Page 59 of Crowned in Sin
"To see my mother."
She goes still. She’s not afraid, not yet, but she’s working on getting there. She knows that the woman exists from the silver frame on her nightstand. By all means, she’s looked at the photo enough that she might even know my mother’s face better than I do.
But knowing the face and knowing the woman wearing it are two very different things.
"I thought you said she never wanted to see you again," she says carefully. “What changed?”
I can’t help but smile at her. “You did,piccola. She wants to meet you.”
She sucks in a slow breath and looks away. “But do you want her to meet me?”
Somehow, she manages to ask the only question that actually matters. I crouch down across from her slowly, my shoulder pulling as I do. The moment she sees it, she reaches towards me to stop me from hurting myself.
I take her hand in mine.
“There’s a part of me that wants to keep you from her,” I admit. “But I started a war with you, and she’ll want to know if you’re worth it.”
“You mean if I’m worth you.”
I close my eyes and shake my head slightly. “She’s stopped asking if I’m worth anyone a long time ago.”
“Why would she do that, Nico?” she asks softly.
“You’ll see soon enough,piccola,” I reply. “But there’s one more thing you should know.”
“What is it?”
"Frank is opening an official investigation on me through the OCCB, as predicted," I tell her. "Going to Italy helps put an ocean between you and him while my people make the case starve."
Her jaw moves. "You realize that once you do this, there won’t be turning back."
“There’s been no turning back from the moment I took you from your mother’s home,” I remind her. “What’s one more thing?”
She doesn't laugh. I know she wants to, but she doesn't, and that's worse. She picks up the next shirt and folds it slowly.
“What is she like?” she finally asks. “Your mother.”
“I wish I could tell you, but thirteen years is a long time.”
She looks at me for a long moment, and then she nods. “Okay.”
She reaches back to the charcoal shirts and resumes folding them without looking, and sets them on the pile.
The jet rumblesin the air as we fly.
The cabin is dark and the water under us is darker, and Lydia has been asleep against my good side for three hours.
She went down somewhere over the Atlantic, her head on my shoulder and her breathing slow and long and even. She’s been there for hours, and my shoulder is starting to go numb. But even then, I refuse to move. My jacket is draped over her, and I wish I could sleep.
But I can’t.
Thirteen years. There's no hiding the fact that as far as I know, my Mom is a stranger to me now. Nothing more than an old woman on a rock who shares my blood.
But the eleven-year old who once held her hand and begged her not to go still lives in my heart, and that boy clings to the hope that she’s exactly who she used to be.
I know who’s waiting for us at the end of this journey, I know who’ll meet Lydia, and I know who I’d want it to be.
Even if I also know that it’ll never be anything more than a dream.
