The Ring Came Off Before He Knew About the Baby

Lorenzo's face buckled into something close to panic. "I didn't mean to. Let me look at it."

I drew back from the hand that reached for me, my voice pitched low and even. "I'm fine."

He caught my fingers where they pressed against my forehead and pried them loose one by one, the way a man opens a fist he does not trust. When he saw the swelling rising beneath the skin, his expression went black as spilled ink. "You call this fine? Sit. Don't move. I'll bring ice."

Before I could tell him not to bother, his phone came alive on the marble table between us. The screen threw its pale light up into the dim study, over the leather and the crystal decanter and the old clock ticking its patient count in the corner. A name glowed there, sweet and small and poisonous.

Little Troublemaker.

"Lorenzo!"

Gia's voice reached us thin and wet with tears, and I watched the change move through him like a current through water. His whole body drew tight, every muscle turning toward that sound as if it were the only true north in the room. "Gia. Breathe. Slow down and tell me what's wrong."

She was crying on the other end, the sobs measured, spaced just far enough apart to be heard.

"My stomach hurts. I wanted to get to the hospital, but I took the wrong train and now I don't even know where I am."

He frowned, and the frown was for her, all worry, all tenderness. "Why didn't you call me before you left? We agreed I would drive you. That was the arrangement."

A pause. Her voice wavered, faltered, found its footing again with the precision of a woman who had rehearsed the fall. "I was foolish again today. I upset Adriana. I didn't want to trouble the two of you."

Lorenzo's face turned grave, solemn as a man taking an oath. "Gia. You are the only sister I have in this world. No one's trouble comes before yours. Send me where you are. I'm coming for you."

"No. Lorenzo, I can find the hospital on my own, truly." Her protest came quick, too quick, a hand thrown up before the blow lands. "And don't forget. Tonight is Adriana's night. The right night. Stay with her. Maybe she'll finally give me a sweet little niece to spoil."

He laughed then, soft and low, the private laugh of a man indulging a child. "Silly girl. It doesn't work by wishing it once more. Your situation can't wait. Send me your location. Now."

He ended the call and turned on me with a look that laid the whole weight of his displeasure across my shoulders. "Did you hear that? She thinks of you even now, doubled over in pain in some tunnel across the city, and still you sit there suspicious of her. I'll take her to the hospital. I'll bring back your ice."

He swept the car keys from the table. Those keys belonged to the Don's own car, the one every soldier in three territories knew on sight, the one that meant something wherever it stopped. He was already moving for the door.

"Lorenzo. Wait a moment," I said to his back.

He rounded on me, and whatever he'd been holding all evening finally slipped its leash. "Adriana, when will you have had enough? This is two lives we're talking about. Don't let your jealousy carry you somewhere you can't come back from."

I said nothing in my own defense. There was nothing left in me that wanted to be defended. I crossed to the closet instead and drew from the breast pocket of the coat he'd worn days ago a small laminated card. Her insurance card. She could never manage her own affairs, that helpless girl, so even this he carried for her. I held it out to him across the cold air of the study.

"You'll want this. She can't check in without it."

He looked at the card, and then at me, and surprise moved openly across his face for the first time that night. He had not expected me to be the one thinking of her.

A moment passed, the clock filling it with its dry ticking, before he reached out and took it from my fingers. "Thank you."

He seemed to gather something behind his teeth, some further thing he wanted to say. I did not let him. "Take care of yourself."

I lifted my hand and set his collar right, smoothing the fine wool flat against his throat the way I had done a hundred times sending him out into the night, into the sit-downs and the meetings that ran to dawn, into the world that took him and gave him back to me a little colder each time. My thumb found the bare place at the base of my other finger and turned there once, the ghost of a ring I no longer wore, and then I stopped the motion cold. I knew, with a stillness that had settled into my bones somewhere between the swelling on my forehead and the sound of her name lighting up his phone, that this was the last time I would ever do it.

Something flickered behind his eyes as he watched my face, some low guttering flame of a feeling he could not name and would not honor. Then he caught my hand in his and pulled me hard against his chest, against the steady drum of a heart that beat for someone across the city. "Adriana. I'll be back soon. Wait for me."