“Ma, if that pie was here when you left, you could get food poisoning. I told you before not to eat moldy food.”

“Leave me alone. This is welcome home pie,” she grunted, shoveling a slab onto one of her tiny rose leaf tea plates. For a ham-fisted banshee, his mother sure appreciated fine, dainty things.

She shoved a card into his hands and watched him owlishly as she hefted the first bite to her mouth.

Welcome home, Morettas.

Gloria

“Why is she leaving pies in your house?” Aldo demanded, gripping the card. Reading her name, let alone saying it, was painful. A reminder of the life that he couldn’t have now.

“Dunno,” Ina shrugged her linebacker shoulders. Everyone always assumed Aldo got his build from his father. But his dad had been a slim-shouldered string bean with a toothy grin and a stratospheric stress level who’d keeled over from a heart attack when Aldo was thirteen. “She was supposed to do a few things around here for me while I was babysitting your ass. Does that bother you?”

His mother was like a bulldog with a chew toy when she was trying to pry information out of him.

“Nope,” Aldo lied. “I’m going to sleep.” Without another word, he headed back to his room, ignoring his mom’s calls about his piece of pie.

He shut the door and leaned against it, letting the ache in his leg permeate everything. He could block it out for minutes at a time, could forget for moments what had happened, but it was always there lurking under the surface. The pain, the memories, the fear that he would never be normal again. His life would never be the same.

In all his deployments, he’d been prepared for the fact that he might not come home. Soldiers all faced it, dealt with it in their own way. But never in his wildest nightmares had he predicted this. The sheer magnitude of the loss.

Yes. He was home and alive. But he wasn’t whole. And she deserved someone who could protect her. That man was no longer him.

26

Gloria juggled the plastic container to her opposite hand and rested the flowers on her hip. Welcome home accessories stabilized for the moment, she stabbed at the doorbell.

“Don’t be nervous,” she encouraged herself. “You’re just a friend stopping by to see another friend and his super scary mother.”

“Aldo, get the damn door!” Mrs. Moretta shouted from somewhere inside the house.

“You get the damn door! I’m on crutches, woman!”

A shouting match broke out on the other side of the front door, and Gloria immediately regretted her decision to pop by.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. Maybe she could hustle down the sidewalk and sneak away—

The door was wrenched open, and Gloria’s jaw dropped.