25. Giovanni
— ? —
Giovanni
The hospital chair was designed by someone who hated the human spine.
I didn’t care.
I’d been in it for six hours. Would be in it for six more. Until someone physically removed me, and even then I’d fight my way back.
The monitors beeped.
Her oxygen levels held steady.
I watched them like they were the only thing keeping me tethered to the earth.
“Boss.” Dante appeared in the doorway, my phone in his hand. “New York’s called three times. The Boston situation needs-”
“Handle it.” I didn’t look up from her face on the hospital bed.
“I need your authorization for-”
“You have it. Handle everything.”
“Giovanni-”
“Dante.” I didn’t look away from the monitors. “Unless this building is actively on fire, I don’t want to hear about it.”
He stood there for a moment. Then, quietly: “I’ll be in the waiting room.”
The door closed.
Kylie slept.
The doctors had called it “mild smoke inhalation with superficial thermal injury to the right forearm.” They’d said she was lucky. They’d said another few minutes in that building and the story would have ended differently.
I’d listened to them explain this with a face I hoped was calm.
Then I’d excused myself to the bathroom, locked the door, and thrown up.
Now I sat.
The clock on the wall ticked past midnight. Past one. Past two.
She shifted in the bed. Made a small sound of discomfort. Settled again.
I leaned forward.
My forehead touched her knuckles, the ones without the IV, the ones that had pushed open a fire door and saved her own life while I was still six hours away, useless, powerless, driving through the dark like prayer alone could close the distance.
The sob caught me off guard.
I’d thought I was past it. Thought the breakdown in the street had emptied whatever reservoir of fear and relief I’d been carrying. But apparently not. Apparently the body had more to say.
I pressed my mouth to her knuckles and let it happen. Quietly, the way I did everything, but it happened. Shoulders shaking. Breath coming ragged. All the control I’d spent a lifetime building crumbling against the reality of how close I’d come to losing her.
“You’re terrible at being quiet.”
Her voice.
I looked up.
She was awake. Eyes half-open, watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite name.
“How long have you been-”
“Long enough.” Her fingers moved against my face. Tracing the tear tracks I hadn’t bothered to hide. “You cry beautifully. Very dramatic. Very Italian.”
“I thought you were asleep.”
“I was pretending. You needed the moment.”
“Kylie-”
“And I needed to hear it.” Her voice was rough from the smoke, but steady. “I needed to hear what it sounds like when you stop performing.”
I sat back. Wiped my face with the heel of my hand. Felt raw and exposed and completely unwilling to rebuild any of the walls that had just come down.
“I don’t have any armor left,” I said. “You’ve stripped it all. Every piece.”
“Good.” She shifted slightly, wincing at the movement. “Now we’re even.”
The silence stretched between us.
Then she spoke again.
“Say the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The altar.” Her eyes found mine in the dim light. “Four years, Giovanni. Translate it.”
My heart stopped.
“Kylie-”
“You said something. At the wedding. One sentence, right before the kiss. Sicilian. I asked what it meant and you said ‘later.’ Later never came.” Her voice hardened slightly. “I want it now. I think I’ve earned it.”
She had.
God, she had.
I took a breath.
Leaned close.
And said it the way I’d said it then, against her ear, the words soft in the language my grandmother had taught me:
“Tu nun eri mai u cuntrattu. Tu eri a fuga di iddu.”
She was still.
“Now translate it.”
“You were never the contract.” I pulled back enough to see her face. “You were the escape from it.”
Her breath caught.
“My father made a deal with yours. Terms. Territories. The usual blood-soaked arithmetic our families specialize in. And you were part of it - the seal, the symbol, the proof that two violent men could make peace.” I held her gaze.
“But that’s not what you were to me. From the moment I saw you, you were the opposite of everything that deal represented.
You were freedom. You were the door I didn’t know I’d been looking for. ”
“Giovanni-”
“I loved you before I knew the word fit.” The confession didn’t shake now. No armor, no performance, just the truth. “I loved you through every silence I mistook for protection. Through the years I was too broken to say it properly, too trained in the wrong language to give you what you deserved.”
She was crying now.
I kept going.
“I will love you from whatever distance you assign me for the rest of my ridiculous life. If you want me in Savannah, I’ll be in Savannah.
Tell me to stay away, and I’ll stay away.
Ask me to stand in the street and cry in front of firefighters every time you survive something, and apparently I can do that too. ”
A laugh escaped her, wet and startled.
“I’m not asking for the words back,” I said. “I’m years behind on mine. Whatever you feel, however long it takes you to trust it, that’s yours to decide. You don’t owe me anything. Not after what I put you through.”
She was quiet.
I watched her decide not to say it back.
She thought it, felt it, held it in her mouth like a word she wasn’t ready to release, and then swallowed it deliberately.
I accepted it out loud.
“You don’t owe me the words. I’m years behind on mine.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “You are.”
“So what do you want instead?”
She considered this.
