"Clear your Thursday," he told his cousin, watching the school's red ink dry on eight years of questions. "We're going to a parent council meeting."
Chapter Twelve
THURSDAY MORNING, AISLINNwoke up smiling, which was becoming a habit, reached out, and found the bed empty on both frontiers.
Louis and Valerio were already dressed. Both of them. Standing at the foot of the bed like a small committee.
That was the first alarm. The second was her phone, blinking on the nightstand, and the email opened before she was fully upright, and then she was very upright.
"There's a parent council meeting, Louis is—"
"We know."
"How do you—wait, Louis?" She rounded on her son. "Did you hack into your school's system?"
Louis quickly shook his head.
She started to sigh in relief.
"Because Papa already did it."
"Valerio!"
"Louis wasn't accurate." Valerio adjusted his cuff, entirely unrepentant. "I was hacking the parents' phones, not the school's. Only fair, since they were all talking about you."
Aislinn opened her mouth, closed it, and stared at the two identical faces in front of her, one of which had the decency tolook slightly sheepish, and the sheepish one did not belong to the seven-year-old.
The school had that swept, braced look of a place expecting weather. Parents were already filing into the council room in their best fabrics, and staff stood along the walls, and every single conversation died wherever Aislinn walked, which in a strange way was almost restful, like the world had finally agreed to gossip about her in bulk rather than retail.
Minna was waiting at the doors.
She'd appeared the way she apparently always did, tall and bone-colored and pleasant, folder under one arm, and she fell into step beside them like it had been scheduled.
"Is this going to be legal?" Aislinn asked nervously.
"No, I'm just here for emotional support."
Aislinn sighed in relief. She heard herself do it, relief, at the word no, and decided that examining this reaction could wait for a calmer decade.
The council did not begin so much as detonate.
She'd thought she was prepared. She had eight years of practice at being talked about; she'd assumed that a room doing it in unison would simply be the same weather, louder. It wasn't. It was Amybeth Schnapp's voice leading a coalition, and the words disruption and those people and criminal element and what that man did, and unfit, they used unfit, about her, in front of her son, and other words too, about Louis, her Louis, incident waiting to happen, and Aislinn's hands had become fists in her lap somewhere without her permission.
But Valerio said nothing.
He sat beside her with his legs crossed, watching the room the way he'd once watched an aquarium, and so she held her tongue, because he was holding his, and if eight years had taught her to outlast weather, one day had taught her this. When this man went silent, silence was the strategy.
The furor climbed. It peaked. It cast around for resistance, found none to push against, and finally began to die of exhaustion.
And in the lull, Valerio turned his head, slow, and looked at his cousin.
Amybeth Schnapp saw it.
She saw it, and something happened in her face, and inside her chest her heart began to slam a message on repeat, don't let him nod, don't let him nod, don't let him nod, because she'd been in a ballroom yesterday, she'd stood on marble and watched a finger crook twice and a world end both times, and she was already rising out of her chair with no plan except interruption—
"Mrs. Schnapp!" the principal said. "Please settle down—"
Valerio nodded.
