“I promised you a result.”
Bea moves past my peripheral vision with the whiskey bottle. She stops at Antonio’s elbow, tips it carefully over his glass. The amber rises to the right line and stops. She doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t look at her. He takes the glass with the same hand he’s been gesturing with and keeps gesturing.
That bothers me.
Not that she’s being ignored, because that’s the job, because that’s the whole point of a woman in the room carrying a whiskey bottle in this particular world. What bothers me is that I noticed.
“—and the witnesses,” Antonio is saying. “The bartender’s girlfriend. The waitress. They need a visit. A real visit. Not a phone call. Not a fucking letter from some kid in a suit.”
“The witnesses are handled.”
“Are they?”
“They’re handled.”
He drinks. He leans back. He’s waiting for me to say more, to give him the choreography he paid for, the usual reassurance, the specific names, the timeline. I give him nothing.
Bea crosses back behind his chair toward the sideboard. I catch the shape of her hip under the navy skirt, the set of her spine. She carries herself differently in clothes she didn’t pick. I noticed that in the car this morning too.
I’ve been noticing a lot.
Focus.
“D’Amico.”
“I’m listening.”
“You don’t look like you’re listening.”
“I’m listening, Antonio.”
I’m not. I’m back in the bedroom this morning, cutting my own face out of the mirror on the way out the door. She sat up when I opened the closet and the sheet slid halfway off before she caught it, and she had that look on her face. The one that said,Good morning. She was going to say something tender, probably. She might have said my name the way she did last night, but without the wreckage around it.
I didn’t give her the chance.
It was necessary. She needs to understand what last night was and what it wasn’t. She needs to understand that the man who pays her salary is the man she saw in that room, not the man from the bed, and that the two aren’t going to shake hands across her in the middle of a workday.
That’s the theory, anyway. The theory also insisted she’d be relieved. Walk out with her shoulders set, with that cool professional line she does with her mouth, and we’d both go back to something workable.
Instead, she stood in my kitchen this morning holding a coffee I’d poured her and not drinking it, and the ride to the office was the longest eleven minutes of my life.
“—and the Sorrento thing. That’s still open, right? The money from Sorrento?”
“It’s being moved.”
“Moved where?”
“Somewhere you don’t need to know.”
“I paid for that money, D’Amico. That’s mine.”
“It’ll be yours again when the accounts are clean.”
Bea wipes down the sideboard. She finished the job twenty seconds ago, but the cloth is still going. At her wrist, just above the cuff of her blouse, there’s a thin mark where my thumb was last night. She hasn’t pulled the sleeve down over it. I don’t know if that’s oversight or something else.
I clear my throat. Antonio thinks the sound is directed at him.
“About fucking time. So, let’s talk about the schedule. I want dates. Real dates. Not this ‘when it’s ready’ shit you’ve been?—”
