"Listen to me, Annette. You need to let Joyce find her happiness."
"That's what I'm talking about."
"By driving a wedge between her and Fantino? By filling her head with ideas of starting a career when she's still settling into new motherhood?"
"What are you talking about? Though if getting a job would help her, I'm all for it. It's her choice, Carlo."
"Exactly. Not mine. Notyours."
"You act like I have some kind of agenda here."
"Don't you?"
"Only to help my sister get better."
"Regularly sleeping through the night will help more than any sisterly advice, I am sure."
Exhausted and on edge herself, Annette was in no mood to deal with Carlo's opinions on that score. She was the one losing sleep so her sister could get some. After a week, Joyce didn't show any improvement from it.
"When your father asked me to talk to you and suggest you let your sister find her feet in her new marriage and motherhood, I told him I didn't think it was necessary, but I can see I was wrong."
"You've been speaking to my father?"
"We talk regularly. We share common business interests, you remember."
"I am not a business interest!" She was losing her cool and that was not okay, but Carlo and her father?
Annette could just imagine what had been said about her and none of it good.
"No, but as his daughter, you are a concern."
"You know what? Never mind. If you and my father have the same view of the situation, you're not going to help me." Once again, the weight of being on her own pressed down her.
"Gladly. I did not call you to talk about our siblings." He gave her that slashing smile that usually sent her nerve endings zinging.
Tonight, all it did was make her want to cry.
Because that smile in that moment might as well have been a meteorite hitting her world. It told her that their relationship wasn't just mostly about sex, but it was all about sex. She was an easy booty call. He didn't even have to leave his apartment, because here she was on the other end of a video call.
And if Annette was wired for easy, casual sex, that would be fine.
She wasn't. No matter what she tried to tell herself. And this pseudo friendship that wasn't really a friendship at all wasn't enough of a relationship to make the sex okay with her brain, much less her heart.
"I need to go."
"You look tired. Get some sleep. We'll set something up for later in the week."
Yeah, no. She just shook her head and signed off the video call.
Joyce's voice risen to the point of screaming had her running from her room in search of her sister. She found her in the living room, sobbing on the floor in front of a large ornate mirror, now broken like someone had thrown something at it.
The culprit, a small statue that used to sit on the mantle lay on the carpet below.
Fantino was trying to comfort his wife. Between the two of them, he and Annette finally got Joyce up to their bedroom and into a soothing bath.
"You are right. She needs help that you and I cannot give her." Fantino sounded so sad, but also determined.
It took another month, with more incidents just like that one, before he and Joyce took the Messina jet to California to check her into a private clinic. Joyce had insisted on Southern California because she'd wanted away from New York's cold winter.