27. Lydia
LYDIA
The overhead lights hum too loud, and my shoes squeak against the tile with every step.
Frank follows closely behind, and I can feel his eyes undressing me with every step.
“That room at the end of the hall.” He breaks the silence.
I keep walking.
Somewhere under my ribs a little girl is chanting the same three things she's chanted since she was fourteen years old. Be brave. Run if you can. Never let him get you alone in a room.
I'm about to break every rule she ever gave me.
She used to say it while she braided my hair before school, quiet enough that the walls wouldn't hear, something meant only for the two of us.
She never explained why. She didn't have to.
I learned the reason the same year she taught me the rule, and I've spent every year since trying not to think about it in daylight.
I'm walking straight toward the one thing she spent her whole life keeping me away from. She isn't awake to stop me, and there's nobody else who can.
My hand finds the door handle before my brain agrees to it. Cold metal. I push through.
Frank takes a seat in the vinyl chair by the window, crosses his ankle over his knee and smiles a smile that doesn’t ever reach his eyes.
"Lyddie." He says it soft. "Look at you. All grown up."
“Get to the fucking point.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect.
“Why don’t you sit down?” He nods at the other chair.
I don't.
He smiles like I've done something charming. "Suit yourself."
He rubs a hand over his jaw, unhurried, a man settling into his favorite part of the day.
"You know I've got people on your mother's floor right now who won't sign off on half of what those doctors want to do to her. Won't authorize it. Won't release records. Funny how much power a man keeps even after his wife ODs.”
"What do you want, Frank?"
He grins wider. “I’m hurt, Lyddie. After seven years, you don’t even have the decency of asking your daddy how he’s holding up?”
“Don’t you dare call yourself that.” I grit my teeth. “You’re not my fucking dad.”
“Hmm.” He chuckles and licks his lips as he gives me another up and down with his eyes, pausing slowly to rest his gaze on my chest. “And ain’t that the fucking truth.”
I stay by the door where I can still see the hallway through the little window in it, and some part of me hates myself for needing that.
"So, you ask me what I want," he says. "Answer is simple. All of it. All you have to do is bring me something real."
"Meaning what, Frank?"
"About your husband." He doesn't blink. "About the family he runs with. You're in his house now, Lyddie. You hear things. You see things. A smart girl in your position hears plenty."
"Vague as hell for a cop building a case."
"I like to leave room for flexibility.” He spreads his hands, easy, like he's offering me a gift instead of a noose. "You bring me something I can use, I make calls. That's it. That's the whole deal."
"And if I don't have anything?”
“I’m sure you’ll find something." He shrugs, like he's asked me to run an errand instead of hand over my husband's neck. “You’re a smart girl, and he looks so damn smitten with you that all you have to do is bat those pretty long lashes and he’ll tell you anything you want.
You're not gonna sit around empty-handed forever. "
"I'm not spying on my own husband for you, Frank."
"Then I guess you're not too worried about your mother."
He says it light, almost gentle, and that's the part that scares me most, how easy the cruelty sits on him, how quiet it stays even when it cuts.
I clench my jaws.
"You want to know what happens to a woman like her, Lyddie, once the machines come off and she's still not all the way back?" He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Weak, confused, barely even fucking conscious.”
Then, the false warmth drops out of his voice all at once.
“But those holes of hers will still be fucking wet and warm.”
My stomach folds in on itself.
"I've got friends who’d been paying her visits for years," he says. "Good men. They'll come sit with her. Keep her company. Keep her hands full, so to speak.” He lets the word sit there, ugly and slow. "You remember how that worked before, don't you?"
I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say that he can't twist into leverage.
"So." He sits back, satisfied, like he's already won, because he has. "You bring me my something real. I agree to signing her off to you. Or." He shrugs, easy again, back to bravado. "My friends keep her nice and busy, just like old times."
I want to be sick right there on the linoleum. "You’re an unbelievable piece of shit.”
He watches me want it, and something in his face settles, loosens, the tight coiled thing behind his eyes going slack now that the trap's already sprung and he doesn't need to push anymore today.
"Go on back to your husband," he says, almost kind now, almost bored. "Think it over. Not like she's going anywhere."
I leave without another word because if I open my mouth again I'm going to say something that gets my mother hurt worse than she already is.
Nico's waiting exactly where I left him, arms crossed, jaw tight enough to crack a walnut. For one second I think he's going to ask what happened in that room, and I don't know what I'll say if he does.
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 serving spoons 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 carried me 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."
I look up at her.
She doesn't explain. She doesn't tell me what the two things were, or which one she kept, or what it cost her to let the other one go.
"I've learned not to ask what I'm not owed," she says.
She reaches over and pats my hand once, slow and steady, meant to settle something that's spooked. Then she stands, smoothing her apron down, done saying everything she came to say.
"You'll figure out what needs to be done, dear," she says at the door. "You always have."
Then she's gone, and I'm alone in a room I haven't slept in since before Italy, with my mother unconscious across the water and my husband down the hall not knowing any of it, and no answer any closer than it was an hour ago.
I lie back on the bed without changing out of my clothes and stare at the ceiling until the shapes on it stop making sense.
Somewhere in this house, Nico's probably still awake, probably wondering why I didn't come to him.
I don't have an answer for that either.