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Mark hugs me hard enough to say everything his fake smile covers. Into my ear, he whispers, “You look good. You look happy. I still don’t believe a word of it. I love you. Introduce me.”

Oh, goody. We’re playing with our cards exposed.

“Mark, this is Lupo. Lupo, my brother, Mark.”

“Mark.” Lupo offers his hand. “Veda says you’re in tech.”

“Funny. She hasn’t mentioned you at all. Or what you do.” Mark takes the hand and glances around. “Nice place to hide someone.”

“Nobody’s hidden. She’s standing right there.”

“So she is.”

The handshake runs longer than it should. Two men measuring each other for a coffin while their faces discuss the quality of Mark’s flight. Neither wins.

I’ve seen Lupo do this to his men. I’ve never watched someone do it back to him. My ribs go tight watching my brother refuse to be the smaller wolf in the room, despite the height difference.

“You have a beautiful home,” Mark says.

“It’s my mother’s. We’re here only for an extended visit.” Lupo steps back to let him in. “She’ll adore you. She adores anyone who worries about Veda—it’s the shortest path to her heart.”

Translation: I know exactly why you’re here.

Dinner is a minefield. Diana charms Mark and force-feeds him ossobuco until he surrenders. She interrogates him about Hawaii, his work, whether he eats enough. Mark, who came here armored against exactly this, loses ground to a grandmother by the second course.

Sarah appoints herself his personal tour guide and explains her entire medical history with the cheerful detachment of a child who’s told it a hundred times. I watch my brother’s face do something real for the first time all night.

He cannot armor himself against Sarah. Nobody can. A small, brave kid narrating her own leukemia melts the investigator down to a puddle of a man becoming an uncle. At some point while she discusses the ongoing tribulations of a stuffed wren, he mouths, “She’s great.”

I bob my head and smile.

Eventually, she loops back to her care, which means she brags on me. “… And Veda makes the needle not hurt,” Sarah tells him, “because she’s not a real doctor, she’s my stepmom, so she just talks to me instead of acting like I’m just a patient.”

“Does she?” Mark’s eyes come to me, and there’s the whole thing in them—the love, the fear, the dawning complication. He came to rescue his sister from a con, and instead he’s meeting a child who calls me her stepmom and means it. He has nothing. No weapon, no ammunition, not a damn thing that means anything to Sarah other than the chance to get to know her.

“She’s the best I’ve ever had,” Sarah says, with total authority, and returns to her ossobuco.

When she mentions her vegetarianism, he glances around the room at the adults, then his gaze dips to her plate, and back up at us. A question.

To be fair, I have been wondering the same thing myself, but I’ve been afraid to ask, since she mentioned it only in passing, and no one corrected her. But Sarah’s been eating meat since we’ve been here, and I’m a little lost on the matter too.

I try for a light tone, so as to not upset her. “Yeah, Diana, erm, the ossobuco—that’s beef, right?”

“Veal.”

That’s probably worse in Sarah’s head. If she knew what it was.

Mark bites his lips, fighting not to say something.

But Lupo smiles at Sarah. “And what did we say about getting to see Nonna?”

“We eat what Nonna gives us.”

“Even if?”

“Even if it’s animals. Because Nonna only eats animals that want to be eaten.”

Lupo smirks up at me, his tone still kind and aimed at Sarah. “That’s right. Good Italian animals are not like bad American animals.”