Chapter 17 #2
A banner stretched crookedly across the far wall of the living room in bright, cheerful letters.
WELCOME HOME, EMILY!
Something in me softened and winced at the same time. It was sweet. Of course it was sweet. But tomorrow was Sophie’s surgery. Tomorrow was supposed to be about her, and instead there was a banner with my name on it, and the guilt hit so quickly I barely had time to hide it.
“Mom…” I said quietly. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“Of course we did,” she said at once, still holding one of my hands as if she wasn’t fully convinced I was actually there yet. “You came home.”
Home.
The word still sat strangely in me.
I looked past them then and saw Sophie on the sofa.
My heart squeezed.
She smiled when she saw me, but there was something off about it. Not exactly sadness. Something closer to apology, which made no sense and immediately made me hate whatever was about to make sense of it.
“Soph?”
She stood, slower than she used to, and came toward me for a hug that I gave back with more force than grace. She felt smaller than I remembered. Or maybe just more fragile because I knew what tomorrow meant.
“Hi,” she said into my shoulder.
“Hi yourself.” I pulled back enough to look at her properly. “Why do you look like you’re about to confess to arson?”
Her expression twisted.
And before I could ask again, movement in the kitchen doorway caught my eye.
I had written, in an early chapter draft I never quite finished, that the most insidious power structures did not announce themselves.
They arrived as generosity. As the man who already knew what you needed.
As the voice that became so woven into the fabric of daily life that naming it for what it was became the disruptive act, not the thing itself.
I found the evidence in Florence. In Siena.
In the merchant networks of fourteenth-century Milan.
I never once thought to look for it in my mother's kitchen.
Adam stepped out carrying a tray of food. Of course he was. Adam had always understood that the most effective manipulations happened in front of an audience.
For one blank second, my brain refused to process what I was seeing.
It was only seven months since I saw him last and yet he looked older.
Broader through the shoulders, a little leaner in the face, his smile still bright enough to pass for easy charm.
The kind of smile that used to make people tell me how lucky I was.
The kind of smile that had always been best at its work when other people were watching.
“Emily,” he said warmly, as if this were natural, as if seeing him here with a tray in his hands and my family all around us were not the start of a private nightmare I had spent years outrunning. “So good to see you home.”
The strange thing was that, standing here now, what I felt first was shock.
Not fear or not enough fear to matter the way it once had.
It was still there, somewhere deep, an old reflex that had not entirely died, but the place he used to bruise no longer lit up the same way. I didn’t feel small. I didn’t feel cornered. I didn’t feel like cowering.
I had sat in a room with Alessandro Benetti and held my own.
I was currently dating a man who would one day be an underboss in one of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the country.
I was not going to stand in my childhood home and fear the son of a local police chief just because he still wore his golden-boy smile.
I smiled back.
“Yes,” I said evenly. “I’m here for Sophie’s surgery. I’m not staying. And you’re here because…?”
My mother glanced between us too quickly. My father tensed. Sophie went very still on the sofa.
Adam laughed, easy and practiced, but I didn’t miss the warning underneath it. It was there in his eyes, sharp as a blade slid halfway free of its sheath. A promise of future retribution, dressed up in amusement.
Too bad for him that promise no longer worked on me.
“It’s a family reunion,” my mother said too brightly, stepping forward as if she could smooth it all back into something harmless by force of will.
“He’s not family,” I said.
Adam’s smile held, but only just.
“Well,” he said, setting the tray down with exaggerated care, “that’s a little rude. We were together for two years, Emily. I was Bran’s best friend.”
“Yes,” I said. “But Bran is dead. And you and I are done.”
The words felt good.
Necessary.
My mother made a soft, distressed sound. “Emily?—”
Adam sighed, the picture of long-suffering patience. “We all make decisions too quickly when we’re young. Your mom and dad broke up in college too, didn’t they? And look at them now. Stronger than ever.”
For one wild second, I almost asked my father how many times he had ever bruised my mother badly enough to leave finger marks.
The answer, of course, was none.
Instead I just looked at Adam and shook my head.
“I’m not here to reminisce,” I said. “I’m here for Sophie and her surgery.”
Then I turned toward my sister, deliberately turning my attention away from him as if he no longer deserved a primary role in my thoughts.
“It’s late,” I said, softening my voice. “Shouldn’t you be in bed before tomorrow’s big day?”
Sophie’s expression wavered. “Probably.”
I smiled at her. “What do you say to a sleepover? I’ll take the inflatable bed in your room. Just like old times.”
Her whole face changed at once, worry morphing in hope and excitement. “Really?”
“Really.”