"Okay."
That's all. Okay. Not are they sure, not what did the doctor say, not why wasn't he home, none of the things I'd expect from her on an ordinary night, and that absence tells me more than anything she could have said.
I reach over and take her hand off her knee, and she lets me, fingers cold and unmoving in mine.
"You don't have to talk," I say. "I'm not asking you to."
Her jaw works. For a second I think something's going to come loose in her, some crack finally opening, but it doesn't. She just nods, once, and looks back at the window.
I could fill the silence. I could tell her what I know about overdoses, survival rates, facts that sound like comfort but are really just noise to keep from sitting still with something ugly. I don't. She doesn't need information from me right now. She needs to not be handled.
So I stay quiet with her instead, and after a while, maybe twenty minutes, maybe longer, I feel her shift.
She unfolds her legs. Turns toward me. And then she's against my side, her head under my chin, one hand fisted in my shirt like she's checking I'm actually solid, actually here. I put my arm around her, and she doesn't cry, still. But her whole body hasgone from rigid to something closer to collapse, all her weight coming into me at once like she's been holding it up by herself for hours and just ran out.
I don't say anything. I put my hand flat against the back of her head and hold her there. Outside the window the dark keeps going by at five hundred miles an hour. Somewhere below us is the ocean, and ahead of us New York, and in it a man who did this to his own wife for years and thought no one would ever make him answer for it.
He's wrong.
I sit with Lydia's weight against my chest, her breath finally slowing into something that might, eventually, be sleep, and I go over it once more, calm now, no adrenaline left in it, just the plain fact of the thing.
Frank doesn't survive this.
This is a decision, made somewhere between the bathroom floor in Brooklyn and this seat on this plane. It has nothing to do with feeling better, or proving anything to her, to my mother, or to my father's ghost still sitting somewhere behind my eyes. It's settled now. Final. There's nothing left to argue about.
Lydia's hand tightens in my shirt even in whatever half-sleep she's fallen into, like some part of her is still bracing for the next thing to go wrong.
I hold her tighter and let her.
Six hours to New York. Six hours until I find out if her mother lives, until I stand in a hospital hallway and look at the man responsible for putting her there.
I already know what happens after that.
26
LYDIA
The lobby smellslike bleach and burnt coffee, and the fluorescent lights buzz so loud I can hear them over my own pulse.
We didn't stop moving from the tarmac. Nico's hand found the small of my back the second we cleared the jet's stairs and it hasn't left since, not through customs, not through the car, not through the sliding doors that dumped us into this washed-out lobby at four in the morning.
The woman at the front desk barely looks up. Types Bianca's name into her computer like she's ringing up groceries. Tells us intensive care, third floor, and to check in with the nurses' station.
I already know we're not walking in unescorted. Two of Nico's men are posted by the elevator bank, still as church statues, jackets too clean for a hospital at this hour. Another one down the hall we're headed toward. Anastasio worked fast for a guy who was still in Sicily when the call came in.
"They're just here," Nico says, low, reading my face before I ask. "Nobody touches you."
I nod because I don't trust my voice yet.
The elevator ride is silent. I watch the numbers climb and think about the last time I stood in a hospital, seventeen years old, lying to a triage nurse about how I got the bruise on my jaw. I think about how I promised myself, walking out that door for good three days later, that I'd come back for my mother.
Seven years. I didn't come back. Not until I had no choice.
The nursewho meets us outside the ICU doors has kind eyes and a voice trained not to give anything away.
"She's stable, for now," she says. It's a technical word. It buys time, that's all. "Unconscious. We're monitoring for organ stress. It's too early to say how this settles out."
"Can I see her?"
