I sit down.
"Your mother's accident," I say. "It was staged."
She doesn't move. "What?"
"Your father wanted headlines. He wanted sympathy from the public to advance his political career." I keep my voice calm because one of us needs to be calm and it is not going to be her. "He arranged an accident. A collision that looked serious enough to generate coverage. He knew it was coming so he knew when to get out of the car." I pause. "Your mother didn't know. She wasn't part of the arrangement. She had no reason to jump."
She is very still.
"How do you know this?" she asks, and her voice has dropped to something I have to lean forward to hear.
I stand up and I go to her and I take her face in my hands and I look at her eyes and I plead, "Go to bed. Tomorrow I will tell you everything and?—"
"Please." The word comes out so softly it barely makes a sound. "Please just tell me the truth."
I feel something in my chest that I don't have a word for.
I look at her face in my hands and I say, "My father worked with your father to stage the accident."
And I watch the light go out of her eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nathalie
"What?"
I look at Luca's face and this is the first time, the first time in all the time I have known him, that I see him at a complete loss. His mouth opens and closes. The ears come before I can stop them, clouding everything, turning him into a blur of dark suit and pale eyes.
"Nathalie." He takes a step toward me. "If you'll just sit down I can explain?—"
"That's a lie," I snap, pushing him away with both hands, stepping back. "That's a lie, that's a lie, that's?—"
But it isn't.
Even as I say it I know it isn't. He has no reason to construct this cruelty, this devastation, and I know it and knowing it is what takes my breath.
My father had cried at her funeral.
I had watched him. I had stood beside him in the black dress that was too big for me because I had lost weight in the week between the accident and the service. I had watched my father weep and I had thought, at least this, at least we have this, at least we are both here in this grief together and it is something that belongs to both of us.
All my life I had made excuses for him. His coldness, his distance, the way he looked through me and past me and around me. I had told myself he was broken. I had told myself that a man who had lost his wife the way he lost her, suddenly and violently and on a random road, had earned the right to be unreachable. I had tried harder because of it. I had tried to fill the space that she left because I thought if I could be enough then maybe he would come back from wherever the grief had taken him.
He hadn't lost her. He had handed her over.
Luca's voice reaches me from somewhere close and then further away as he shouts for Renzo to get the doctor and then his arms are around me and I can feel them but I cannot coordinate my breathing and the room is falling and I hear him sayingbreathe,Nathalie, breathe,against my hair.
I think,you stupid girl, you stupid stupid girl,and then everything goes dark again.
* * *
I wake up in bed. Luca is sitting beside it holding my hands. When my eyes open he sits up and helps me up, one hand at my back, careful, and he looks at my face and asks quietly, "How are you feeling?"
I look at him.
"Tell me the whole truth," I reply. "Everything you know about my mother."
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he releases my hands and he rests his elbows on his knees and he looks at the floor briefly before looking back up at me and he says, "I don't know much. I heard about it through the family, word of mouth. I was in college in Italy when it happened, and I wasn't part of any of it." He pauses. "What I know is that your father came to my father and made an offer in exchange for help staging an accident."
