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“Yes,” she whispered, taking my hand, squeezing. “I noticed during the meeting with your family. I wanted to throttle your sister.”

I laughed. “So many people do. However, they are afraid of getting rabies.”

Scarlett paused for a second, then exploded with laughter. She pulled me in, kissing my cheek as a mamma would do.

“I wanted to throttle yours,” I said, “after I knocked the table over—right on top of her. I have always heard to have a sister is to have a lifelong friend, but I have always thought about the saying of enemies. How does it go?”

“Who needs friends with enemies like these?”

“That is it!” I pointed at her. “My sister is still my number one enemy, or two, as my cousin calls her. Two, as in, the shit.” I slapped a hand over my mouth.

Even if Mariano’s mamma heard vulgar language regularly, she seemed so…prim and proper, her being a world-famous ballerina and all. She even smelled of roses. It lingered in the air around us as if she had just been rained on, and her perfume permeated the air.

She exploded with laughter again. “Have I ever told you how much I love you for my son?”

“Not today,” I said.

“Well.” She seemed to sober. “I do. I love you so much for him.”

“I am so happy about this,” I whispered.

The dogs were back. They had run to the men, then made a loop and were walking side by side with us. One on Scarlett’s side. One on mine.

She sighed. “I couldn’t leave them with my mother.”

As if I could not keep track of simple math, or the conversation, I asked, “The dogs?”

Scarlett nodded. “My dad loved them. Always had them around after the evil sister and I left the house. His dogs were always more than welcome in our home when he came to visit.”

“Your sister did not welcome them?”

“She allowed them in, but I wouldn’t say welcomed them. She’s not a big animal person. Neither is my mother. Dogs sense that about people, and even when they sense they’re not truly wanted, they keep trying anyway.”

“This is why it is probably best to be a cat,” I said. “They seem to look down on everyone.”

“True,” she said. “The only animal that will look the human race in the eye and see that its equal is a pig, or so the saying goes.”

We walked a few paces before I cleared my throat.

“It is nice,” I whispered. “You and Papà Brando taking the dogs.”

She shrugged. “My father and I didn’t have a great relationship either, but I couldn’t see them with anyone else.

I wouldn’t have felt right about it.” She gave the dog on her side a pat.

Her eyes seemed fixated in the distance.

“I felt it…felt something was wrong even before we received the call to come back home. I do that at times, feel things.”

I nodded.

She nodded. “Sometimes I know exactly what’s going on.

Other times…” she raised her hands in a helpless gesture “…I don’t.

I’m all twisted up inside. It feels as if all my wires are knotted, and I can’t seem to find the one that’ll lead me to the problem.

When I was younger, I hoped one day I would be more precise.

No matter how much older I get, or more knowledgeable I become about life, my feelings still confuse me at times, especially when a lot is going on around me. ”

“You are still confused?”

She looked me in the eye. “Yes. I’m weighed down by sadness, which can confuse things and make my circuits, for lack of a better word, go haywire.

” She waved a hand. “It’s a sadness that has sprouted from regret—regret that I wasn’t able to have a decent relationship with my parents all these years, and now one of them is gone.

My father never made things right with my mother.

He never made things right with me. He caused me to have this…

brittle part of myself that never truly became solid. ”

“Trust,” I said.

“Yes, exactly. Trust.”

“I know this feeling.” I grabbed her hand, squeezing. “It is awful.”

“Downright,” she whispered.

We walked on, and I looked toward the sky, wondering if the sun would ever shine again.

It felt as though the rain refused to come, and so did the sun.

As if we were stuck in limbo, and I was as confused as Scarlett about…

life. How Mariano felt about me keeping what Iggy had done a secret.

About my own parents and what I would have to face when the time came, and I lost one of them—even my sister.

I felt relieved to think of her gone, then guilt hit me.

Who was supposed to feel this way about anyone? Especially one’s own sister?

Scarlett sighed.

I sighed.

“My sister has a lot to be bitter about,” she said, apropos of nothing, although I wondered if she had been feeding off my thoughts.

“Her husband?”

“He’s last on a long list. For starters. I could do what she couldn’t. Dance. Fast forward to the husband. Travis is a cheat.”

