The Sister Who Shot Me Got Everything I Had Chapter 11
The Old Boots
Mama, Papa, and Matteo came a month later.
They stood outside the foundation gate. And they didn’t look righteous the way they used to.
Mama had a box in her hands. She saw me and her tears dropped. “Baby.”
I checked my watch. “I have a session in ten minutes. You’ve got that long.”
Mama flinched like the sentence had cut her.
She opened the box quickly.
Inside were a pair of old combat boots.
Scuffed. The leather worn white at the toes. A dark stain along the right sole where I’d stood in wet concrete at fourteen, my first time watching Papa collect tribute at the docks.
“Mama brought them for you.”
“You loved these when you were little.”
I looked at the boots.
I remembered wearing them home from the docks that night. My legs had been shaking. My mouth had been dry.
But I’d carried Papa’s briefcase. And Papa had put his hand on my head in front of every man there.
“This is my heiress.”
I’d worn those boots to bed that night. Just to feel them still on my feet.
Back then I thought if I kept training, if I kept proving myself, they’d finally see me.
Turns out, people who don’t love you can’t see you bleed. They just complain that you’re staining the floor.
I said, “I don’t need them anymore. Take them away.”
Mama froze. “Baby—”
Papa’s voice was hoarse.
“I sent Gia away. She won’t set foot in New York again.”
“The pistol—the ring—all of it’s gone.”
“Your rooms are back to the way they were.”
Matteo stepped in.
“Every medical bill from here on out—Zurich, follow-up, physical therapy, anything—I’ll cover it. Personally. Not from the Family books. My own money.”
“Sienna. I was garbage of a brother.”
“I kept thinking you were the strong one, so you could wait.”
I looked at all three of them. “You still don’t get it.”
I felt very tired. “I didn’t leave because of the room.”
“Or the ring. Or the dinner.”
“I started dying seven years ago, the day someone signed my surgery off the schedule. It just took me this long to finish.”
Mama shook her head, sobbing.
“I was so scared Gia would hurt herself. You were always so steady, I thought you’d get through it—”
“Yes.” I nodded. “I got through it.”
“So you can go now.”
Mama’s face went bloodless. She reached out to grab my hand but stopped in mid-air. “You really don’t want your mother anymore?”
I looked at her. “You stopped wanting me first.”
That was when Mama’s legs gave out. Papa caught her.
Matteo’s eyes were red. “Sienna. Give us a way to make it right.”
I shook my head. “You can’t.”
“I…”
“You can’t make up for the surgery or the sit-down I never sat at or the nights I checked into the hospital by myself or the night I bled through my dress and rolled myself out the side door.”
I pulled a business card from the pouch on my chair and slid it across the table between us.
“If you really think you owe me—hand my lawyer everything. Medical costs going forward. Damages for pain and suffering. Every dollar Gia stole off my card.”
“But don’t come back interrupting me and my life.”
Mama broke down completely.
I didn’t soften.
The session bell rang inside.
A group of kids in the hallway started shouting for me. “Miss Sienna!”
I turned my chair and rolled toward the door.
Right before it closed behind me, I heard Mama sobbing, Matteo dropping to his knees on the sidewalk and slapping himself.
A few years ago I would have cracked at that sound.
But not anymore.
Tears that show up late can’t water something that’s already dead.