"Em?" she asks, frowning.
I don't even manage to open my mouth when Ben, without missing a beat, pulls his hoodie off so she can recognize his face.
"Mrs. Foster." He gives her his charming smile. "It's been ages, but you haven't changed a bit. How are you?"
"Ben?" Mom blinks. Once. Twice. Three times. "Well. This is... unexpected."
I can tell her brain's buffering. She's thinking what's Ben Bellini doing back in her daughter's life when she herself told me he was a bad idea—not as a boyfriend, not even as a friend. She never fully explained why, just let it hang there, knowing it would fester.
"I know. I was just going to the store when I saw Emma struggling in the rain."
"But what are you doing here?"
"He, uhm—Ben moved into our building," I rush out. "With his wife."
Mom frowns like that's the weirdest alibi she's ever heard.
"Interesting," she says finally. "What a coincidence. Still work at the hospital? ER, wasn't it?"
Ben smiles. "You remember? I'm flattered."
"I remember everything about my daughter," she says, sounding offended.
Ben's eyes harden instantly, his patience for my mother hitting expiration date very quickly.
"As you should," he says with a cold tone, and before my mother can react, he pivots with that calm, lethal grace. "How'sFrank? Still coaching little league?"
The question pulls me back to that one Saturday when Ben picked me up from my parents' house and ended up in the backyard batting with Dad. Dad never talked more with anyone in his life, I think. Said I should invite him over again but I never did because of Mom.
"Yes," she says, clipped. "Still stuck in his own world of sports and gasoline."
Ben nods, eyes saying he's not surprised my dad prefers carburetors to her.
"People just never change, do they?" he taunts as he watches her. "Especially the bad traits."
Mom squints, finally catching up. She gives him a tight-lipped smile. "Well, I'm sure you are busy. So are we. Thank you for the chivalry."
"No worries. You know, Italians. Our mothers would kill us if we let women walk in the rain."
Mom freezes. Looks up at the gondola umbrella, then at the boy she told me to forget, and right there, clear as the sliver of sun breaking through the clouds, she gets that I never did.
All because Ben's too Italian to let me get soaked. It'd almost be funny if I didn't feel like throwing up.
"Oh. Right. Italian," she says flatly.
Ben insists on walking us back to the glass deck, gentleman to the end. Nobody's talking, which somehow feels louder than if we were.
"Always a pleasure, Mrs. Foster," he says, the sarcastic tone obvious. My mother only nods, not even faking a smile.
Ben turns to me, and his voice goes softer, private: "See you later, Emma."
I meet his eyes for one second too long. "Later."
And then he walks off, lowering the umbrella, vanishing into the blur of streets, and every instinct in me wants to follow, run wherever he goes.
When I turn back to my mother, she threatens me with that look she's used countless times when I was younger, living under her roof.
"Tell me it's not what I think it is," she says, her eyes searching my face.
