Page 52 of Coming in Hot

My father’s nickname for my mother, “Pinkie.”

My heart thuds so hard I can feel it in my throat. I reach for my tepid juice and choke down a sip before dashing off a goodbye to Klaus.

Me:Oh shit—message from my editor. Must get the article in before midnight! Sleep well. I’ll dream of you.

I sink back on the pillows and try to calm my pounding heart.

This is it. The email I’ve been dreading for months…

Our Christmas morning “family reunion” didn’t end much better than it started. I was stiff and formal when I thanked my parents for coming and wished them the best of luck in their post-incarceration life.

Basically, I looked like a jerk. Especially since Sherri cried and I didn’t.

For a few minutes, I watch the city-light-studded shadows outside my hotel, steeling my nerve, then sit up and jab open the email.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: It’s your mom

Hi baby, hope you won’t mind your aunt gave me your email. I’ve done a lot of thinking since Xmas trying to figure out a way to talk that you wouldn’t reject. Jace said maybe it’s not in the cards for us to be a family, but I have to try.

So I’m going to give you my stories, and I hope you’ll take it for what it is—me trying to make a connection and fill in 28 years of blanks, not being manipulative. If you’re at all like me, you might have a weakness for what my granny called “a two-hankie tale of woe,” so I want to make it clear this isn’t an appeal to your pity.

At that I stop cold, breath stalled in my throat.

My mom is a sucker for a sob story… just like me? I guess in my selective memory, I’ve imagined my parents to have been hard people. Unsentimental. Lacking empathy.

Settling my tensed hand over the center of my chest, I go back to reading.

I didn’t tell you on Xmas why I didn’t want you to know when you were little that I was in prison. First I hoped to get out on an appeal, which I lost. After that, I was afraid I might die there—the medical care was awful. After I almost died from an abscessed tooth, I figured there was a chance something would take me out before I’d served my time. If Ididn’tever come home, it’d be years of you counting down for nothing. It seemed kinder to go away.

I’m taking online classes and got this laptop for that, so I figure I’ll write out stories for you about what happened in California. I attached the first one, about how Jace and I got the idea to move to California, and what happened when we ran out of money. Please don’t delete it.

You may not want to hear it, but I love you, my baby girl.

The feeling in my chest is something worse than crying. It would be a comfort to cry, but my eyes won’t do it. I’m not one of those stubbornly dry-eyed people who stare impassively at a movie when everyone else is blubbering. I’m more the type who gets misty over a stupid ad for arthritis medication featuring an elderly couple dancing.

Maybe the attached document will bring on the waterworks and give me some relief…

No. I can’t look yet.

I start a new folder, just titled “Sherri,” and move the doc there.

She waited to speak.

I can wait to cry.

15

ITALY

ONE MONTH LATER

NATALIA

My coworker Alexander Laskaris—Nefeli’s nepo-twerp son—is the last person I want to see. But here he is with his signature smirk, leaning nonchalantly in the doorway of my hotel room, which I only opened without checking because I hoped it might be Klaus making a surprise appearance.

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