“Anything that actually needs my eyes?” I ask.
He hesitates. That pulls my gaze up.
“There’s a journalist,” he says. “A DeLaurentis.”
My knuckles still. Recognition is a cold, metallic taste. The name sits high in this city, in bright offices with flags and cameras—money old enough to forget the smell of it.
“Which one?” I ask.
“Isabella. Thirty. Investigative. Left her father’s orbit for the paper seven years ago. They say she doesn’t scare.”
“Everyone scares,” I say, and lean back. “What does she want?”
“She’s after the mayor.” Lorenzo’s mouth twitches. “Which… ordinarily I’d send flowers for.”
“Ordinarily,” I agree. The mayor’s a parasite whose hand I keep off my table only because it keeps other animals too busy to sniff at my door. “And us?”
“She’s building a chain of shell corporations that run through a consultancy. Someone paid for a few city contracts to go a certainway. The consultancy is legit.” He pauses. “It also paid protection fees last spring. Through a cousin of a cousin.”
I say nothing as the clock keeps ticking.
“She doesn’t have you,” Lorenzo adds, because he knows I savor the truth more than flattery. “But she has the architecture a step out. Enough to make noise. The kind that brings cameras to neighborhoods that don’t need them.”
“And her angle?”
“‘Power corrupts, New York pays.’ That kind of thing. She’s good with words.”
“Words don’t bleed,” I say. But they cut. Sometimes deeper.
I sign what needs signing. There’s a pile of condolence cards on the credenza—old men who have worked for my family for forty years dying in their sleep with secrets in their teeth. I keep my handwriting neat. It matters, the small ways you tell a family their grief is witnessed.
When the clock hits nine, I stand. “I’m done.”
Alessandro falls into step. He doesn’t ask where; he always knows. The club swallows us, lights low and velvet dark. Hands reach for me, then think better of it. We slip through the private exit and into the waiting car.
The city is its own machine tonight. Yellow cabs like teeth. Steam rising from the grates like breath. We glide uptown where the security cameras are my cameras and the doormen look away.
Home is not a castle. Castles are for men who want to show how scared they are. My building is glass and steel with a view of the park and more eyes on the street than most precincts. The elevator knows my weight. The doors open into the private hall.
Nicole meets us there, tablet in hand, hair pulled back tight. She ran my house when my wife breathed, and when she stopped, she never missed a beat.
“She’s waiting,” Nicole says, which untangles something small and tight inside me.
“You’ll brief me in the morning about our journalist,” I tell Alessandro without looking at him.
He nods. “She publishes on Wednesdays. If she had something, tonight would be the time to look into it.”
He’s right. Relief shouldn’t feel like this—sharp enough to be an ache. I dismiss him.
Sofia sits on her bed like a queen without bothering to pretend she doesn’t rule me. Her hair is a fall of dark, sleep-tangled curls, her favorite purple pajamas a size too big because she refuses to stop growing. There’s a picture book open on her lap, a dozen stuffed rabbits in attendance, and a crown she cut from gold paper sitting lopsided on her head.
“Papà,” she says solemnly, and then breaks into a smile so unguarded it feels like sunlight in my ribs. “You’re late.”
“I am.” I shrug out of my jacket and hang it in the closet beside the little painting she made of the two of us, watercolors bleeding into happiness. “The city forgot you were the princess.”
She scoots to the edge of the bed and holds her arms up without shame. I pick her up. Eight years old and I still carry her like she weighs nothing. Maybe she does. Perhaps everything else weighs too much.
“You promised story time,” she says into my neck. “Nicole did an okay story, but not a good story.”
