Chapter Twenty-One: Fifteen Years, Four Months
"Hey, Zoe. How are you?"
Zoe shrugged. "Not bad."
"How's your mother?"
"Good, I think."
"And Oliver?" Tony made himself ask, as had become his custom.
She hesitated. "Dad, you don't have to ask about him just to be polite. I… I can tell how much it hurts you."
Tony blinked. "You… what?"
She could tell? She knew? But he had gone to such great lengths to hide his feelings about Oliver from her… after all, it wouldn't be fair on her to know how deeply he had come to dislike her surrogate father. She could tell? She wasn't even fifteen years old, she shouldn't have to know about any emotions that were so unpleasant…
"I'm not blind, Dad. You're jealous of him, but you feel guilty for feeling jealous, even though there's no reason to feel guilty. It's completely understandable. You still love Mom."
"I… Well… yes, I guess I do," he admitted.
Zoe paused, looking at him. "She still loves you, too," she said quietly.
Tony shook his head. "No, Zoe, you don't have to say that just to make me feel better."
"I'm not. She found your wedding album the other day, when we were cleaning the attic. She almost cried, I saw her. She said she'd hidden it up there when she decided not to visit you anymore." Zoe smiled. "Then she gave it to me."
"She…?" said Tony, unable to form a coherent thought, let alone a sentence.
"You look so handsome in the pictures, Dad, and Mom is so beautiful, and you both look so happy… it made me mad that you were in prison all over again."
"Zoe…"
"Tell me about your wedding," she said, cutting him off and gazing at him pleadingly. "Mom wouldn't."
Tony knitted his brow, still not able to process what she had just told him about Michelle. "Well… what do you want to know?"
Zoe grinned and bounced up and down slightly in excitement. "Everything! Beginning to end! Well, maybe not right to the end, 'cause, wedding night… but everything else!"
"Everything, huh?"
"Uh-huh."
"Okay…" Tony thought back to the morning of his wedding to Michelle and couldn't help but smile. "I woke up with a really bad hangover from drinking too much the night before, so I went downstairs and was teased by your Uncle Joe and pampered by my mother… and my dad just sat there with a big grin on his face."
Zoe grinned too. "So you were staying with Grandma and Grandpa?"
"Yeah, just for the night. Anyway, I ate breakfast and I really had to fight to keep it down because I was so nervous and excited. And then I got a call from work saying that they were really, really sorry but I had to come in right away."
"Oh no!" Zoe cried, wide-mouthed.
"Oh yeah. It got worse; they called your mother in too."
"Oh, I bet she wasn't happy…"
Tony shook his head. "Not at all happy. I arrived in the parking lot at the same time as her and she was upset because we weren't supposed to see each other before the wedding… she was worried that they would keep us at work for so long that we wouldn't make it to the church on time."
"But you did, right?"
"Eventually." He nodded. "After I'd been held at gunpoint, seen your mother be held at gunpoint twice and taken her to hospital after some psycho with a knife cut her arm open, helped to save the President's daughter's life and been pushed out of a helicopter, we got to the church ten minutes early and managed to get changed and cleaned up and not look too battered and bruised in our wedding pictures. Then we wisely decided not to take our cellphones with us on our honeymoon or leave a contact number at work, and the world didn't end without us and we had a wonderful week in Paris."
"Aw…" said Zoe, completely enraptured. "You guys had the worst job ever." She slowly shook her head.
"Only sometimes. Other times… well, it felt good to be helping keep people safe."
"But they put you in prison, Dad!"
"Zoe, they had to, what I did was against the law and could've cost millions of lives. Anyway, I have less than a quarter of my sentence to go now."
Zoe smiled. "It's gonna be so great when you get out. I found this great recipe for mango sorbet that I'm gonna make as part of the dessert for your meal."
"Still planning that, are you?" Tony asked, returning the smile, trying to remember what mangoes tasted like.
She grinned. "Oh yeah. It's gonna be the best meal ever!"
They looked at each other, imagining food and freedom.