else?’ he asked, leaning closer. ‘What else would you do?’

‘I’d go to England and see where Millie grew up. I’d go to Buckingham Palace, and the West End. Millie says they do Wicked in British accents over there. How weird is that?’ I didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘Or maybe I’d see The Phantom of the Opera. I never got to see that one, and it was my mother’s favourite show. We were going to go but we…’ I trailed off.

‘Anything else?’ he said, softer now.

‘You know they think there are more tombs left to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt? Imagine if I found one? I’d be so famous.’

Luca’s laughter burst out of him, flashing warmth into the air between us. ‘This is getting pretty elaborate… even by your standards.’

‘Don’t act like you wouldn’t want to see the pyramids.’

‘Of course I would,’ he said leaning in until he was distractingly close. ‘Maybe in this version, I could come with you…’

I tried to ignore the scent of his aftershave, the warmth of his body heat as he pressed against me. ‘You’d probably get motion sickness on the way there.’

‘ You’d probably get sunburnt.’

‘And you’d spend all the time reading lame poetry. Or The Iliad for the fiftieth time.’

‘Look at you, knowing the name of an actual book. I’m impressed.’

I punched him in the arm. ‘You’re evicted from my dream.’

He laughed again but there was something else in it this time, a sense of empathy, of understanding. ‘Oh well,’ he said, leaning back down, away from me. ‘It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.’

I laid my head beside his. The excitement had drained away again, and the blanket of reality floated down to cover us. Our sighs weaved together, into the air above us.

‘I killed a man tonight, Sophie,’ Luca said into the silence.

The meaning was implicit. There was no other life, there was only this one. And his die had already been cast.

‘I feel heavy,’ he said quietly. ‘I feel heavy inside.’

‘I know,’ I said softly. ‘I’m sorry.’ I was sorry. I was sorry that I had failed to do it; that he had had to take that burden from me, and that he was sad, right down in his bones, because of it.

I felt for his hand. He spread his fingers and laced them through mine.

Overhead, a star streaked a line of bright white across the sky. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘A shooting star.’

‘Mmm,’ said Luca, the sound rumbling in his chest. Another flash, this time over to the left. ‘There’s another,’ he said, clasping my hand a little tighter in his own and pointing with his other hand.

‘Do you wish on them?’ I asked.

‘Not in a long time,’ he said. ‘When I was young, Evelina and I would lie out here all the time and look at the stars. She taught me the constellations. Told me the stories behind them. We used to wish on them.’

‘She sounds amazing.’

‘She was.’ His voice changed, a sense of reverence in his words. ‘She used to talk about it all the time – this sense of possibility. You couldn’t see it, or touch it, but you had to chase it. She told me to chase it, no matter what…’ He trailed off, and I felt the sadness rise up around us like a lake. I was determined to keep us afloat.

‘Let’s wish tonight, then,’ I said softly. ‘In her memory.’

‘OK,’ he said, after a beat. ‘Let’s wish.’

‘OK,’ I said, smiling too, as more stars began to burst overhead.

We stayed like that for a long time, watching the sky as it lit up in silver streaks.

I wished on every shooting star, and all my wishes were for him.