Chapter 23
MILA
Mama is dead.
Yelena is dead.
I keep saying it in my head and my body keeps not believing it.
I’m on the edge of my bed in the dark. I’ve been here since I came back from the shower the morning he told me. The shirt of his is on my body. I haven’t taken it off. The chain at my throat is under the cotton. My hands are shaking and they haven’t stopped.
I’m not okay.
I won’t be.
My family is dead. I’m in a house with the man who knew. I can’t breathe.
Mama is dead.
She didn’t get out.
Yelena died asking him to find me.
He stopped looking.
I bend forward over my knees. My breath stops and won’t come out. I press my forehead into my palms. My whole body shakes.
I try to cry. It comes in fragments. A sound. A breath. Then nothing. My body doesn’t remember how to do this. I haven’t cried in front of myself in years.
I haven’t slept or eaten. The room won’t stop moving.
The light at the window hasn’t started.
I get up.
I leave my room before the household is up. The hallway is dark. I’m in his shirt and my slip. Bare feet. I walk to the library.
He doesn’t go in the library. The library is Cassia’s.
I open the book on my lap. I open it to the page I was on before. I look at the words.
I can’t read.
I sit in the chair. My hands keep shaking on the spine.
I cry without sound. Tears land on the page. I don’t wipe them.
I’m cold. The shirt is thin. I don’t get a blanket.
I have been sitting in this chair for a long time.
My hands are in my lap. They won’t stop shaking. I stopped trying to make them an hour ago and now I just watch them and let them shake because fighting it takes something I don’t have left.
Mama is dead. Yelena is dead. She asked him to find me.
The tears come and stop and come again and I have no control over any of it, which is its own kind of horror because I have had control over this for five years. Five years of making myself a wall and the wall is gone and I don’t know what I am without it.
The book is open on my lap. The words mean nothing. There’s just the chair and the shaking hands and the light moving slow across the floor and the thing sitting in my chest that I cannot name and cannot put down.
Cassia comes in.
She’s in a dress, her hair up, the bump full under the fabric. She’s carrying a glass of water on a small enamel tray. Nothing else. She sets the tray on the side table without asking if I want it and closes the door behind her and looks at me.
“I know,” she says.
My throat closes so hard it hurts.
Because she does. It’s in her face — not performance, not pity, not the careful way people look at broken things.
She is looking at me the way a woman looks at something she recognizes.
She has been in this chair. Maybe not this one.
But she knows this chair, and she is not flinching at what she sees in it.
She pulls the desk chair over and sits right next to me. Close enough that I could reach out and touch her if I wanted to. She doesn’t ask me anything. She doesn’t say a word.
She just stays.
And the crying comes.
Hard and ugly and I cannot stop it and I hate that I cannot stop it, and then Cassia’s arms come around me and I fall into her and what comes out of me is a sound I have never made in front of anyone.
My whole body shakes with it. She holds on.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t tell me to breathe.
She just holds on and waits me out and I cry until there is nothing left.
I haven’t been held like this since before Alexei.
The thought hits and the crying gets worse. I can’t help it. I can’t stop it. She just tightens her arms and waits me out.
When the last of it has moved through me I pull back, pressing the heel of my hand hard against my eyes. She keeps her hands on my arms and doesn’t speak until I can look at her.
“Nico kept things from you,” she says. No preamble. No softening. “He was wrong.”
My eyes burn again. I look at her hands on my arms because I can’t look at her face yet.
“He is also ours.”
Something moves in my chest before I can stop it, low and aching, the way a bruise aches when you press it.
“I’m not defending him,” she says. “What he did is between you and him. But this is what family is. You don’t get to set them down when they’re difficult. They don’t get to use that against you either.”
My throat tightens. Yelena is in the ground and Mama is in the ground and I have been alone so long that what she is saying lands like a hand on a door I forgot was there. I want it. The wanting is so sharp it scares me and I press my lips together hard against it.
“Family isn’t blood,” Cassia says. “It’s who chooses each other, every single day, even when it’s hard. And we choose you, Mila. We choose you.”
My eyes are burning again. I look at her hands on my arms because looking at her face will undo me, and I am so tired of coming undone.
She means it. I know she means it. She doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.
Nobody has chosen me since I was fifteen years old.
“What you do with that is yours,” she says. “Stay or go. But if you stay — you stay in the mess too. The wrong choices. The ours.” A pause. “He is ours. Which means he’s yours to be furious at. Not mine to apologize for.”
