Page 92 of Second Chance

Tony can’t stop himself from hugging her for much too long, so filled with gratitude he can hardly speak for the first few minutes.

“Hey,” she says, gentle in a way he rarely gets to hear anymore. “Tony, what’s going on?”

He tells her in bits and pieces between getting coffee brewed much too strong in the hope it will keep them going for long enough to get through the night. He pours it into a thermos and dumps towels, tools, and whatever else he can think of into the trunk of his car while Blake and Lisa fill in the blanks, things he’d told them a half hour ago and already forgotten.

“Are yousure?” Gianna asks more than once. “I knew something was wrong, but…”

Tony can’t offer her more than a helpless shrug. “I guess the pressure was too much for her?”

Gianna’s lips tighten, but she doesn’t say anything. She slides into the passenger seat, and they take off.

It’s only him and Gianna in the car, headed to Germantown. Blake rightly pointed out that if Lily does need medical attention, Daniel’s apartment is severely low on supplies. He and Lisa will pick up all the materials Blake’s lifted from work over the last couple of months.

According to Blake, it’s fully within his rights as an employee to take along the odd bandage or syringe every time he gets thrown up on, someone yells slurs at him, or he gets “accidentally” scheduled for back-to-back shifts. Beyond the possibility of it getting him fired, Tony can’t find anything wrong with his argument. Ever pragmatic, Lisa is thrilled she won’t have to steal materials from her job since the missing poster has become a moot point.

“All that work on the poster,” Gianna sighs as they pull out of the tiny lot under Daniel’s apartment in Rhinebeck.

“Imagine if we actually had to go around hanging them up though.”

“Yeah, would have been a pain.”

They’re silent for a stretch of dark road.

“Why didn’t you tell me you thought she had something to do with it?” Gianna asks Tony. “She’s my friend. I was trying to, like, support her. If I had known…”

He freezes, foot slipping on the accelerator.

“You would have, what? Called the cops?”

“I mean, maybe?”

Even Gianna knows it would be the sensible option. And she’s closest to Lily of all of them. The things Tony is willing to do for Daniel…

“Seriously though. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We…weren’t really talking,” Tony mutters.

Gianna crosses her arms under her chest. “Yeah. Why was that?”

Tony can’t quite meet her eye. “Because I was being a dick?”

“I’m not sure you were.” Gianna twists toward him, tangling her seatbelt the way Ma always told her not to. “Talk to me.”

“I…” Tony tries to remember when he got so angry at her and why he couldn’t let it go. “When it happened, with Professor Lawrence, I kept asking if you were all right.”

“Yeah,” Gianna says slowly. “I didn’t want to talk about it. Brought up a lot of things for me I haven’t had time to work through, with Lia and everything.”

“I get that.” To his own surprise, he does. It makes sense, and it’s understandable. “It…brought up a lot of things for me too. Things I didn’t tell you about when they happened.”

“Like what?” It’s the first time in days he hasn’t read irritation or boredom in her voice when she talks to him, only open curiosity. She probably wasn’t annoyed or bored, looking back on it. She just wanted him to stop asking when she wasn’t ready to answer, the same as him.

“Stacy Allan nearly killed me too.” Tony’s thankful he’s staring straight ahead at the road and can’t see her expression, or he wouldn’t be able to keep going. “And Daniel. And Colette nearly went to prison for Mario’s murder. It was…intense when it all happened. I know you knew about Daniel getting shot, but she was about to shoot me first when Daniel found us. I never told you about…about me because you were already going through so much. I didn’t want to put that on you or Ma and Pa. But when this happened…”

“It started reminding you of all the things you were trying not to think about,” Gianna finishes.

“Yeah.”

“Guess I should have asked if you were okay.”

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