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She clicks her tongue, "Don’t try that with me. You know who I am talking about."
I blink rapidly, then bite the inside of my cheek. If I thought the Sovrano men were overwhelming… Well, Nonna is, undeniably, far ahead of them. "If you mean Michael, it’s because he feels responsible for the explosion and for…" I clutch at my glass of wine, "And for the baby, and for what happened to Xander."
"Ah," she takes my arm and guides me to a chair, "sit."
"I am fine." I frown.
"You’re not fine. You just left the hospital and you’ve been through an emotional rollercoaster, not to mention the physical impact of the car blowing up."
I flinch.
"It hurts to hear it, huh?"
"You know it does."
"It’s better to talk about it than to keep it all bottled up inside."
"Is that what you did with them when they were growing up?"
She draws in a breath, then urges me to sit down. I sink into the chair, then glance up at her, "Did you?"
"I wish I had," She straightens, and glances across the room at the faces of the Sovrano brothers. "I wish I had been more open with them. Wish I had taken them from under their father’s care earlier…but I was weak."
"You, weak?" I laugh, "Not quite how I see you, Nonna."
She glances down at me. "I come from a traditional Sicilian family. I was married at sixteen, pregnant at eighteen with my first child."
"Don Sovrano?"
"Don Sovrano," she nods. "I had four other miscarriages after him. Gave birth to a girl who didn’t live."
"I am so sorry," I whisper.
Her lips twist, "It was a long time ago."
"Does the pain…ever go away?"
"It…fades a little with time," she draws in a breath, "but it never leaves you. It settles in your heart, becomes a part of it, so you occasionally take it out and glance at it. You try to get over it but it doesn’t really leave you. It becomes a part of you. And much as you want to take the story out of you… Some resonance of it always remains."
"Oh," I blink back my tears, "that’s…profound."
She glances away, then back at me, "I know you’ve been through a lot in the short time that you’ve known Michael, but the two of you are lucky."
"We are?" I stare, "How can you call us lucky? He kidnapped me. I tried to kill him. He married me because my father promised me to him and he… Ah…hasn’t exactly been nice to me since."
"He saw you, saw something in you that he wanted; he took you, wedded you, and despite the fact that you stabbed him at his wedding, did not kill you."
I bite the inside of my cheek.
"You escaped him, only to return to him."
"Only because I thought he was dead."
"He faked his own funeral, knowing it would entice you to come back to him."
I shuffle my feet. "I still wanted to escape him," I whisper.
"Only you were foiled by the car-bomb."
