Page 57

Look who I ran into! reads the caption, cheerful, obscene.

Allegra, sitting with Veda.

19

VEDA

The pharmacy trip was routine until it wasn’t.

Tomaso waited with the car while I ran in for Sarah’s monthly resupply and the pediatric bandages. I stepped back out into the sun with two bags and a coffee craving. “Be right back.” I nodded toward the café two doors down, and he smiled.

There she was. The devil in cream.

Allegra sat at a sidewalk table, settled in like she’d been waiting for me. “Dr. Sartorre.”

“Allegra.”

Allegra lifted a hand dripping with gold, a cigarette burning between two fingers. “What luck. Sit with me. I’ve been dying to talk to you without an audience of husbands.”

A conversation was unavoidable.

Tomaso is thirty feet back with the engine running, and she’s alone. It’s not as though she will do anything here. Refusing her in public makes a scene that Lupo would have to answer for.

So I sit, because having coffee with her costs less than the alternative. The chair across from her is already pulled out, angled toward the sun.

“I don’t smoke,” I say, when she offers.

“Of course you don’t. You do everything right, don’t you?” She signals for two espressos without asking what I want. “It’s the first thing I disliked about you—the rightness. It photographs so well.”

“You’ve been photographing me?” I keep my voice flat. She seems to want me upset, and I will not give her that.

“Milan photographs everyone. I merely collect.” She taps ash and studies me with sharp eyes that miss nothing. “You’re wondering how I found you, whether to text your bodyguard, a great many things. And you’re hiding all of them beautifully, which is more than the last one managed.”

“The last one.”

“Before you. There’s always a last one.” She smiles. “I’m the constant in Lupo’s life. The women rotate, and I remain.”

I cock my head. “If the women rotate, and you remain, what does that make you?”

“Permanent.” Her smile really pisses me off.

Damn. I’m not as good at word-lawyering as Lupo.

She leans over, phone out and aimed at us. “Smile for your husband, doctor.”

I’ll play along for now. I smile, and she takes the picture, then texts. I assume she’s sending it to Lupo. Or her crabby brother. Or both.

The espressos arrive. I don’t touch mine. She drinks hers as if she has nowhere on earth to be. “We were magnificent, me and your husband,” she says, conversational, cruel. “You should understand that, since you’re benefiting from all my hard work on that man. He proposed twice. Did he tell you? Once in Monaco, once in a hospital hallway while my father was dying.”

I keep my face at the temperature of the untouched coffee. “What a pity you couldn’t make it work.”

“He does his best proposing at deathbeds.” She watches for the flinch that doesn’t come. “Death focuses him. He hates that about himself, but it’s still true all the same. We speak the same language, Lupo and I—not Italian, the other one, where you understand what a man is and love him anyway.”

“You’re romanticizing a relationship that ended,” I say. “Repeatedly. That’s a little sad, Allegra. Haven’t you found happiness with someone else by now?”

Her eyes narrow, then they release with something close to respect. “She has claws. Good. He’d have tired of you in a month otherwise.”

“I have other ways of tiring him out.”