By the time I crossed the threshold of the Genovese estate, the ankle had ballooned to something grotesque, the skin taut and shining under the hallway light. Nonna Elisabetta took one look at it and her face crumpled. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of old liniment, the kind that smelled of camphor and rosemary, and she knelt on the floor to rub it into my skin with hands that had once commanded the respect of every Don in the city.
I could not let her carry my pain on top of her own. So I told her about the invitation.
I told her that I had been accepted into La Rete.
The bottle nearly slipped from her fingers. She looked up at me, and for a moment the years fell away from her face. The grief, the decline, the slow erosion of everything the Genovese name had once meant vanished behind a light I had not seen in her eyes since I was a child.
"My Seraphina." Her voice broke on the second syllable. "My girl is truly something. I am old, cara mia. I have been old for a long time. You are the only one left who can raise this Family from its knees."
I nodded. Tears burned behind my eyes, but I held them.