I SIT ON THE brown leather sectional, my feet propped up on the worn-out, rustic cocktail table in their Ferragamo's. In the kitchen a faucet is leaking, the steady drip of water serving as ambient background music along with the chirping of birds and rustling of pines. My father steeples his fingers beneath his chin, watching me. This is a test that I rarely pass, because some criteria is always out of reach to me.

Sometimes he picks on simple things: sit up straight. Don't slouch. Make eye contact. Other times it is things beyond my control, things that I never seem able to ameliorate: this sector is performing badly. Sales are down. The cops keep finding us. No matter how much I strive to improve in one area, another problem pops up like some real life game of whack-a-mole. I stare out the window at a small bird that pecks on the sill, brown and tan feathers covering its minuscule body as it moves its head in tiny, jerky motions and hops around. Some days I feel like that avian friend of mine, moving a lot but never really getting anywhere. At least it can make it off the ground.

"Antonio. Eyes on me, per favore," my father intones. "How did this happen?"

I sit there, statue-still, wondering how a simple date went this badly. How it managed to enthral me with this girl who probably wants nothing to do with me and has just gone running back to her cheating, lying FBI ex. How it made me think of things I haven't let my mind wander over in years, how it led me to wonder if praying and confessing were better than freezing over my soul and doing my best not to let the cracks show. Christina Martell, how you've ruined me...

"I don't know," I lie through gritted teeth.

I do know. I know too damn well what happened. She happened, her and her nice girl ways and her uncovering of my buried secrets and her soft brown eyes that drew me in and refused to let go. Her and her scent of roses and her little black dress and the way she looked at me, like I was someone who could still be saved.

"That's not enough." Roberto Cavalli doesn't slam his fist on the table, doesn't even raise his voice. But the look he levels at me with his blue eyes—the ones he has passed on to countless bastard children of his, but not to me because I got my mother's grey eyes and it made him project his own habit of infidelity onto her—that look he gives me could murder. "You need to know. You need to know how this went wrong, so you can keep it from happening again."

"Okay, pater meus." I always speak in Latin, rather than Italian, to irritate my father who never learned it. He himself was the illegitimate son of his father, who had clawed his way up from ruin and poverty to become the head of a multi-billion dollar illegal trade empire. His brothers and his wife spoke the "dead language" and I know well enough that he is bitter over what he views as his inferiority. "Quod vulsne? Vino, o la birra?"

I stand up and go into the kitchen as he growls out his request for a glass of cold water. "You should really get a woman to do these things for you, not to mention give your house a feminine touch."

I roll my eyes. I don't need a wife, much less a woman. And my house is fine as a bachelor pad. I'm perfectly capable of pouring a drink or cooking a meal or lighting a cigar, by myself. I don't need... I don't need her. I don't need to drag anyone else into this life of crime with me. Christina was a mistake, no matter what her last name is.

"Whatever." I set the tumbler in front of him. "Are we done here?"

His lip curls in disgust before he gulps down the water, standing and brushing imaginary dust off of his thousand-dollar suit trousers. "We are quite finished."

When he walks out, I wait for relief to flood my body. It doesn't. I just feel... hollow. Empty. Utterly void of any emotion or sensation, simply waiting to be filled up by the next rush, the next thrill, the next event.

I need to think, to breathe, to feel something. Fingers trembling, I grab my keys, hop into my car and start driving.

I can't stay here any longer than I have. My mother keeps fussing over me; when I woke up last night to get a drink in the middle of the night she thought I'd been kidnapped from my bed. It was a little too dramatic, even for her. She made me phone in sick to work—I mean, nobody would try and attack me at a grocery store! I'm not even a cashier there, so it's not like I'd find myself at gunpoint any time soon.

I know she cares about me a lot. But this is excessive. I half-expect her to start treating me like a teenager again, instating a curfew and making me text her every time I leave the house. The sad thing is, the only time she'll let me leave is if I'm going out with Lucas. I don't care if he's FBI or if I've forgiven him or asked for his help. The man—no, boy—has the personality of a mosquito: annoying, blood-sucking, and evil simply by existing.

So today I decide to go shopping. Maybe I can pick out new furniture to replace the pieces that I lost in the... incident. It's been a few days since I've heard anything from Antonio so I try to pretend that the whole date and its aftermath was a fluke in my typically boring life. The Manolo Blahnik's in a box under my bed, unworn since the day after my date. The black leather dress hangs untouched at the back of my closet. I do my best to act like Antonio Cavalli doesn't exist—or if he does, that his life has never intersected mine.

"What are your plans for today?" My mom asks me as I sit across from her eating breakfast—peanut butter toast with sliced banana. She's back from her night shift at the hospital and dark circles shadow her eyes.

"I'm going to fill out more job applications and then go to the mall," I tell her. "I'm going to find some furniture for my apartment."

She frowns. "You're not moving back into that place, are you?"

"Why? Is the feng shui there horrible now?" I try to crack a joke. It falls flat. "Look, it's affordable and close to my job..."

"It's in an unsafe neighbourhood," she says, tsking as she takes a swallow of milk.

But guilt still sinks into me. I don't want to put her in danger by staying with her and I certainly don't want to be a burden to her. Already I know she's going to persuade me to quit my job at the grocery store, my last remnant of normalcy, and stay with her while I look for an internship that matches my degree.

"Okay, I'll think about getting an apartment elsewhere," I tell her calmly. "Where do you recommend?"

I know what she recommends. She recommends that I resume my teenage life and go back to dating Lucas, living in this house, and essentially... not leaving her to be an empty-nester at the age of forty-five. It would be different if my father were alive, I know. She wouldn't have had to struggle so much over the years as a single mother. I know she, like me, feels guilty. She feels bad that she never got to see much of me when I was growing up because she was always working hard to provide for us. So now she's trying to overcompensate for that.

She rattles off a bunch of affordable and safer neighbourhoods while I try to pay attention. She keeps yawning though, so I know it's my cue to leave so she can take a nap.

"I need to leave soon. I told Lucas I would meet him at ten, and it's ten-thirty." I glance at my watch.

She waves me off and I leave. When I unlock the door, though, it's not Lucas's blue Honda Civic that greets me. It's a sleek black sports car, and when the driver rolls down the window all the memories I have tried to repress come rushing back.

Antonio.