She stops.
“If this reaches him?—”
“It won’t come from me,” she cuts me off.
I nod. “Fine.”
“For appearances,” she says, “you’re visiting a dressmaker.”
* * *
The car isn’t one I’ve used before. It’s smaller. Dark blue. No family crest. No driver in formal black. No visible escort.
The second thing I notice is Luca standing beside it.
I stop at the top of the steps. Teresa stands beside me with a folded coat over one arm.
“No house car,” I say.
“It isn’t,” Teresa says.
“No family driver.”
“He isn’t driving as family driver.”
“How comforting. A man becomes less dangerous once reclassified.”
Luca looks at me. “Miss Brennan.”
“Mr. Romano,” I reply.
His eyes move once to Teresa. Back to me. He knows something. Men like Luca survive by noticing what people are trying not to carry.
I adjust my gloves. “Are we all pretending I’m shopping?”
“Yes,” Teresa says.
Luca opens the back door of the car. I get in without taking his hand. Because if he touches me, he may feel the tremor I’m successfully hiding from everyone else, including myself. The car smells faintly of leather, rain, and cigarettes that’ve been forbidden but not forgotten.
Teresa doesn’t come. For one second, I want her to. That irritates me more than the nausea.
We drive through the gates. The outer road bends between high walls and dark trees. I track the route because some habits remain useful even when life has decided to complicate the map. Left at the first stone bridge. Straight through two iron posts. Right at the road with three cypress trees. Five minutes to the main road. Seven to the village edge. Twelve to the city outskirts.
Luca takes none of the obvious routes. The city grows around us slowly. Stone walls give way to narrower streets, narrow streets give way to traffic, traffic gives way to people pretending cities are not just organized collisions.
Luca parks two streets away, and we approach a building through its rear door.
A woman opens the door before we knock. Late fifties. Gray hair cut short. Brown eyes. Practical shoes. The kind of face that has delivered bad news often enough to stop apologizing for facts.
“Come,” she says tersely.
Luca remains by the door as I follow her. We move down a narrow hall into a small examination room that smells of antiseptic, lavender, and old wood. There’s a window facing a brick wall. One door. No second exit. Cabinet. Sink.Examination table. Screen. A machine beside it that looks too modern for the room and too intimate for my liking.
I count. Door. Window, if shattered. Cabinet, if hiding from reality. Not ideal.
“Name?” the doctor asks.
“No,” I reply.