Then: “Say it in English every day and we’ll see.”
“Done.”
“And stay tonight.”
I looked at the narrow hospital bed. The monitors. The IV line that limited her movement. The complete impossibility of fitting my body into that space without disrupting approximately seventeen pieces of medical equipment.
“Okay.”
I climbed in anyway.
The bed complained. A monitor beeped in protest. A nurse appeared in the doorway, took one look at the don of the Ferraro family trying to spoon his ex-wife around an IV stand, and apparently decided this was above her pay grade.
The door closed.
Kylie settled against my chest.
Her cheek found the spot over my ribs where Nonna’s sauce recipe was tattooed, the place she’d always gravitated to, even before she knew what was written there.
“Is this okay?” I murmured.
“Shut up.”
“That’s a no?”
“That’s a ‘stop talking and let me sleep on you.’”
I stopped talking.
Her breathing evened out. Deepened. She slept.
I watched the monitor blink.
Green lights, steady rhythm, the most beautiful thing ever engineered.
Each beep was proof she was alive. Each green flash was confirmation that I hadn’t lost her.
That somehow, despite everything, we’d ended up here, in a hospital bed too narrow for two people, with her hair smelling like smoke and my heart beating against her ear and the whole future stretching out in front of us like something I might actually deserve.
I didn’t sleep.
I watched.
***
Dawn came through the hospital window, thin and gold and merciful.
I’d dozed eventually, couldn’t help it, the exhaustion too deep, but I woke when the light changed. Kylie was still asleep against my chest, her breathing steady, the monitors all showing green.
Then the door opened.
Miss Dot appeared first, her caftan today a sunrise orange that matched the window light perfectly. She was carrying a coffee and a look of extreme satisfaction.
But the important thing was who she was holding.
Nico.
Five months old and furious about the early wake-up, his face screwed up in the particular outrage of a baby who’d been handed off one too many times before breakfast. Then he saw me.
The outrage stalled. His whole body did the small startled still-thing it did when a shape resolved into a face he knew.
“Dah,” he said. Wetly. Around his own fist.
“Hey, buddy.” My voice cracked on it. “Yeah. That’s me.”
Miss Dot was already crossing the room. She lowered Nico onto my chest with the efficiency of a woman who’d handled far more complicated deliveries, then stepped back to assess her work.
“There,” she said. “Now you look like a family.”
Nico squirmed against me, rooting and grumbling until he’d wedged himself where he wanted, half on me, half on Kylie, one fist locked around my collar and the other pressed flat to the bandage on her arm like he’d appointed himself its guard.
He babbled something long and grave and entirely without words.
“I know,” I told him. “I agree completely.”
He blew a bubble and went boneless against my chest, that total, trusting collapse only babies and the very drunk can manage. Kylie stirred at the added weight, her hand coming up on its own to rest on his back before she was even awake.
Then she was.
I could tell by the change in her breathing, by the small smile that curved her lips before her eyes opened.
“Hi,” she murmured.
“Hi.” I couldn’t manage more.
“Hi, you.” Her eyes found mine over the top of our son’s dark head. Then she turned her face down and pressed her lips to his hair. “Hi, baby.”
Nico answered with a shriek of pure delight that a nurse two doors down surely heard, grabbed a fistful of Kylie’s hair, and pulled.
“Ow. Okay. Love you too.”
We stayed like that. Three people in a bed built for one, machines beeping, Miss Dot pretending to check her phone in the corner, the morning light making everything gold.
Kylie’s eyes were wet.
So were mine.
“Family,” she whispered.
She said it like she was testing the word. Like she was letting herself think it on purpose for the first time.
I pressed my mouth to her forehead. To Nico’s hair. Let myself believe we might actually get to keep this.
Then her phone buzzed.
Miss Dot checked it, she’d apparently appointed herself communications director, and her eyebrows rose to somewhere near her hairline.
“Well,” she said. “That’s interesting.”
“What?”
“Text from a New York number. Says it’s from Rosa.” Miss Dot read the screen with the particular relish of someone delivering excellent gossip. “‘Landing at noon with your grandmother’s pots. ALL of them.’”
Kylie’s eyes went wide.
My stomach dropped.
“All of them?” Kylie repeated.
“That’s what it says. Capital letters and everything.”
“Giovanni.” Kylie turned to me with an expression caught somewhere between alarm and amusement. “What does ‘all of them’ mean?”
I thought about my mother’s kitchen in New York.
The copper pots that had belonged to her mother-in-law, handed down through three generations of Ferraro women.
The cast iron. The ceramic baking dishes.
The collection that took up an entire wall and was treated with more reverence than most religious artifacts.
“It means,” I said slowly, “that my mother has decided something.”
“Decided what?”
“I’m not sure yet.” I looked at the ceiling. “But she doesn’t move the pots for small decisions.”
Kylie started laughing.
Nico looked between us, confused but delighted by our delight.
My mother was coming.
With all the pots.