Chapter 13 - WHAT MY MOTHER HAD HIDDENVincent eventually told me why my mother once called him.
I was nineteen.
Away at college.
Mom had started dating a man named Peter Nolan after Dad died.
I barely remembered him.
She ended the relationship after six months.
Peter stalked her.
Waited outside work.
Entered the house once using an old key.
Mom did not tell me.
She called police.
Then Vincent.
Vincent arrived after police had already arrested Peter for violating a restraining order.
So what did “not fast enough” mean?
Vincent looked ashamed.
“Anna had called me a week earlier.”
“For what?”
“To ask if Peter knew people in Brooklyn.”
“And?”
“I told her she was imagining things.”
I stared.
Vincent Moretti, feared by half of New York, had made the most ordinary family mistake possible.
He had dismissed a woman telling him she was afraid.
“She called again after he broke in.”
“Yes.”
“And you came.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve spent fifteen years turning guilt into surveillance.”
He did not deny it.
I said:
“I’m not Mom.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He looked at me.
May you like
“I’m learning.”
That was the first time I believed our relationship might become something other than an emergency arrangement.
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