“It’s not gonna go bad, Frankie.”

“Promise?”

It wasn’t a plea.

It was a dare.

And Benny was too good. Too honest. Too decent. Too awesome to make a promise he couldn’t keep.

But he was also too Benny, so he was gentle and cautious when he replied slowly, “I can’t tell the future, baby.”

I shook my head in short frantic shakes. “No. You can’t. I can’t either. And I can’t take the risk. I got shot and that was good. It was good, Benny,” I repeated when his face grew dark. “It brought all of you back to me. And I know what you want. It burns, it kills, because I like what you want. I want to give it to you. I want to have it for me. But I can’t risk losing more. We have to go back to the way we were before. You can’t promise me this won’t go bad, but you can promise me we can keep that kind of good.”

“The way we were before?” he asked.

“You, me, friends, family.”

I felt it slice clean into my heart, the new look on his face when he whispered, “You wanna be friends?”

But I didn’t delay in whispering back, this time definitely a plea, “Please give me that, Benny.”

He studied me for a moment, his expression beyond unhappy, and I let him, my chest rising and falling rapidly, my bleeding heart still finding a way to beat hard.

Then he said, “There’s somethin’ not right here, Frankie, and we gotta get to the bottom of that.”

He was right.

And that was not happening.

“Benny—” I started, but he cut me off.

“If you can’t do that yourself, you gotta let me in there so I can dig whatever is eatin’ at you out of you, baby.”

“I’m falling in love with you.”

Everything went still.

Silent and still.

Benny. Me. The air around us.

Dead still.

Then Ben wasn’t still. His expression changed again and he gave me beauty—pure, undiluted beauty—as his face warmed, his eyes went sweet, and he took a step toward me.

My hand shot up and I shouted, “Don’t come near me!”

“Baby, you lost a man and you—”

“No!” I yelled. “You think you understand but you don’t. It isn’t about losing Vinnie. It isn’t about me not bein’ strong enough to try again. It’s about you. It’s about the man who would come over to my house and shoot the shit with me, teasin’ me and makin’ me laugh while he ate my Christmas cookies. It’s about findin’ you and snuggling close for a Christmas picture, feelin’ warm and safe, family all around me. This could be good, what we could have—amazing, awesome, the best. And it could go bad. And then all that’s gone for me. You’re all I have. You’re all I ever had. And when I say that, I mean you and I mean your family.”

“You gotta have it in you to try,” he returned.

I shook my head. “Don’t you get it, Ben? I don’t have anything in me.”

His look turned cautious when he said quietly, “I don’t get that, honey.”

“If you don’t, you haven’t been paying very close attention.”

His back shot straight. “There’s a lot to you, Francesca.”

“There’s nothing to me, Benny.”

He held my eyes, a firmness entering his jaw that was more than a little scary, and he said slowly, “You are very wrong.”

“Yeah?” I fired back. “You think that? Okay, then what happens when the day comes you find out I’m right?”

He continued to hold my eyes, staring into them with a focus that felt like he was unraveling me. Then he took a visible breath, lifted his hand, schooled his features, and urged, “We need to calm down and talk about this somewhere not in the bathroom.”

“I need to go.”

“That’s the last thing you need.”

On his words, it happened, so I guess he did unravel me.

Tears hit my eyes so fast, I had no hope of choking them back.

But they were the silent ones. The ones that said it all without a lot of sobbing and moaning. The ones that came from that well you held deep and only came out when the something you were crying about meant everything.

“I want you always to think the way you think about me now, Benny,” I told him quietly.

“Why would you ever think I’d think differently, honey?” he asked me, also quietly.

“Because I’m me.”

“Baby, we need to get outta this f**kin’ bathroom and—”

He shut up when I begged, “Please let me go.”

“You cannot seriously be askin’ me to do that.”

“Please, Ben, let me go.”

“And you cannot seriously think I’m gonna say yes.”

The tears kept coming, but I said nothing.

Ben did. “Come here, Frankie.”

God.

Benny.

The tears came faster.

“Baby, come here.”

“I want you to have the woman who deserves this bathroom, Benny.”

At my words, something hit him. His look turned ravaged and it was difficult to witness as he whispered, “Jesus, come here.”

“I want you to have what you deserve, honey, and it’s not me.”

“Fuck it, I’m—” he gritted out as he made a move to me.

I took another step back, jerked my hand at him, and shook my head. “I’m leaving, Benny. And, honest to God, I’ll fight you if you don’t let me.”

He stopped dead and looked into my eyes.

I felt the last tear fall as I held his gaze.

We stared at each other a long time.

Benny broke it.

“Don’t do this to us.”

“I do, don’t hate me.”

“Don’t do this, Frankie.”

“If I do, be pissed. Then come back. I need you to come back to me, Benny.”

“You do this to us, not gonna be able to get to that place, Frankie.”

I felt saliva fill my mouth at that possibility, but I swallowed it down and nodded.

“You okay with that?” he asked, his face a mask of wounded incredulity.

I was not. I was absolutely not okay with that.

But it was better to take the cut, make it surgical, move on, and carry on living without Benny and his family as I’d learned to be able to do before but do it far away, where people’s talk and my own memories couldn’t make it torture for me.

“I’m guessin’ I’m gonna have to be,” I answered.