“Also,” he adds, “you look like you’d rather die than do a public trapeze performance, and training service dogs requires patience you clearly don’t have.”
I laugh. Too loud. A startled, genuine sound that echoes in the car’s interior before I can catch it. I should be offended, but he’s not wrong. My patience reservoir has exactly two settings: endless for books and words, nonexistent for literally everything else.
I could spend hours dissecting a single paragraph of prose, teasing apart its structure and meaning, but ask me to waitfive minutes in a slow-moving coffee line and I’m mentally composing strongly worded letters to management.
The dichotomy isn’t lost on me—this selective patience that extends infinitely in one direction while completely evaporating in another.
“You really like words, don’t you?” he asks, and the question feels different from his others—less like an interrogation, more like actual curiosity.
Something in my chest loosens slightly. This, at least, is territory I know how to navigate. “Yes,” I admit. “I love them. Always have.”
The highway stretches ahead of us, Pittsburgh’s skyline visible in the distance. I watch it grow larger as I consider how to explain something that feels as natural to me as breathing.
“Words are...” I pause, searching for the right way to put it. “They’re tools, and weapons, and shelter all at once. You can do anything with them.”
Giovanni says nothing, waiting for me to continue. The silence feels less threatening now, more like space being offered.
“My dad was an English professor,” I say, surprised to hear myself volunteering personal information. “He used to say that language was humanity’s greatest magic trick—turning abstract thoughts into sounds that create pictures in someone else’s mind.”
I remember sitting in Dad’s study, surrounded by books, listening to him read aloud. The way his voice would change for different characters. How words on a page could make me laugh or cry or feel less alone.
“When I was little, I thought books were alive,” I continue, staring out the windshield. “Not in a childish, Disney way. I just thought they had... I don’t know, energy. That they absorbed something from everyone who read them.”
Giovanni’s hands adjust on the steering wheel. “And now?”
“Now I think maybe I was right.” I shrug, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “Words are the closest thing we have to time travel. You can read something written by someone who died centuries ago and feel exactly what they felt. That’s... that’s pretty close to magic.”
The Lamborghini roars as we slow to take an exit, moving from highway to city streets.
“In college, I started cataloging the different ways people use language. TheGilmore Girlspaper was about rapid-fire banter as both connection and deflection—how Lorelai uses humor to simultaneously pull people closer and keep them at a safe distance.” I stop abruptly, realizing I’m rambling. “Sorry. You didn’t ask for a thesis.”
“No,” Giovanni says, his voice thoughtful. “I didn’t. But it was interesting nonetheless.”
We’re deeper into Pittsburgh now, navigating through increasingly upscale neighborhoods. I wonder if this is where he grew up—where his poet mother taught literature while his father... did whatever mob fathers do.
“What about you?” I ask, immediately regretting the question. The fragile moment of connection shatters as his expression closes off again.
“What about me?” His tone is back to that dangerous neutrality.
“Do you like words?” I press on anyway, because apparently, I have a death wish. “Your mother was a poet. Did any of that rub off?”
For a long moment, I think he won’t answer. Then, so quietly I almost miss it, he says, “Words are unreliable. People say things they don’t mean. Promise things they won’t deliver.” His knuckles whiten slightly on the wheel. “I prefer actions. They don’t lie. My turn. I can recite the entire script ofThe Godfatherfrom memory. I once swam with great white sharks in the Caribbean without a cage.”
He pauses.
Four seconds as if his life depends on this next statement.
“I was kidnapped when I was eight.”
He looks me in the eye, and I know instantly it’s number three. And in this same instant, I see the game for real. I see the way he played.
I shot someone when I was eight.
I’ve had to bury a body before.
I was kidnapped when I was eight.
Two truths… and a lie.