Page 34

At the pot she adds one anchovy, melts it to nothing, and points the spoon at me. “This does not exist. My friend in Napoli has asked for thirty years. If it reaches her, I will know the leak.”

“Doctor-patient confidentiality covers sauce.”

“Good girl.”

For an hour it’s just work and jazz and her humming, and I didn’t know a kitchen could hold this much order without a single monitor beeping in it. My world is very different from hers, and in some ways, not at all. Her operating room has an order to it. Steps must be followed for the best outcome. Red squishy things require their own handling.

Maybe we’re not so different.

“He was married to his work by nineteen,” Diana says, out of nowhere, stirring. “You should know the history.”

I keep my eyes on the onions. “Allegra.”

“That one, and others before and after her. My son has a pattern. He finds women with expensive tastes.” She takes my board and slides the onions into the fat, and the perfume makes my mouth water.

“Women like that are a costly hobby.”

She nods once. “There was one from Geneva who loudly stated the prices of the paintings in our hallway during Christmas dinner. It was distasteful. An actress who cried whenever jewelry was mentioned. Others I never met.”

I can’t stop myself from asking, “And Allegra Brancati?”

“Allegra never needed his money. She has her own.” Diana wipes her hands on her apron.

“By your estimation, I imagine that makes her perfect for him.”

Her face shutters, warmth gone. “That one needed his power, which is a hungrier thing. Money fills. Power only craves.”

“True. I see that a lot at the hospital. Ambitious people, always trying to climb the ladder. They’re never really happy with what they have.” She passes me a large wooden spoon that might be better described as an oar, and I stir the onions. “Why does he go for gold diggers?”

“He likes to know what he’s up against.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A woman with a visible price can never ambush him. It is the ones without a price a man like him never sees coming.”

I think I get her meaning. “You just reminded me of one of the administrators we lost last year.”

She crosses herself. “How did they die?”

“I don’t mean like that. He was fired for unknowingly hiring an underage escort. He knew she was an escort—didn’t know she was underage. Everyone knew he hired his dates, and one drunken Christmas party, I asked him why hire them. He was good-looking, smart, funny. The whole package. He said he liked to know what he was getting into at the start of the night. With a date, he didn’t know what might happen, but with the agency he used, he knew what to expect. He liked predictability.”

“He sounds like my boy when my boy is honest. That is usually when he has had too much Chianti. Don’t tell him I told you that.”

I smile down at her. “The secret is safe with me.”

She sits on her kitchen stool, which might be older than her. “For years, they were off and on, and every time Allegra left, she took nothing, so she believes she took nothing. The others emptied his wallet. But Allegra drained his heart.”

The onions have gone glassy and sweet. I stir them so I have somewhere to put my hands. “Why tell me this?”

She turns from the second pot and looks at me with the full weight of her attention. “So now I ask you plainly, Doctor. What do you want from my boy?”

I could tell her the pretty lie, but she’d see right through it. Through me. There’s no point in playing that game—she would win, and the rest of us would lose.

“I want Sarah’s counts to stay where I’ve gotten them. I want her in the narrow band of kids who finish maintenance and grow up and forget the taste of the pills. I’ve spent my whole career watching this disease take families apart—not just the children, but the marriages, the savings, the healthy siblings who learn to be invisible. I know how to fight that. It’s the one thing on earth I know how to do.”

“But Lupo⁠—”

My eyes sting, and it’s not the onions, and I wipe the corners of my eyes. “What I need from Lupo is… somehow more complex than cancer. I can understand cancer. I know how to cut it out of a body, how to treat what remains…”