fast food, and too much wine could harm. Gemma would always be a good-looking woman, whatever fate had in store for her.
Rosa let her eyes wander over the walls, the furniture, the photographs on the mirror. Difficult to imagine that this had once been her life. Everything here was strange to her now.
“You never mentioned anything,” she said. “About the family. The dynasties. But you knew all along.”
Gemma spun around, her face flushed. “I didn’t want you to find out from Florinda, least of all from her,” she said firmly. “But I couldn’t…” She interrupted herself, searching for words. “I’d already lost Zoe to her, and I knew it was wrong to keep your origin and…and all the rest of it secret from you. But I couldn’t help it. I tried to say something, and it was no good. Talking to you about it would have been like…”
“Like Dad was still here. As if he hadn’t died.”
Her mother stared at her. After a while, she asked quietly, “What do you think I should have told you? That one of these days you’d turn into a snake?”
“Well, for example, yes.”
Gemma leaned back against the chest of drawers, supporting herself on it with both hands. “And you think that would have one of those cozy mother-daughter moments, like on the Gilmore Girls?”
“It would have been honest.”
“I had to stand by helplessly for years, watching you get dragged off to a police station for questioning again and again. You were still a child! But they didn’t leave you alone. Because you’re an Alcantara. Because you inherited that damn name.” She gesticulated energetically, but a moment later the strength went out of her. “Because someone thought a girl of thirteen or fourteen could tell them about the Mafia!” She laughed bitterly. “About crimes committed by people she’d never met, who lived on the other side of the world.”
“I didn’t choose my family, Mom. You did that.”
“I chose your father, that’s all.”
“And then there were suddenly two daughters, and they were useless, too.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“Yes, it went wrong. Obviously.”
Gemma pushed herself away from the chest of drawers, took a couple of hesitant steps, and stopped in the middle of the room. “You were never an easy child, Rosa, but you didn’t used to snipe at everything before you went to join them.”
“Well, at least they aren’t a problem to you anymore, right, Mom?” Rosa jumped up, then felt as if someone had hit her over the head, but she managed to stay on her feet, and went over to the closet, passing her mother. “Zoe and Florinda are both dead. Maybe you’d be able to remember them better if you’d turned up for their funeral.”
Gemma flinched. “I’m never setting foot on that island again.”
“So you said already. More than once.”
When she’d changed back into human form, Rosa had shed the snake’s burnt skin, but this new one didn’t seem to hold her together just yet.
She rummaged around in the closet with both hands. Everything was just as she had left it four months ago. Her mother hadn’t changed anything.
Gemma said quietly, “Would you have contacted me? I mean, being here in New York and all…no, you wouldn’t even have called me, would you?”
Rosa was looking at some old jeans and sweaters. Most of them were black and had once belonged to Zoe. “I came especially because of you, Mom. Maybe that was a mistake.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Believe whatever you want.” She took out a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a heavy wool sweater. There was no underwear, so she had to keep the Simpsons shorts on. As she went to pull on her jeans, and was wobbling on one leg, she felt dizzy. She lost her balance and tipped over, just like that.
Her mother was beside her in a split second, and caught her.
Rosa cursed in Italian.
“That was quick,” said Gemma.
Rosa tried to break away, but her mother wasn’t letting go. Gemma forced her daughter to look her in the face. “I couldn’t come to Zoe’s funeral,” she said forcefully. “I know you don’t want to understand that. But I swore never to enter that house again.”
“Swore to who?”
“Myself. And you can think that’s ridiculous or pigheaded, whatever you want. But things happened there that…anyway, I’d rather die than go up that mountain again and set foot through the palazzo doorway.”
“There’s no one there now, Mom. No one but me.” She could have mentioned Iole, but