"Then we start with the library. The date. The table. Someone remembers a face even if you don't—"
"Please." She was shaking now, and it wasn't fear of him, it had never once been fear of him, it was the sheer velocity of it, eight years of grief becoming a manhunt in under a minute. "Please, calm down. Not tonight. I just got you back."
For a moment he didn't move at all, caught between the phone and her hands on his arm, and she watched the war happen behind his eyes in real time.
A knock sounded on the suite door.
"Sir." A member of hotel staff, muffled and apologetic through the wood. "Ms. Marchetti asked me to let you know, the young master is asking for his mother. It's been rather a lot of new, all at once, for a boy his age."
The taut line of Valerio's shoulders didn't quite release, but it bent, just enough, toward the door and the small insistent person on the other side of it.
"It's fine. It's fine." He caught her chin, and whatever he'd been about to become simply set itself carefully aside, folded and put away for later, the way she'd watched him do with the word photo not five minutes before. "But look at me. I realize I've never told you this. I love you? I've only ever loved you, and now that includes Louis. Never doubt me again,ma belle. Do you understand?"
"I promise."
"And if I ask you to come with me now, no questions asked?"
"How soon do you want me to go?"
Something moved through his face at that, something enormous that he clearly had no intention of letting loose in front of witnesses, and twenty minutes later they stepped out of the elevator looking almost respectable, which Aislinn considered a group achievement.
Minna was already waiting beside the limousine, and Louis was already in it, kneeling backward on the seat with the air of a boy who'd spent the interval conducting a thorough inspection of every button the vehicle possessed.
"Papa." He didn't even wait for the door to finish closing. "Can we go home first? I need to pick up my favorite toy."
"Of course."
The limousine pulled away from the hotel, which its new owner did not give a second glance, and Louis resumed operations.
"Do you have a helicopter?"
"Three."
"Do you get seasick?"
"No."
"Does Aunt Minna work for you or with you?"
"For me," said Valerio, at the exact moment Minna said, "With him," and neither of them elaborated, and Louis nodded as though both answers had confirmed something.
"Are you really a stuntman?" Louis asked next. "Because Brooklyn's mama said you own the hotel, and I looked, and stuntmen make forty-one thousand dollars a year."
Aislinn choked on nothing. Valerio, unbothered, glanced at her once, and something passed between them over the top of their son's head, eight years of it, an intersection, an orange, a lie he'd told with fruit in his hand.
"No," he said. "I was never a stuntman. Your mother decided I was one, and I..." A pause. "I liked who I was when she believed it."
"Then what are you?"
"A businessman. A very rich one." He said it the way other men said their blood type, information, not achievement. "And a long time ago, before you were born, I was someone who made bad mistakes. Mistakes that hurt people. I've spent a long time putting them right, and I'm not finished yet."
Louis considered this with the unblinking gravity he brought to all major disclosures.
"Okay," he said. "What kind of helicopter?"
And that was that, and Aislinn sat in a limousine between the two halves of her whole heart, listening to rotor specifications, learning eight years too late that she'd fallen in love with a billionaire because she'd ordered him to be a stuntman and he'd obeyed.
Their building did not improve with a limousine parked in front of it. It stood there in the late afternoon, three stories of tired brick and one broken buzzer, and Aislinn felt the old reflexive apology rise in her throat and made herself swallow it. Louis was already out and up the first step. Minna elected to stay with the driver, on the grounds, she said, that the vehicle contained her billable hours.
