The Sister Who Shot Me Got Everything I Had Chapter 07
She Left
Luca’s POV
Downstairs, the Family doctor went back.
His face changed when he saw the trail of blood dried into the parlor rug.
“Where’s Miss Sienna?”
The housekeeper whispered, “She’s gone.”
The doctor set his bag down. “That fusion hardware needed imaging. Tonight.”
“If the vertebrae shift and she doesn’t get to a surgeon in the next twelve hours, she could lose feeling above the waist too.”
“She’ll be paralyzed from the collarbone down.”
I stared at the floor, at the trail of Sienna’s blood, thin and dark, running from the parlor to the stairs, up to her room, and back down, all the way to the side door.
A trail long enough that it should have taken her twenty minutes to make.
Nobody had seen her leave.
Because we were all at the hospital, around Gia.
…
I ran for the door before Don Falcone could stop me, got in the car with my tie still undone and drove ninety miles an hour to JFK.
By the time I got to the international terminal, her flight was already thirty-eight thousand feet over Virginia.
I stood in the empty check-in lane, called her number over and over.
“The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
“The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
…
At seven in the morning, I went back to the clinic on East 68th.
I had the photocopies in my hand and held them like they were the last card I could play.
I wanted the doctor to tell me it had been a misunderstanding. That the reconstruction had a low success rate anyway. That she still had options.
He pulled up her file and looked at me without any warmth.
“Mr. Romano. We warned the family seven years ago. In writing. Three separate times.”
“Miss Falcone’s nerve bundle at L2 was bruised, not fully severed. Reconstruction inside the three-month window had a recovery rate over forty percent.”
“You signed the risk disclosure. You signed the postponement.”
My voice came out hoarse. “A postponement. Not a cancellation.”
The doctor’s face didn’t move. “For a nerve reconstruction, missing the window is the cancellation.”
“You didn’t know that?”
I couldn’t answer.
The doctor sighed.
“That girl was a model patient. She did every hour of physical therapy we prescribed.”
“She asked me once—” he stopped, weighed the words, “—she asked me if after the second surgery, she’d be able to stand up and raise a glass at the sit-down.”
“I told her there was hope.”
“She smiled for the rest of the appointment.”
My hands tightened at my sides.
I remembered the day she was discharged. She was in the back of the car, cradling her medical file against her chest. Her legs were still in the braces. She looked at me and whispered, low so her mother wouldn’t hear:
“Luca. Am I really never going to walk again?”
What did I say?
I said, “Don’t think about that right now, baby. Gia’s still in a bad way. Don’t make things harder on your parents.”
She wasn’t being dramatic. She was only asking the man she loved if she still had a shot at her own life.
And I chose Gia’s feelings over the answer.