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“Later.”
“People will look for me. I have a brother who—”
“Who builds beautiful machines in Honolulu. You’ll call him from Milan and tell him about your exciting new consulting position.” I check my watch. “Which begins in forty minutes.”
“I’m not getting on a plane with you.”
“You have no phone. You have no car. My driveway is a quarter mile long, and my woods are longer, and you’re wearing the wrong shoes for both. And this is the part that matters, doc, some part of you got in that car this morning and drank the coffee and memorized the route, because the same appetite that took you upstairs last night wants to know how this story goes. So stop pretending to be incurious because it insults us both.”
Those warm brown eyes go cold. Didn’t know they could. “I am not curious about you. I want to go home. Make your errand boy take me home.”
“Not curious about me? About all of this? Come on. Liars bore me, remember? You don’t want to bore me, Veda.” I smirk up at her. “You weren’t boring last night. This trip can be all sorts of fun, if you let it be.”
She ignores the implied threat completely, her pretty face twisted by her rage. “This is NOT—”
The office door cracks open, and she whips around to face the next threat. The gap that opens is small, and the face that appears in it is smaller.
Shit. This is not how I wanted them to meet.
Sarah. Pajama bottoms and a sweater, sock feet, auburn wisps escaping the headband she put in herself, judging by the angle. She’s supposed to be at brunch. She has never once in her life stayed where she’s supposed to be, and I’ve never once corrected it with any conviction. My mistake. But I can’t stand to stifle her either.
“Papa,” she says to me, while staring at Veda. “Sofia says the plane leaves after my pills, and I did my pills already.” She looks up. “And who are you?”
Veda takes in the sight of my daughter, and something professional and enormous moves in behind her fury and puts it, gently, down. Her shoulders drop an inch. Her hands, which were fists, open. The voice she was using on me is nowhere in the building.
She doesn’t know who Sarah is yet. It doesn’t matter. There’s a child in the doorway, so the weapons go down. All of them, at once, without negotiation.
There it is. That’s the woman I flew across my own city to watch lecture.
“Piccolina,” I say, without taking my eyes off the doctor. “Come in. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
5
VEDA
The little girl in the doorway is six, give or take a hard year, and I have her chart written in my head before she’s fully in the room.
Auburn wisps at the headband line, the fine regrowth that comes in soft after chemo takes what came before. Skin a shade paler than expected, given her father’s natural olive glow. The faint shadow of a port scar at the collar of her sweater.
The words fit in my brain like a key in a lock. Pediatric cancer. Of course she’s a pediatric cancer patient, because that’s the reason a father kidnaps a pediatric oncologist.
Particularly a sociopathic, criminal father.
Every question I’ve screamed at this man reorganizes itself around a girl in sock feet, and I hate that it does. She comes in with the confidence of a kid who owns the building and stops in front of me, head tipped back. Up close, the assessment continues without my permission. Good color, steady on her feet, well-loved, in a sweater somebody soft chose for her.
“Are you another doctor?” she asks, and her small nose wrinkles. “I don’t like doctors.”
I open my mouth. My job is in it. My whole adult life is in it. But I don’t want to upset her.
“This is Veda,” Lupo says, smooth as poured cream. “My new wife.”
I stop breathing, and my eyes jerk to him without my permission.
Wife?
The sick child looks up at me with her whole face open. “Your wife?” Sarah’s tiredness drops off her. “Papa. You got married?”
Tell her the truth, and I frighten a sick child in her own house. Scream for help, and the person I terrify is her. He hasn’t trapped me with the woods or the confiscated phone.
