"Yeah."
"Come here." She tugs at my hand, weak but insistent, until I lean down and let her press her lips to my forehead the way she used to when I was small enough to still fit against her. "My Lyddie. Oh my sweet baby girl, I’ve missed you so much."
Over her shoulder I watch Nico, this man with a scar from his ear to his chin and amber eyes that used to scare me and don't anymore, standing in a hospital room meeting my mother for the first time under no threat at all, no gun in the house, no lie between any of us, nothing left to hide from anyone.
I remember another room, another year, his voice low in the dark of my bedroom when I had nothing left and no reason to believe a single promise anyone made me.
I'm going to help you. I'm going to help her.
He said it when he had no way of knowing if he could keep it. He said it before I trusted him, before I loved him, before either of us had any idea what it would cost to make it true.
He never broke it. Not once, not even through everything that came after, the betrayal, the gun to my head, Frank's body crumpling in the driveway.
Every hard thing that happened between that promise and this room was just the long way of getting here.
My mother is awake. She knows my name. She's holding my hand, and Nico is standing close enough to touch. There's a baby growing under my ribs that will never know a single second of what I knew.
The promise I made at seventeen isn't a debt anymore.
It's paid.
"Introduce us properly," my mother says, looking past me at Nico with something like approval already forming on her face. "The man who helped bring my daughter home. I want to know him."
Nico steps closer, and pulls a chair up to the other side of the bed, and for the first time in a long time, nobody in this room is afraid of anything at all.
43
LYDIA
The zipper stickshalfway up my spine. Giorgia laughs under her breath and works it free with two fingers.
"Hold still," she says. "You're worse than a cat in a bath."
"I'm nervous."
"You're not," my mother says. "You're happy. Different thing."
Bianca stands behind me in the mirror, her hands steady on my shoulders. Six months ago steady hands from her would have been a rumor. Now she's here, upright, color in her face, close enough that I can smell the perfume she's worn since I was a girl.
She smooths a curl back from my temple and tucks it into the pins Giorgia already set.
"There," she says. "Now you look like you."
The dress fits. That's the part I keep circling back to, small and enormous at once. It fits through the shoulders and fits loose enough over the curve of my stomach. Nobody pinned anything at midnight, no seamstress muttering that it would have to do. Ipicked this dress. I stood in a shop three months ago, turned in front of a mirror, and said yes, this one. Nobody told me what yes meant.
Last time the fabric didn't fit and neither did I. Last time I walked a path I didn't choose with no shoes on, cold stone under my feet, and I told myself the whole way that a funeral would have felt more honest.
This time my feet are in ivory heels Bella picked out and made me practice walking in for two weeks straight.
"You're crying already," Giorgia says, not unkindly, and hands me a tissue before I've even felt the sting behind my eyes.
"I'm not."
"You are. Dab, don't rub."
Bianca catches my eye in the mirror and doesn't say anything at all. She doesn't have to. We both know what today is standing on top of, and we both know we're not going to talk about it, not today. Today gets to just be this.
My phone buzzes on the vanity. Bella, from downstairs. He's already crying. Anastasio's filming it. Get down here before he ruins his own wedding.
