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“Oh, bullshit!” Her voice climbs, finally, the scalpel going ragged. “You let me fall in love with a man I couldn’t know. You let me sleep in a house that ships poison. You let Sarah—” She stops, because Sarah is the one place neither of us can go carelessly.
“Sarah is innocent. She doesn’t know anything—”
“Don’t you think I know that? I know.” She’s irritated by that, which is reasonable enough. But she said her name, and I panicked. “I know you’d die for that child. I’ve watched you. That’s what makes the rest of it unforgivable, Lupo—that you’re capable of that love and you still ran this operation, still shipped this, still—”
“The Brancatis did this. Under my name, yes—and I’m setting fire to everything I own to stop them and to prove exactly that.”
“Just stop pretending already.” She seizes it, and now the cold cracks all the way open and what’s under it is fury. “You’re making millions off the Brancati deal, Lupo—that’s what the whole venture is. So spare me the crusader.”
“That’s not—”
“You found out your partners were running fake chemo, and your solution took months—months of me at your table—because God forbid you interrupt the cash flow before you’d arranged your perfect release with your name coming out clean on the far side.”
“My name does not come out clean. That’s the entire point of the—”
“Did you pick me because you were attracted to me?” she cuts in, and it’s the cruelest question in the room because it’s the one she actually needs answered. “Or because you looked at my file and thought, there’s a woman gullible enough to fake-marry a stranger, keep my kid alive, and never look too closely? Which was it? Because I can’t tell anymore, and I need to know if the man I fell in love with was ever real, or if I was just the respectable dummy who was too stupid to look around here before now.”
Everything I say now will sound like the lie she’s already decided it is. But I say it anyway. “Both. I picked you because you were the best in the country, and because a wife made pulling apart the Brancati operation invisible. And then I fell—”
“Don’t.” The word has frost at the core.
But I can’t stop now. “I’ve been trying to build a way to keep you safe and free, and I’ve done it badly, and I decided too much of it for you. You’re right about all of that. I’m not going to argue you out of being right.”
“You’re still lying to me—”
“I’m not! I swear, I am not lying, Veda.”
But she shakes her head in disbelief. “The scary thing is, you have no tells when you lie. Your pupils don’t dilate, your pulse doesn’t kick up, you don’t stare off in one direction or another, none of the usual ways you can tell when someone is lying. Not even a trademark phrase like ‘Trust me’ before you do it. You told me before we left the States that you’re a sociopath, and I think that might be true, because for you, lying and telling the truth get the same neutral physiological responses from you.”
I drag my fingers through my hair in frustration. “Veda. Do you think I cooked up all of this just to be able to lie to you at some point? That I set all of this up, the dossier, the meeting, just so I can lie to you on the off chance that you found those files?”
“I genuinely don’t know what to think anymore.” She says it to herself, almost wondering, testing whether the sentence is true.
A month ago I’d have thought honesty was the whole debt. But the truth, delivered late enough, stops being a gift and becomes the final piece of evidence against you.
“I thought if you’d just tell me the truth… but this, whatever this is, is worse. You call it protecting me.”
“Yes.”
“I thought if you explained it, we might be able to get past it somehow, and we’d figure things out…” She gulps and glares, and that look is a knife in my chest. “I want to go home. Not upstairs—home, Boston. I want out of this house and this country and this marriage that was never a marriage, tonight, and I want you to let me go, Lupo. I just… I need this to be over.”
Love isn’t like it is in the movies. It’s not some magic wand that fixes everything.
When I thought I had love with Allegra, it fixed everything. Made her forgive me, made her sweet. For a time, anyway. The whole world looked different when I was in love with Allegra. People were pawns we used to get what we wanted. Our happiness was all that mattered, second only to our bank accounts. Violence was cheap. It meant nothing.
Love with Veda is a different creature. It sharpens the world. Makes me see things clearly for the first time. Makes me care more. Makes the world real.
And that love is leaving.
For a long moment I don’t answer. Once I say it I can’t take it back, and I don’t want to take it back.
“You are free to go.” Simple words. The worst kind.
I mean it as the deepest thing I’ve ever said to anyone. I have never let a person walk away from me with something I wanted still in the room. I’ve never once caved to what another person wanted over what I’d decided. I’m doing both, right now, for her, and it is a love confession in the only language I have left that she might still believe.
But she doesn’t know that. She can’t. In her language, the same sentence means the opposite—a guilty man opening a door to be rid of his problem. The one gift I have left to give arrives sounding like the crime she’s already convicted me of, and there’s no changing her mind about the verdict.
She turns for the door, and Nick follows her out.
