Page 189

Well, shit.

Nora follows her gaze and wipes under her eyes, still smiling.

“Nonna, loro sono i miei amici.”

More Italian follows. Names this time, because I catch mine somewhere in there.

Her grandmother looks straight at me and I straighten without meaning to.

Nora notices.

Of course she fucking notices.

Her mouth twitches.

“What?”

“Nothing, cowboy.”

“What's she saying?”

“Wouldn't you like to know?”

“Nora.”

She laughs.

Actually laughs.

And I don't even care if the old woman just called me an idiot. I'd probably agree with her anyway.

Her grandmother waves all of us toward the house, saying something that apparently doesn't require translation because Nora and Chiara immediately start moving.

The house is small and old.

Not old in the way people back home renovate something and then spend a fortune making it look old. This place has actually been lived in.

The walls are thick and uneven, painted a pale color I can't quite name anymore. There are dark wooden cabinets, little lace curtains at the windows and a religious picture hanging near the doorway. A wooden clock ticks somewhere behind me and the patterned tile beneath my boots is cool despite the heat outside.

There's stuff everywhere. Ceramic bowls and crocheted covers over things I'm pretty sure don't need covers. A television that looks older than Jace. A bowl filled with lemons, flowers on the windowsill and a wooden rosary hanging from a nail.

Nothing matches, but everything belongs.

It reminds me of home, not because of the way it looks, because nothing about this place looks like Wyoming, but because of the feeling.

Then I notice the photographs.

They cover half a wall and continue across the top of a cabinet, some so old the colors have almost disappeared.

I recognize Nora immediately.

She's probably six or seven in one of them, sitting on the shoulders of an older man with her arms wrapped around his forehead and a smile so big it takes over her whole face. Her hair is wild around her shoulders and she's missing a tooth. Chiara is beside them, reaching up like she's trying to pull her sister down.

There's another of the three of them at a table. Nora and Chiara are covered in what looks like flour while the same man stands behind them laughing.

Nonno, I guess.

The man I've heard Nora mention before, but never had a face for until now.