I did not know why, but the situation between the evil sister and her husband brought my evil sister and Remo to the forefront of my thoughts.

“Will Remo do the same?”

If I had shocked her by pulling that situation out of thin air, she did not show it. This was why I found her to be interesting. She was different…and all the times we spent time together felt natural, never forced.

She sighed. “That’s a complicated situation.

Sometimes the men’s dynamics in the family are more complicated than you’d think.

Hierarchy rules, which keeps them in place, but sometimes a man doesn’t want the place he’s in.

He wants to go higher. Higher comes with more…

perks you’d say. These men who strive to become higher sometimes confuse their feelings with these wants. ”

I set a hand on her arm, and we stopped. “He wants me because of Mariano.”

Scarlett nodded. “Partially. I do feel Remo is truly attracted to you, but also, he’s yearning for a love, for lack of a better word, for himself. You made him feel. That can be extremely dangerous in this world.”

“If he wanted love, for lack of a better word, he went to my sister. She’s the antidote to love potions. Why is this?”

“To make you jealous, though he was telling the truth when he said he also did it—” She stopped, her lips pursed, perhaps by the he also did it , and then shook her head. “He, er, kept your sister busy to protect you from her.”

Both of our heads turned some, our eyes catching in the distance. She spotted her husband, and I spotted mine. We watched as they ran as soldiers would.

“My husband, or Papà Brando, as you call him—” a grin came to her face, fast and then gone “—usually goes with his sons singularly on runs. Or whatever they choose to do. But when things get hard, and it seems that they collectively understand they’re all going through the same thing—a loss of control—he’ll lead them to burn off what they’re feeling as he’s always done.

He understands what it means to be a son of Fausti blood, and he’s taught his sons how to work out their issues instead of taking it out on the world. ”

“Yes,” I whispered, watching as my husband jogged not behind Matteo, but next to him.

Papà Brando was the leader. Matteo and Mariano behind him.

Marciano and Maestro behind their two older brothers and their father.

The brothers always had a sibling next to them.

It was Brando who ran alone. “Unless it is a woman.”

The words slipped from my lips naturally, and Scarlett squeezed my hand in agreement.

I was sure there were times Magpie attempted to prepare her for what life with a Fausti meant, even if she did it clothed in leopard print and glitter.

Or, perhaps, with a showgirl hat on her head, plumes drifting in the wind.

The thought of her made me grin.

Scarlett did as well, as if she read my mind.

“Usually Romeo will join my husband,” Scarlett whispered.

“Or any of his brothers will if they’re around.

Rocco has a lot going on right now. Dario has always stuck close to Rocco.

Romeo went to be with his wife’s family, who live not too far from here.

One of Juliette’s aunts isn’t doing so well. ”

I said nothing as my husband disappeared again.

He was right. He was running in circles.

Even if he ran away from me, he always returned to me. I turned my ring around my finger, finding peace in the everlasting meaning behind the circle of my bands.

Scarlett sighed, and it was a wistful sound. “Perhaps I don’t always have all the answers to my feelings. The wires being as twisted as they can sometimes be. However.” She squeezed my hand. “I do know one thing for certain. I can feel it in the marrow of my bones.”

It took me a second to look at her.

She was still gazing in the distance, the path her husband and sons had gone in.

Then her eyes, the color of a lush tropical forest after a long series of storms, looked directly into mine.

“Your eyes are truly beautiful, Sistine,” she whispered, “and they reflect my son as he is. Who he is. It’s easy to fall in love with a Fausti, but to figure out how to live with one without lessening who she is, who he is…

that’s special. Whatever you do, as with the son of my heart, the other daughter of my heart, you do out of love for my son, Mariano.

As a mamma, I couldn’t ask for anything more. ”

We stared at each other, before we wrapped each other in a hug that brought us to tears.

We rocked a bit, holding on tight. Not only for the love we shared for her son, my husband, but because we also shared a kindred spirit.

We both knew what it meant to be hurt by the people who were supposed to protect us.

This thought, for whatever reason, encouraged me to confide in her about what my sister did to me as a child. How she had pushed me down the steps.

Scarlett pulled away, shaking her head. “My sister tripped me down my parents’ steps years ago,” she said in camaraderie. “It almost killed me. I thought I was dead for a second, until the pain hit.”