The way they hold so much that she never says, so much carefully controlled emotion hidden beneath that perfect mob wife facade.
My mother has perfected the brittle smile, the one she wears at family dinners and charity galas and anywhere she needs to pretend that everything is fine.
The smile that says “I’m the wife of Connor Brennan and I’m perfectly content with my life” while her eyes say something else entirely.
I love my mother. I’ve always loved her, even when I didn’t understand her, or couldn’t figure out why she stayed with my father through everything.
She’s been my refuge since I was a child, the one person in our family who sees me as Emma first and a pawn second.
She’s the one who taught me to draw and would sit with me in the garden and let me sketch the flowers while she read her romance novels that she thought I didn’t know about.
“You have your own life to live, sweetheart,” she told me once when I was sixteen and complaining about some family obligation. “Don’t let them take that away from you. Don’t let them make you smaller than you are.”
But then she turned around and supported my father when he arranged my marriage to Tony Lombardo, smiled that brittle smile and told me it was a good match, that Tony seemed nice and I’d learn to be happy.
Like she’d learned to be happy.
Or pretend to be happy. I’m still not sure which.
I shade in the shadows around her eyes, the tiny lines that appear when her smile doesn’t quite reach them, and I feel my throat getting tight.
Is she okay?
Does she know I’m alive?
My father would have told her, wouldn’t he?
Unless he decided it would be better for her not to know, to protect her from the worry.
No.
He would have told her.
Even Connor Brennan isn’t cruel enough to let his wife think their daughter is dead.
I hope.
I finish the sketch and stare at it for a long moment, my mother’s face looking back at me from the page.
Then I flip to a new sheet and start on my father.
Dad is harder to capture.
He’s sharp angles and hard lines, steel-gray hair and blue-gray eyes that miss nothing.
I draw him the way he looked walking me down the aisle—imposing in his tuxedo, his jaw set in that way that means he’s satisfied with how things are going.
In control.
Powerful.
The man who arranged my marriage to seal a business deal.
The man who, according to Leo, loves me more than anything else in the world.
I pause mid-stroke, the pencil hovering over the paper.
Doeshe?