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Fifty people, all of them family in one sense or another, which is a strange thing to say about a wedding attended by a consigliere and a tech CEO and a grandmother in a wheelchair, but there it is.

There’s paperwork for this marriage. It’s all nice and legal, something that grates on Lupo, but I can tell he’s also excited about it. He says he’s “finally doing something the right way. Kind of.”

Nonna runs the operation from a wheelchair she treats as a throne. The hip is mending, which is a relief considering how long she delayed the surgery. “You,” she says, when she sees me in the dress. Just that. Then her eyes go wet, and she takes my hand in both of hers. “You will call me Nonna now. Not Diana, I have decided. A woman who saves this family as many times as you have does not keep calling me by my Christian name like a stranger. But Ma is only for Lupo.”

“Nonna it is, then,” I say, trying it out loud, and it fits, the way the ring fits, the way this whole impossible life has started to fit.

Three months ago, I was a woman with a decade of ladder and a break-room chair and no one to call my own but a brother nine time zones away. Now an eighty-year-old Italian matriarch is crying over me and reassigning what I’m allowed to call her.

“Good. Now go. You are keeping my son waiting, and he has waited long enough. We all have. Go and be married and let me finally stop worrying about the two of you.”

Before I walk down the aisle, Sarah scatters petals in careful, evenly spaced deposits, frowning with concentration, occasionally stopping to redistribute a clump she finds insufficiently uniform. Twice she looks up to confirm I’m watching, and twice I give her the nod that means perfect, keep going. So, she does.

She’s holding Pip now too, tucked in the crook of her petal arm, wearing a matching peach flowered dress. Her hair has grown into soft little curls. Her color is good, her counts are consistently in range, her dose is correct now and monitored by a doctor who will never again let a number go unchecked. She is, for the most part, an ordinary child doing an ordinary job at an ordinary wedding, and I have to stop watching her, or I’ll cry before the vows.

The music starts—piano. It’s my own arrangement, Simple, in C.

Mark gives me away.

He flew back for it, still not entirely sold on a brother-in-law who runs a legitimate-now empire he built out of the ashes of an illegitimate one. But he flew back for this. For me.

He walks me down the aisle in a linen suit, and at the end of it he shakes Lupo’s hand—a hard handshake, except this time there’s something else underneath it.

“You set yourself on fire for her,” Mark says, low, just for the two of them, though I catch it. “Don’t come up with another reason to do that again.”

“I won’t.”

“I built the tech that clears half the world’s shipping now, and I will always, always know where you are. Understand me?”

Lupo smiles. “I’d expect nothing less from a man who loves her. For what it’s worth, I’ll spend the rest of my life earning her, because it would take a lifetime to do that.”

Mark studies him a long moment, one last pass. “You pass. For now.”

My future husband laughs, and Mark actually smiles before taking his front row seat.

Nick stands beside Lupo in a suit that isn’t blue for once. Black, for the special occasion. When I reach the end of the aisle, he gives me the smallest nod, the one that means the doctor did all right after all, and I give it back, because he did too.

Adeline is here. Sort of. Sarah stands at the bridesmaid’s position holding a tablet, and on the screen is Adeline, video-called in from Boston. She’s wearing a dress and holding a glass of wine at what must be a criminal hour her time.

The officiant, a village priest Nonna produced from some deep reserve of favors, begins. The words move over us in Italian and English both. I understand more of the Italian now than I did three months ago, but not all of it. That’s okay. I don’t need to know all of it.

Lupo catches my eye and smirks, the wolf’s smirk, the one from a hotel bar three months and a lifetime ago. It pulls me back to the moment I’m supposed to be in—the moment where I say the two words that make all of it real.

“I do,” I say when the moment comes, and my voice doesn’t shake, which surprises me. It’s the one thing I’ve been sure of since he asked, and I mean it in a way I’ve never meant anything.

Lupo says his two words like a threat and a promise all braided together, the way he says everything. Then he kisses me. Sarah cheers. Nonna weeps royally into a handkerchief, Nick pretends he isn’t, and Adeline whoops from a tablet across an ocean. Everyone else claps.

We shuffle out to the reception in the last golden hour, and Lupo’s hand finds the small of my back. I lean into it the way I’ve been leaning into all of it—slowly, then all at once.

There’s a moment, crossing the grass toward the reception, where the whole strange architecture of the last three months of memories arranges itself into something I can almost hold. A conference, a drink, a packed suitcase, a plane. Sunday sauce and a gala and a road in the dark and a stuck drawer. A warehouse, a hilltop, a hospital floor where a don knelt on cheap linoleum. A whole life, built at gunpoint and then rebuilt by choice, standing up on its own at last.

The captive friend who chose to stay.

EPILOGUE

LUPO

Six Months Later