But for my father?
It was probably like it was yesterday.
The day he walked into his home that he had built for his young, beautiful, loving wife, to find her in a puddle of blood on the kitchen floor.
This was the anniversary of the day he failed to protect the woman he loved from his life.
There wasn't much that could make my father shirk his responsibilities.
But honoring his slain wife?
Yeah, that was the one thing that could make him say fuck New York and fuck everyone who didn't like it.
He was going to go be alone and deal with the burden her death had placed on his shoulders.
"The grave?" I asked Matteo. I was fine with him wanting to mourn, to be alone, but he needed someone else there to keep an eye. Especially now that whoever was trafficking in the people from Venezuela was likely now scrambling, knowing we were onto them. And frantic people did desperate, stupid things. They could even be delusional enough to think that by taking out the boss in Navesink Bank, they might be able to control the docks.
"No. He never goes to the grave except to make sure the flowers are being planted in the spring and with us." On Christmas Eve. To place a blanket there.
"Where is he then?"
"Our good, old-fashioned, hopeless romantic father?" Matteo asked, brow raising.
"Right," I agreed, nodding. "You do damage control. Rein in the troops. I'll go keep an eye on him."
"Really, the underboss can't exactly act as the bodyguard," Lucky reminded me.
"Fine then his actual bodyguard can come. For the time being. But I'm leaving now," I added, taking off toward my car.
As I was pulling out, I noticed the car following as I made my way across town.
My old-fashioned, hopeless romantic father would never go to honor his wife in the place her body was laid to rest.
No.
He would honor her in the places that meant something to the two of them.
And on this big kind of anniversary, that meant the place they met, the place they eventually married as well.
It was the worst beach in the area with a supposedly haunted historical house leering at you from the half-crumbling pier that stretched far out in the water that perpetually smelled like fish, with a shoreline full of sharp shards of shells and large stones and always teaming with sand flies, leaving you bitten to high hell if you ever dared walk around barefoot.
But it was their spot.
It was where they always ended up on their date nights, eating half-melted ice cream they picked up on the way.
I saw him before I even parked, standing there at the very edge of the pier, alone save for the cloud of despair around him.
"Dad," I called tentatively, moving out toward him as his bodyguard kept a respectable distance.
"Luca," he called, voice thicker than I'd ever heard it, his gaze still trained forward.
"Everyone was worried. I wish you would have said something."
"Right where you're standing," he said instead of responding to me. "That was where she was standing. In a white sundress that flirted around her bare ankles. I remember being too distracted by the tan lines on her shoulders to read the time off my watch when she asked for it. She was breathtaking bare-faced and burnt over the bridge of her nose from laying out too long. I knew it the moment I saw her that I was going to marry her. That she was going to be the mother of my children. That we were going to build a beautiful life together."
Dad..." I started, unsure what to say, but crippled by the tears I saw swimming in his eyes.
"I wonder, sometimes, I wonder if I had known what would happen to her because of me, if I could have foreseen that, if I would have been able to tell her I didn't have the time, to go ask some other poor bastard. I don't think I would have, though. I think I would have been the selfish bastard I ended up being."