Chapter 2 - The Answer He Owed
Vincent had negotiated leases with men who arrived already angry.
He had sat through lawsuits, funerals, inspections, and one armed robbery at the original Romano restaurant without losing control of his voice.
But the question from Maya Torres left him unable to speak.
Did you ask her to get rid of me?
He looked at the twenty-year-old woman standing across the counter and understood that any answer shaped to protect himself would become another version of the same failure.
“No,” he said finally.
Maya's shoulders loosened by half an inch.
Then he added, “But I understand why she thought I did.”
The relief vanished.
Vincent turned toward the kitchen staff.
“Marcus, close the tasting room for ten minutes.”
Marcus hesitated. “We have twelve guests arriving for the investor dinner.”
“Then give them champagne and tell them I’m late.”
Vincent looked at Maya. “You can walk away if you want. I won’t stop you.”
She glanced toward the back door.
For one moment he thought she would leave.
Then she untied her apron and folded it once.
“Ten minutes.”
They went into the small chef's office off the pastry station.
There was one desk, two metal chairs, a shelf of supplier binders, and a dying basil plant nobody had admitted was dead.
Maya sat nearest the door.
Vincent noticed.
He sat opposite her.
“I gave your mother money,” he said. “I told her to take care of it. Those were my exact words.”
Maya stared at him.
“What did you mean?”
“I meant the rent. Medical care. Whatever she needed until I could come back.”
“Then why didn't you say that?”
Because he had been twenty-nine, proud, frightened, and trained by a father who believed tenderness was how people found the soft place to cut you.
Vincent rubbed his thumb over the ridge of an old burn scar on his palm.
“Because I was angry that she told me the same night I had to decide whether to leave Chicago. Because I felt trapped. Because I was selfish enough to think my fear was the only emergency in the room.”
Maya said nothing.
He continued.
“She asked if I was telling her to end the pregnancy. I didn't answer.”
Her eyes hardened.
“That is an answer.”
“Yes.”
He did not defend himself.
The basil plant leaned sadly toward the window.
Maya looked away.
“My mother told me you chose your future.”
“I did.”
“She said you never called.”
“I called three days later.”
Maya's gaze snapped back.
“What?”
“I went to her apartment. It was empty. The landlord said she had left. My father told me she had moved to Texas with a cousin. He said she didn't want contact.”
“And you believed him?”
Vincent swallowed.
“I wanted to.”
That answer hurt both of them.
Maya's mouth trembled. “She never lived in Texas.”
“Where did she go?”
“Milwaukee. For six months. Then back to Chicago.”
Vincent stared at her.
Back to Chicago.
For nineteen and a half years, perhaps.
In the same city where his name appeared on restaurant awnings, magazine covers, charity boards, and buildings.
“How long?”
“Until she died.”
He looked down.
“What did she do?”
“Worked.”
The answer came sharp.
“She cleaned offices at night. She cooked at a daycare. Later she ran the kitchen at a church shelter. She raised me.”
Vincent's hands went still.
“I didn't know.”
Maya leaned forward.
“I know. That's the part I can't decide if I hate more.”
He met her eyes.
“Which part?”
“That you didn't know, or that it was so easy for you not to know.”
There was no defense for that either.
A knock sounded on the office door.
Marcus opened it an inch. “Sorry. The investors are asking whether we should serve without you.”
“Yes,” Vincent said.
Marcus blinked. Vincent had never missed a formal tasting in thirteen years.
“Serve without me.”
The door closed.
Maya watched him.
“You're just going to cancel your important dinner?”
“No.”
“I’m going to miss it.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm sitting across from my daughter.”
The word entered the room before he could decide whether he had the right to use it.
Maya stood so fast the chair legs scraped the tile.
“Don't call me that.”
Vincent stood too, immediately regretting his mistake.
“You're right.”
“You don't know that.”
He did not say they both knew.
He did not say the dates lined up, the recipe lined up, her face lined up.
He did not say blood could be obvious before paperwork.
Instead he nodded.
“You're right.”
Maya picked up her apron.
“The box isn't here.”
Vincent looked at the brass key still in her hand.
“Where is it?”
“My apartment.”
“What did your mother put in it?”
“I don't know.”
“You never opened it?”
“She made me promise not to.”
“Why?”
Maya's expression softened despite herself.
“Because she said some answers can ruin a person if they get them before they know what question they're really asking.”
Vincent almost laughed.
“That sounds like Elena.”
Maya's face closed again.
“You don't get to remember her with me yet.”
He nodded.
Fair.
She reached for the doorknob.
“Maya.”
She paused.
“If I ask you not to quit tonight, would that feel like pressure?”
“Yes.”
He took that in.
“Then I won't ask.”
She opened the door.
Before she stepped out, she said, “My mother told me one more thing.”
Vincent waited.
“She said if I ever found you, I shouldn't decide who you are based on what she told me.”
His throat tightened.
“What should you decide it on?”
Maya looked back.
“What you do after you realize I'm real.”
Then she walked out.
That night Vincent drove to the old neighborhood in Pilsen and parked across from the building where Elena once lived.
The windows had been replaced. The laundromat below was now a coffee shop. A mural covered the brick wall where they had once argued about whether they could afford a real bed frame.
He sat in the car until midnight.
At 12:17, his phone rang.
It was his older sister, Teresa.
“Vincent,” she said without greeting, “Dad heard what happened in the kitchen.”
Vincent straightened.
His father, Angelo Romano, was eighty-one and rarely left his Lake Forest house.
“How?”
“Marcus called Uncle Paul. Paul called Dad. You know how this family works.”
Vincent stared through the windshield.
“What did he say?”
May you like
Teresa was quiet too long.
Then she said, “He said the girl's mother should have stayed gone.”
