My shoulders drop. Just an inch. The mask slips when no one’s watching.
Mama’s roses are blooming. Red and white and pale pink, the same ones she planted when she was a new bride. Nonna Rosa tends them like they’re holy ground.
Maybe they are.
This is where Papa proposed. This is where they danced on their anniversary every year until she got too sick.
Papa’s grave is fresh earth beside Mama’s headstone.
Together. Done reaching.
Lucia.
Her name was the last thing he said. We were at Sunday dinner, all five of us at the table, the way Mama would have wanted. Papa was passing the bread when his palm went to his chest. His eyes went wide. He reached toward something none of us could see, and her name fell from his lips like a prayer.
He was gone before he hit the floor.
Gia tried. God, she tried. Working before her mind caught up, all that medical training pouring out of her in a desperate rush. But there was nothing to do. His heart had been broken for over a decade. It just stopped pretending otherwise.
Now he’s in the ground beside her.
I should be relieved. I should be grieving. I should be something other than this.Cristo.
I press my palm against my chest. My heart beats slow. Even. Like it doesn’t know everything has changed.
Bone-deep tired. I can’t afford sloppy. Not now. Not with every family in New Orleans smelling blood in the water.
Gia finds me when the sky goes dark.
She doesn’t say anything. Just appears at my shoulder and stands there, the way she’s done since we were kids.
The cicadas are loud. The jasmine is blooming, thick and sweet in the humid air. And I’m standing at my parents’ graves with my little sister, trying to remember how to breathe.
“He’s with her now,” Gia says, her voice low. “Together at last. That’s all he wanted. For so long.”
“I know.”
“Are you okay?”
The question hangs in the dark. Simple. Impossible.
I could tell her the truth. That I’m drowning. That I don’t know how to be the Don because I’ve already been doing it, and now it’s official, and that makes it worse somehow.
That I’m terrified I’ll fail them. That I’m terrified I won’t.
That I’m terrified I’ll end up just like him.
I could let her in. Let someone see. She’s asking.
I open my mouth.
I close it.
“I’m fine.”
Gia doesn’t push. But I see the flicker in her eyes. Disappointment, maybe. Or recognition. She’s watched me build these walls since we were kids. She knows she can’t get through them.
No one can. No one will.
