Page 46 of The Mad Don
She pulls back gently. She looks at my face again. Then her eyes shift past me to Yana, who has not moved from the spot two steps back where she stepped to clear my sister’s sightline.
Lucia’s face lights up.
“Oh. Oh. You. You’re the kind girl. You brought me water.”
Yana’s mouth opens.
Before she can speak, Lucia is reaching her thin arm toward her with a kind of delighted urgency.
“Why haven’t you come to visit me again? I have been waiting for you to come back.”
Yana looks at me.
I sit up. I clear my throat.
“Lucia, she has been busy. She will visit you when she can. Right now, you need to rest; you have had a difficult morning —”
“Giovanni.” Lucia turns her face up to me again. She is studying me. She turns back to Yana, then to me, a small grin spreading across her thin face.
“Are you…” she says to Yana in a voice that has gone shy and warm. “Are you his fiancée?”
Yana does not answer.
“Oh.” Lucia’s hand comes up to her mouth. “Oh, silly me. Of course, you are. He told me about you. He didn’t tell me your name —”
I close my eyes briefly.
She is delighted by her own deduction. “You two should be married. Why have you not married? I’m sorry I was too sick to come to the engagement party. I should have been there; I —”
“We’re not married yet,” I say carefully.
Yana’s face shows something I have only seen on it a handful of times — pure scandalized indignation.
“Why not?”
She turns to Yana.
“Is he bullying you? Is he? Oh, please forgive him. He is sweet, truly. He used to bring me drawings when we were small. He once kept a kitten in a box for three weeks so our father wouldn’t find it. He is gentle; he — he hides it. He is shy with women.”
I am, somehow, going to die in this study.
I look at Yana.
She has recovered, and her face is doing exactly what I expected it to do: nothing. There is a careful absence of any reaction Lucia could read.
But I have watched her for weeks now. I have studied her face the way I study every face that matters to my work. There is something at the corner of her mouth, very small. There is a flicker of color at the line of her jaw.
The faint heat of being perceived in a way she did not ask for.
It is gone in less than a second.
She brings her face back into the soft warmth she wore at the Marchetti estate for Carlo De Luca. The performed warmth. The Yana of dinner parties.
“He is not bullying me,” she says to Lucia. Her voice is steady and kind. “Don’t worry.”
“Good.” Lucia squeezes her own hand into a small, triumphant fist. Then she yawns, like a child yawns when the day has caught up with her. “Oh. I am so tired.”
“Time for your medicine,cara,” I say. “Let me take you back.”
