Page 59 of The Mad Don
“Better than I have felt in years.”
She reaches out to hug me again. I lean back out of range.
“That’s enough hugs.”
She laughs and lets her arms drop. Then she looks at me, and her face goes thoughtful.
“Why don’t you tell my brother?” she says. “That you think my medicine is being tampered with. It was the first thing you said to me.”
It was. The first day, the moment I had her alone for ten seconds with the maids’ backs turned, I whispered it to her: I think someone is making you worse. Trust me. Hide the pills. Let me handle the injections. I had no right to expect her to believe me. She believed me anyway.
I think it is because she has decided I am Giovanni’s fiancée. She decided that on the first day in the study, and I have not corrected her because the correction was not worth the cost and because a woman who trusts her brother’s bride is a woman who will hide pills under a pillow for me.
“Your brother is busy,” I say.
That is the easy answer. The true answer is more complicated.
After day one, my plan had been simple. If Lucia got worse off the medication, then the medication was keeping her alive, and I was wrong, and I would abort. If she got better, then someone in this house was poisoning her slowly and dressing it up as treatment. Three days in, she is standing, walking, and crying from physio instead of from her own nerves. That is not the body of a woman whose medicine was helping her.
But I am not going to move on a suspicion. I want day five. I want to be certain before I put this in front of a man who points guns at people for sport and adores exactly one person on this earth.
“As long as my brother trusts you,” Lucia says, “that’s fine.”
She looks at me and then toward the window.
“Can I go to the garden?”
“Of course.”
I help her into the wheelchair by the wall and tuck a blanket over her legs. Before I unlock the door, I crouch to her level.
“If we see anyone,” I say, “you can’t be too energetic, all right? You’re still weak. As far as anyone watching knows, you’re still weak. Let them think it.”
She nods, solemn, pleased to be in on a secret.
I unlock the door and wheel her out into the corridor.
She is smiling, her face turned up toward the light coming through the tall windows, and I am watching her color, which is better than it was three days ago, when we round the corner and nearly run into Fabiano.
He is on his crutch. He stops.
He looks at Lucia in the chair. He looks at me behind it.
Then he looks at me, and his voice is flat.
“Who gave you permission to take her out?”
Lucia coughs on cue.
It is a good cough, and she sags a little in the chair as she does it. The girl is a better actress than her brother gives her credit for.
“I asked her,” she says faintly. “I wanted air. Please don’t be cross.”
Fabiano does not look reassured. His eyes move over her, over me, slowly.
“Have you been taking your medicine?”
I see Lucia freeze. Just for a second. A small stillness in her shoulders that anyone watching closely would catch.
