“We’ll be there in a minute to pack,” I said.
He nodded and then asked Mia if she wanted to go with him.
“You,Zio!” She squashed her face against his, hugging him so tightly that she closed her eyes.
“Ah, my heart,” he said. “Zio Romeo will give his favorite girl something sweet.”
We watched them go, and then I turned to Scarlett, taking Matteo from her. She slipped her hand in mine.
“You knew that was coming,” I said.
“I felt something,” she whispered. “I still feel it.”
“Maggie Beautiful?”
Her eyes narrowed as she stared up at me. “What about her?”
“Luca. He thinks something is wrong with her.”
“Oh,” she said, as if the pieces finally connected. “That explains the suddenly hostility. He thought that I was—?”
“Yeah, not telling him something about her.”
“I haven’t felt anything but her happiness. This—with Ettore—took me by surprise, even though we all knew it was coming.”
“You would tell me—about Maggie Beautiful. If there was something to tell.”
“Brando.” She squeezed my hand. “I would never keep something that important from you.”
I squeezed her hand back. “How sure are we about Ettore? My mind’s not right.”
“Pretty solid, but I don’t always feel everything. You know I don’t. There’s no rhyme or reason—no science behind what I feel.” She met my eyes. “Luca could be right, about Maggie Beautiful, or he could be wrong. I’m really not sure. If I do feel something, though, I won’t hesitate to speak up.”
Sighing, I led her back toward the villa. “It’s time to pack, baby.”
“For how long, Brando?”
There was no true answer to that question, so I said nothing.
40
Scarlett
Florence felt miles away from home.
The entirefamigliahad gathered to be with Ettore as he took his last breath. Members of thefamigliafrom both sides came in and out the room in a constant stream.
His old Sicilian aunts stood out the most. They were all dressed in black, held rosaries in their hands, and hovered over the bedside.
The smell of death permeated the air, as disturbing as the smell of funeral flowers. It didn’t smell of preservatives, though, but the putrid wasting away of life.
Ettore lay in the center of the sprawling bed, half the size of the man he had been, almost being swallowed by all of the blankets and pillows. His flesh had shrunk to fit his broad bones, the man being eaten from the inside out.
It sent a cold sense of unease through me to see those prominent bones, so like my husbands, to be close to protruding out of the thin skin. The same skin that had turned from a warm olive to a sickly ashen, reminding me of ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Though the room was past warm to accommodate the warmth Ettore lacked, I shivered.
The feeling of death was a real thing, almost tangible enough that if my eyes were closed, I could imagine touching it. At one point, I thought I had—a feeling of complete weakness flooded through my flesh, rushing through blood, inhabiting bone.
