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Glaring. Always with the glaring.

“I brought coffee⁠—”

“Come,” Ma demands, wheeling ahead of us.

I tip my head to Veda. “What’s going on?”

All she does is shake her head, so the only thing left to do is follow. Ma leads us to an empty patient room down the hall. “Close the door.”

I do. “You really learned your way around here in the past week.”

“Of course I did. You think I am lazy like you? Sit. Both of you. I’m tired of craning my neck to talk to people.”

She’s in one hell of a mood. I sit next to Veda on the visitor couch by the window. The room is a private one, but the hospital isn’t terribly busy, so I’m not surprised it’s empty.

She looks at the two of us sitting there—me nearly healed from that fucking bullet, Veda hollow-eyed from a night at Sarah’s bedside. Then, Ma folds her hands in her lap and takes a slow inventory of the wreckage her family has made.

“So,” she says. “I know it all now. The doctor told me at Sarah’s bedside. Told me by accident. The wheels, they make me silent. The kidnapping, the marriage that is not a marriage, all of it.”

“There were reasons⁠—”

“I don’t care.” She leans forward as far as the cast allows. “I am not angry about the crime, understand that first. I have patched men, buried men, washed blood from tile. I stopped pretending about this family long before you were born.”

“But you’re still angry.”

Something flickers in her gaze. “I am not angry that you kidnapped a doctor to save your daughter. It was monstrous, but I understand it.”

Veda makes a small sound—not quite protest, not quite grief. Nonna holds up a hand without looking at her.

“I am angry at the cowardice. Not the lie—the cowardice of maintaining it. You had months, Lupo. Months of this woman at my table, at Sarah’s bedside, in your bed⁠—”

“Ma—”

“And you let her fall in love with a man she could not know, because you were too much a coward to hand her the truth and trust her to survive it. That is the sin. Not the taking, though that was bad enough. Your sin was keeping her ignorant, and calling it protection.”

This again. “I know, Ma.”

“Then you should be on your knees, begging for her forgiveness.” Her voice cracks. “And mine. Because I raised you better than a coward.”

Fuck. “I have reasons⁠—”

“Quiet.” She turns on Veda. “You I have watched. The gold diggers I feared for my son, the pretty empty ones who appraised my paintings at Christmas dinner, not one ever smelled of another person’s blood.”

Her hand tightens on the armrest. “Not one trained someone to pull me back from death, just in case. Not one dug a bullet out of my coward son in a warehouse, or sat up all night with my granddaughter’s fever. They were pretty faces and greedy hearts.” She turns her burning attention to me. “This one has saved every soul in this family at least once.”

Veda’s eyes are wet. She doesn’t wipe them. “Signora⁠—”

“Diana. I told you that in a kitchen a lifetime ago, and I meant it then, and I mean it more now. You are family, Veda. That is the whole trouble.”

I pipe up, “Why is that trouble?”

“Because I am old and tired and my hip is broken and I refuse to spend my remaining strength watching two intelligent people be stupid about who is family and who is not.” She wheels herself back an inch, gathering.

“You love each other. It is obvious to everyone in this hospital, including the nurses, who have a wager. The only people who have not admitted it are the two it is happening to.” Her chin lifts. “Fix this, both of you, or I will haunt you, and I will be very good at it, because I have been practicing my whole life.”

She raps the IV pole once against the floor, a gavel, and then she wheels herself to the door. I open it for her. She makes me bend down so she can pat my cheek on the way out with the hand that isn’t bruised. For one second, she isn’t the matriarch or the survivor or the terror of the cardiology ward. She’s just my mother, who nearly died in a ditch, telling her son not to waste what’s left.

“You do things stupidly and cowardly,” she murmurs to me, “not faithlessly. She knows the difference now. Do not make her regret learning it.”