Déjà vu.
Only this time, the doctor wouldn’t talk to us. We weren’t family.
“Fuck! I just want to know if he’s alive!”
“Ma’am, you need to calm down,” the doctor said.
“Lucia.”
I heard a man’s voice behind me. I turned to find Roman walking into the waiting room, his face cleaned of blood, although his shirt still had splatters of it.
“They’re operating. There’s nothing for them to tell.” He turned to the doctor. “Add Lucia DeMarco to the list,” he said. “Keep her updated on Salvatore Benedetti’s condition.”
The doctor nodded and made a note of what I assumed was my name and walked away.
“Thank you,” I said to Roman.
He nodded and sat down. Defeat was the one word I would use to describe him in that moment.
“What about Franco?” Isabella asked.
“Stable”
“Of course. Of course he’s stable while his son is in there possibly dying.” I sank down into a chair, and Isabella wrapped her arms around me.
“Shh. Remember, you have to be strong. He needs you now more than ever.”
I nodded, wiping away tears and snot.
We sat in the waiting room for a long time. Isabella excused herself to make some calls, to make sure the sitter could stay with Effie longer, to check on Luke. Roman and I remained silent, lost in our own misery. All the while, my ankle throbbed.
“He should never have goaded Dominic like that. He’d sworn never to do it.”
I turned to Roman. “What are you talking about?” I hadn’t been in the room, not until it was almost the very end.
Roman glanced at me. “Franco isn’t Dominic’s father, but he loved my sister. Loved her enough to keep it hushed. To act like Dominic was his son all along. He had no right to tell him like this.”
“You’re worried about Dominic? He deserves to be the one in there, not Salvatore.”
He met my gaze. “No one should be in there. Period.”
“I may be a horrible person, but I don’t agree.”
He sighed. “You’re nowhere near a horrible person.”
He got up and left the room. I remained where I was. Isabella stayed with me until, almost four hours later, a doctor finally came out, looking for next of kin.
“That’s me,” I said, although it wasn’t quite me. “Lucia DeMarco.”
He checked his sheet of paper. Satisfied, he looked back at me. The space of that second stretched to an hour, and I dreamed the worst, thought I should prepare myself to hear it, but how did one prepare to hear something that terrible?
“Mr. Benedetti is an incredibly lucky man. And his will to live is tremendous.”
I smiled, feeling a thousand pounds lift from me. “He’s going to make it?”
“He shouldn’t have, not given the route the bullet took, but he is. He’s asking for you.”
“I can see him?”
