That's the truth and I make myself hold it instead of looking away from it. I don't get to be only a victim in this. Not this time.
The nausea climbs another notch. I put my hand flat against my stomach like that'll help. It doesn't.
I tell myself it's guilt. I need it to be guilt. Guilt I can survive; I've survived it before.
I askto see my mother alone.
I don't have to build a story for it, the way I did for Anastasio at Gravesend, standing in that dusty hallway inventing a reason to be somewhere I shouldn't. Nobody questions a wife who wants privacy with her dying mother the same day she found her father's murder connected to her husband's family. Grief is the easiest lie I've never had to tell.
Nico looks at me like he wants to come with me and doesn't, reads something in my face he takes for sorrow instead of what it actually is, and lets me go.
I almost can't stand how easy that is.
Frank is alreadyin the hallway outside her room when I get there, leaning against the wall in his off-duty jacket like he owns the hospital and every hallway in it.
"There she is." He smiles, and it's the same smile he's worn my whole life before something bad happens to me. "You look like hell, sweetheart."
"I have something." My voice comes out flatter than I mean it to. "For you."
That gets his attention fast. He straightens off the wall.
I hand him the phone.
I watch his face while he scrolls through the four photos, and I have to swallow hard, twice, to keep from being sick right there in the hallway. Something moves behind his eyes that I've genuinely never seen on him before. It's hunger, brighter and worse than the smugness I'm used to, worse than the low, constant satisfaction of a man who already knows he's won. His mouth opens a little. For one unbearable second, he looks openly delighted.
"Terminal 7." He says it slow, tasting it. "He never once mentioned this club existed. Not once, in every file I ever ran." He looks up at me like I just handed him a gift he didn't know to ask for. "Where'd you find this?"
"Doesn't matter where. It's real." I keep my eyes on his face because if I look at the phone again I don't trust my own stomach. "Isn’t that what you wanted?"
"Yes it is, baby girl." He almost laughs. "You did good, Lyddie.”
I want to take the phone back out of his hand so bad my fingers ache with it, and I don't, because there's no version of this where I get to take it back.
"So we're done," I say. "You do your part now."
He tucks the phone in his jacket pocket like it's already his, and something in me screams at the sight of it disappearing into that pocket, gone, out of my hands for good.
"About that." He rocks back on his heels. "Power of attorney's signed. Hell, it’s executed. Sitting right here." He pats his chest like there's a folder in there instead of a heart. "All legal, all real, just like I promised you."
"Then give it to me."
"I will." His smile doesn't move. "Once your husband's put away for good. Not before."
The hallway tilts a half inch, same as the floor did this morning.
"That wasn't the deal."
"The deal was you'd bring me something real, and you did. I'm grateful. I really am." He says grateful like it tastes good in his mouth. "But I'm not handing a signed medical power of attorney to a Mafia wife while her husband's still walking around free to do whatever he wants with it. Think about it from where I'm standing. You'd have it in your hand for maybe an hour before he found out. And then what?"
He leans in, low, almost gentle, which is somehow worse than the menace.
"This is me being patient with you, Lyddie. You should be thanking me."
I don't say anything. Anything I said would come out as a scream.
"Tell you what." He glances toward the door, toward the room, toward the shape of my mother somewhere on the other side of it. "As a show of good faith. You get her alone. No nurse standing over your shoulder, no camera in the corner, whatever you two need to say to each other." He steps back, opening the hallway like he's granting me a kingdom. "First time since you got here. My treat."
I almost laugh, and it comes out as something closer to a sob that I swallow before it finishes.
