He doesn't ask.
He just looks at me, reads something in my face he doesn't like, and says, "Let's go home."
We drive to Long Island instead of back to Brooklyn. Neither of us says why. I think we both need the distance from that hospital more than we need to be close to it tonight, even though my mother is still in it, unconscious, tubes running into both arms.
Dinner happens because dinner always happens in that house, whatever else is falling apart around it.
Giorgia sets the table like it's any other night, moving between the kitchen and the dining room with a towel over one shoulder, gray braid swinging, laying out bread and a pot of something that smells like rosemary and garlic. It smells like a home I never actually had, and my throat tightens up before I've even sat down. Nico sits at the head of the table. I sit across from him. The three of us circle each other around plates and servingspoons like a strange, careful little family that none of us signed up to be.
I push chicken around my plate.
I cut it into smaller and smaller pieces until it's basically shredded, and I still don't eat any of it.
Nico watches me do this without saying anything, which is somehow worse than if he'd said something. He's holding back questions. I can tell. I don't know if it's patience, or if he's afraid of what I'll say when he finally asks.
"Lydia." Giorgia sets a basket of bread near my hand. "Eat."
"I'm not that hungry."
She doesn't push. She never does, not in front of him, and I'm grateful for it, even if I don't have room to feel much of anything right now beyond getting through the meal.
I make it through maybe ten more minutes of forks scraping plates and Nico asking me small, careful questions I answer in one word each, and then I can't do it anymore. My chair scrapes back too loud against the floor.
"I'm gonna turn in early," I say. "Long day."
Nico's eyes stay on me a beat too long. "You okay?"
"Yeah." The lie comes out smoother than it should. "Just tired."
I don't go to his room.
I go to mine, the one I haven't slept in since before Italy. I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark for a long time without turning on a lamp, and I know exactly what it means that my feet carriedme here instead of there. I just don't say it out loud. Not even to myself.
A soft knock. Giorgia doesn't wait for an answer. She comes in and sits down on the edge of the bed beside me like she's done it a hundred times, even though she never has.
"You didn't touch your food," she says. "I'm worried."
"I'm fine."
"You're not." She says it plainly, no heat in it, just fact. "I've known you long enough now to see the difference."
I stare at my hands in my lap. "My mom's still not awake."
"I know, dear."
"And Frank..." I stop. I can feel the rest of the sentence sitting right behind my teeth, what he wants, what it would cost, what happens to her if I don't hand it over, and I can't make myself say any of it out loud, not even to the one person in this whole house who's actually on my side. "He wants something from me. Something I don't know how to give him without it costing me something else."
Giorgia doesn't ask what. She waits, hands folded in her lap, and lets the silence sit there instead of rushing to fill it. Somehow that's easier to sit inside than a question would have been.
"I keep thinking about how she used to tell me never to be alone with him," I say. "And today I walked right into a room and did it anyway. Because I had to."
"Sometimes we do," Giorgia says.
"I don't know what to do." My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate that it does. "I feel like whatever I choose, somebody I love pays for it."
Giorgia is quiet for a moment. When she speaks again, her voice has dropped into something older, something that's been carrying weight a lot longer than tonight.
"I loved two things once," she says. "I couldn't keep them both. I chose one. I have never been sure it was the right choice. Only that it was the one I could live with."