The breath that comes out of me is slow and unsteady and something in my chest loosens just enough to let it through.
She stands, and her hand moves briefly to my shoulder before she lets it go.
“Eat the bread Maria brings up later. You don’t have to want it. The body has to keep running.” A beat, almost dry. “If you don’t nourish it, it catches up.”
She leaves the glass of water on the small table beside me and walks out of the room quietly.
She came.
“Cassia.”
She stops at the door.
“Thank you.” My voice is wrecked. I don’t try to fix it.
She looks at me. Her face does something — not quite a smile.
“You’re in this house,” she says. “That means you’re mine to look after.”
She walks out.
I drink the water.
It’s the first thing I’ve put in me in a while.
I don’t eat the bread Maria brings.
She sets the tray on the side table. Walks out without speaking.
I get up and walk to the bathroom on legs I cannot feel, and kneel on the cold tile over the toilet. Nothing comes out. My body’s empty.
I sit on the tile. I press my back against the porcelain. My hands shake.
I cry again. Harder this time. The kind that hurts. My whole body shaking. I bite the inside of my arm to keep it quiet.
The bread is still on the side table when I come out.
I don’t eat it.
Sofia knocks at dusk.
Two knuckles. Soft.
I open the door and her eyes hold mine for one beat and her mouth softens.
‘I lost a sister too,’ she says. Quiet. ‘For a while. I’m here.’
I break.
The sob comes out of me before I can stop it. Loud. Ugly. The first sound I’ve made in days that came out clean.
Sofia steps into the doorway. She doesn’t ask. She puts her arms around me.
She’s small. She’s strong. She holds me up while I cry into her shoulder.
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t shush me. She just holds.
I cry until my body has nothing left.
Sofia steps back. She wipes the wet from her own cheeks. She reaches up and touches the corner of my mouth with her thumb. Younger-sister gesture.
She walks away.
I close the door.
I’m here.
I have a sister in this house.
The deep hours.
I haven’t slept.
I get out of bed. I walk down to the kitchen.
My legs do it before I’ve decided to.
Nonna is at the stove.
She’s not cooking. She’s standing there in her robe with her hair wrapped. She turns when she hears me.
She isn’t surprised.
She’s been waiting for me.
“Come here, ma chère.”
The Cajun lilt is full. The pretense is gone.
I cross the kitchen. She pulls the stool out from the island. I sit.
She turns to the stove. Pours warm milk into a mug. Slices bread. Sets both in front of me.
“Eat. Drink. You don’t gotta want it. The body still gotta have it.”
I look at the milk. I don’t pick it up.
She sits across from me. Reaches across the marble. Puts her hand on mine.
“Mon p’tit c?ur. Look at me.” My little heart.
I look at her.
“My mama died when I was younger than you,” she says. “I thought I would not survive it. I told myself, pauvre p’tite, you don’t get to lay down. Not today.”
I don’t answer.
“You think you don’t get to lay down neither. Not yet. Maybe one day. Not yet.”
Her hand on mine is warm. Steady.
The last time a woman touched my hand without wanting something from it, I was small enough that I can’t name the year. This is just — a hand. Old and warm and patient, pressing down on mine with no requirement attached.
My tears come quietly. I don’t fight them.
“Your mama. Your sister. They love you, chère. That don’t die when they do. That stays. You carry it. You carry them. You let them be in the room with you.”
My throat closes. The tears come again. Quiet. Steady.
She doesn’t wipe them or reach for me beyond her hand on mine.
“I lost Lucia,” she says. “Niccolò’s Mama. Cancer took her. Slow. I helped care for her at the end. She died in this house and I didn’t get up for weeks. Weeks I lay in that bed and Salvatore brought me food and I didn’t eat it.”
She pauses.
“Then I lost Salvatore. He never got up after Lucia. He carried it for years and then he was gone too. Two losses in this kitchen. I thought I would not survive either one.”
She squeezes my hand.
“I got up because his babies needed somebody who could stand. I’m tellin’ you that not to ask you to stand for nobody but yourself. I’m tellin’ you because the body does get up. Even when you don’t want it to.”
I’m crying harder now. Not loud. Steady. Tears running down my face into the milk.
“Ma fille. Drink.”
I lift the mug. I drink.
Warm. Sweet. Honey in it. Real cream.
She slides the bread closer.
“Eat.”
I eat. Half. Then the rest. I haven’t put this much food in my body in days.
Nonna doesn’t say good or reward me. She just keeps her hand on mine while I eat.