My head hurt, and my foot burned. Sometimes the scar there did.
It took me a second to remember where I was.
Lilo and Lucila’s villa.
The night came back to me in a flash. Strolling the streets with Nazzareno, Lucila, Lilo, and Minnie. Telling Lucila about Nazzareno. Lucila telling me about Janis. Lucila insisting that Nazzareno and I spend our last night in Candela with her, Lilo, and Min. I didn’t think Nazzareno was going to go for it, because all we had was a small mattress in a small room.
He had agreed before me.
Maybe he’d sensed how much I needed to be close to my sister, especially after everything she’d told me.
Music floated in the otherwise silent villa. Lilo on the piano and my sister humming along. Those two together are a song.
A beautiful, haunting melody.
A painful, air-stopping sob was stuck in my throat. The past had come back to haunt me too. It was like the truth my sister had given me earlier had unlocked a vault of terrible memories.
It was the first time my mo—Janis’s—face was so clear to me in years. She was always just this fuzzy, beautiful memory that stuck with me. I didn’t focus on it too much, because then reality set in and I had to keep coming face to face with the fact that her memory clung to me, but at the same time, she wasn’t close to me.
I’d obsess over if she was dead or not.
Because she had put that idea in my head.
Son—my dad—was killing her.
When she’d been killing us.
Our own mother drugged us.
She was so selfish, she put our lives at risk to go out and have fun.
To screw around.
To feel free of the cage our love had trapped her in.
Instead of just leaving, a clean break, which would have been the best for everyone, she left us fractured and jagged in our own ways.
My sister was a chocolate addict because her body remembered what it felt like to depend on something that made her feel good.
My dad was left physically broken, an emotionally dead man, not equipped to deal with us or life.
Me?
I was the most fucked up of them all.
All the things I’d done to feel numb again, it was honestly…shameful.
That was why I didn’t feel good enough for Nazzareno. I had helped sully the cage my mom had been trapped in.
I’d dirtied my life for things that were soul corrupting.
My strained eyes turned some, and Nazzareno was staring at me. He wiped the tears from my cheek with his thumb.
“It is okay to fall,” he whispered to me in the darkness, pulling me even closer to his chest. “I will tell you why.”
Even though I knew what he was going to say, I needed to hear it. I needed it like my next breath.
“Because I am here to catch you,uccellino selvatico. This is my vow to you. I will never let you crash. Now take your rest in the cabin of my heart. I’ll fly you into peaceful skies.”
