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“My brother called.”
Something cold and immediate shifts in him. Not aimed at me. Aimed past me, at a threat. “What did you tell him?”
“That I’m happy.” I hold his gaze and hand him the lie I told, so our stories match, and no seam shows tomorrow. “He didn’t buy it. He tracked my cards, my phone, my badge. He lands tomorrow to see it himself. We’ll do dinner, and then he leaves. That’s the whole of it.”
Lupo stands slowly. “He tracked you.”
“He’s my brother. It’s what he does. It’s what I’d do.” I take a step in, because the cold in him is rising, and I need it to stop. “He believed me enough to give me the chance to prove it. He’s coming to be convinced, not to burn anything down. We do dinner right—one good night—and he flies home, and this is done.”
“If this goes wrong?” His voice has dropped the cold, but only a little.
“Then my brother goes home suspicious, and keeps digging. So we do it right the first time. He’s the one person on earth I can’t fool, Lupo, so this dinner has to be the most honest fake we’ve ever performed.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and I see him arrive where I arrived on the terrace. “He believed you?”
My first lie in Lupo’s direction, and the one that matters. If Lupo believes Mark saw all the way through me, then Mark becomes a problem Lupo solves. And then, I’ll have to solve Lupo, make it look like an accident, adopt Sarah, and that’ll be that.
All bad options.
“He believed me. He’s coming to bless it, not break it. He’s my brother. He wants to be happy for me. We just need to show him that I am happy. So be nice to me for a day, and it’ll all be over.” I smirk at him, but he doesn’t respond the way I hoped.
Lupo studies me the way he studies a manifest that doesn’t work out. For one long second, I think he’s going to call it.
“He better believe you.” Quiet, even, and underneath it, something I’ve never had aimed at me before and don’t want to hear ever again. “He cannot afford to think anything else. For his sake, Veda. Make sure your brother believes you.”
It isn’t a threat against me. It’s worse than that.
It’s the temperature of the whole rest of his life, shown to me for one unguarded second. What he is under the drugstore glasses and the honored candy deals, the monster that peels a man for slapping an employee.
But I understand this monster.
He isn’t wrong to be what he is. If our positions flipped, if it were Sarah landing in Milan with a fistful of facts and a phone, I don’t know that I’d be any different than him.
“He’ll believe me.” I leave no room for doubt in the matter. Everything now rides on my brother being convinced by a woman he’s never once failed to see through, and Lupo being fooled by a woman he has every reason to suspect of lying to him.
Two men. One lie.
I leave him to his thoughts. In the sunroom, Sarah has dealt a fresh hand and invented three new rules in my absence. “… and you have to spin in a circle when I win.”
“If you win.”
“You said the house always wins, and since I’m the card scuffler, I’m the house.”
The house always wins. The words cut through me.
“Yeah. Um, and it’s dealer. Not card scuffler.”
She sings a song as she passes out cards for a game she doesn’t understand, and I sit down on the purple rug and let a six-year-old cheat me blind.
16
LUPO
I hate Wednesdays.
Sarah’s swim lessons are on Wednesdays, and she loves them, so I try to keep my attitude to myself. I’m not great at it.
I like the water just fine. The pool is too exposed for my liking. But Sarah doesn’t share my concerns, and I’m not about to make her paranoid for no reason.
