He checks all the corners of the room, examines the tile floor and the ventilation unit on the ceiling. For five full minutes, I’m standing in a sea of noise while Lorenzo combs the area around us. When he’s satisfied, he comes to me, tangles his long fingers in my hair, and presses his mouth to mine. His hands roam down, stroking the nape of my neck, playing silent musical notes on my back. The skin under my blouse prickles and tingles and now I’m in the kiss, all of me is lips and tongue and saliva and mute love, and it’s not a Patrick kiss, but a Lorenzo kiss.

I never want to leave this place.

When we break, we’re both panting. His hardness presses into my belly, like he’s probing to feel what’s inside, what secrets I hold in that dark female place.

It’s moments before either of us speaks.

“Is it mine?” he asks, moving slightly so there’s room for his hand where that other part of him was. “Gianna, tell me.”

I’ve already run these numbers, and I didn’t need calculators or spreadsheets. Ten weeks ago was a cold day in March, when I went to Eastern Market for a hunk of cheese and returned home with Lorenzo in my body after an afternoon at our little Maryland shack. Love shack, crab shack, baby shack. Patrick and I hadn’t been together for a while.

“Yes,” I whisper.

He pulls me close. This time, it’s all softness; no edges, no probing, only a warm cocoon of lips and arms and our mingled breath. I’m safe here, in this sterile room with its supermagnets and banging and no cameras to watch us or recorders to pick up our sounds. For a few moments, it’s only us. I have no children, no husband, only Lorenzo and the baby inside me, and a desperate need to stay like this.

“I’m working on it, Gianna,” he says into my ear. “I’m working on it.”

I want to ask what he’s working on. If it has something to do with the money and the personal problem he talked about yesterday. I want to ask if he has a way out for me, for Sonia, for our baby. It would mean leaving Patrick and the boys, maybe only temporarily, maybe until they’re able to travel and find me. And what then? Would Patrick take me in his arms this way? Would we return to normal in some new place? Would Steven ever speak to me again?

But that’s foolish talk. There’s no way out for me.

Suddenly, every new bang of the machine is Jackie’s voice, saying:

I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

Chapter Forty-one

FORTY-ONE

The banging of the MRI stops.