"I don't know what to do," she whispered.
"Let me help you. You should go away and hide, just in case he tries to find you."
"B-But I don't know how..."
"I know someone...I'll help you, I promise."
Chapter Seven
"I NEVER CHEATED ONyou!"
"I know that now," Aislinn said shakily, "but the photo looked so real."
Valerio looked at her in disbelief. "And that's it? You damned me to hell because the photo looked real? Have you never heard of deepfakes?"
"I—well, no—"
Valerio looked as if he wanted to strangle her now. "Well, you should have!"
It was such an absurd thing to shout, and he shouted it so sincerely, this enormous man sitting up in the wreckage of a hotel bed, scandalized across eight years by her insufficient technology literacy, that under any other circumstances Aislinn would have laughed.
But she couldn't.
Because he was right.
She had damned him, and her—she had condemned them to suffer, their own son included, needlessly, and she would bear that sin for the rest of her life.
"I'm so sorry." Her voice wobbled. "I should've asked you about it, but I was just scared you'd convince me to stay, and I was scared I'd say yes, so—"
"No." He caught her hands in both of his. "Don't apologize to me,ma belle. I never told you my last name. Never let you see where I lived. I called that keeping you safe, and it was never anything but a mistake. Mine, first."
She was crying harder now, and he gathered her hands in both of his like something breakable.
"It isn't even the only one." His jaw tightened, and whatever came next seemed to cost him more than the last confession had. "Because I made a second mistake, just as bad. When I was told you were dead, I was so far out of my mind with grief that I never once thought to question it. And I never suspected foul play, because no one knew about us. Who would ever have had reason to hurt you?"
Something moved through him, slow and terrible, like a held breath finally let go.
"There's a grave," he said. "Upstate. A small cemetery outside Poughkeepsie. Your name is on the stone."
She stared at him. "That's not possible."
"I was told there was an accident. A car, a bad road, a closed casket, because of the nature of it." His voice had gone very level, which she was already learning meant the opposite of calm. "Someone called me. I don't even remember who anymore, only that the details were exact enough to be true, and I had no reason then to think anyone would build me a lie that specific. I went to the funeral. Small. Quiet. I stood at the back so no one would ask who I was, and I watched them lower a casket I was never allowed to see inside, and then I went home and I grieved you for eight years."
"Valerio—"
"Eleven months ago I was in the area for something unrelated, and I went to see it. The grave. First time in years." He looked at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. "There were fresh flowers on it. Recent. Someone had been tending a stranger's grave for the better part of a decade, and I remember standing there thinking, that's strange, and then doing nothing about it, because grief doesn't ask good questions. It only asks you to keep grieving."
The room had gone very quiet.
"Someone built you a corpse to bury," Aislinn whispered, "and built me a story to run from."
"Yes." Whatever had been simmering under his composure since the word photo finally broke the surface. "Who, Aislinn?"
"I don't—"
"A name." He was already reaching for the phone on the nightstand, his whole body gone taut and ready, the ballroom-emptying stillness back in full. "Whoever did this to us. Whoever took eight years and a—" His jaw worked. "Give me a name." Something low and Italian cracked underneath the English, there and gone, the sound of a man losing a grip he'd held his whole life. "And I promise you, they will never draw another easy breath."
"I don't have one." It came out of her in a rush, both hands closing around his arm. "Valerio, please, I never saw a face, I never heard a name, it was just a voice at a library table and I was so scared I didn't ask, I didn't think to ask—"
