Chapter 22: Her Name

I closed my hand around his heart and squeezed.

Release.

Squeeze.

"Come on," I said. "Come on, Luca. You don't get to leave."

Teo's lamp held steady over my hands.

Nobody in the room made a sound.

On the ninth squeeze, the muscle shuddered against my palm, and then it kicked on its own.

It beat once, hard.

Then it beat again, and kept going.

Whitney slid down the wall and sat on the carpet.

Teo said a very quiet prayer in Italian, and swore at God in the same breath.

I stood at Aldo Fontana's dining table, with my arms red to the elbow, and finished the stitches.

Six weeks later I stood in a green silk gown in the ballroom of Mercy General Hospital.

The hospital threw a benefit every autumn.

I had not walked through its doors since the night they took my name off the schedule.

Luca stood at my side in a black tuxedo, with a cane he hated and a scar under his left collarbone.

He had been out of the cardiac ward for nine days.

He had not let go of my hand since the car.

"You're shaking," I said.

"I'm being looked at."

"By who?"

"By everyone in this room who has read the paper."

He had earned that.

The paper had run the story for three weeks, with Giulia's picture at the top and the hospital's name in every second paragraph.

Giulia sat in a cell at a federal detention center.

She had asked for her brother.

Luca had sent her a lawyer and a letter that said, in one line, that her father's chair was empty and would stay that way.

The night nurse had testified in exchange for a plea.

Whitney sat at our table in a dark blue dress, with her hands knotted in her lap.

She had given her statement to the district attorney on a Tuesday, four hours long, and she had not asked for one favor.

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