Page 73
“I found it. In the office. I was looking for Sarah’s pharmacy file.”
“Worse.” She shakes her head. “He would give it to you gently, if he had the courage.” She says something in Italian, low, that I’ve learned means roughly may God give me patience with my son.
“Diana, I can’t stay in a house that—”
“I know what is in the drawer.” She says it flatly, and it stops me. “You think I have lived in this family and do not know what my son does? I have always known.” She takes my free hand in both of hers. “Whatever he did, he did it stupidly, not faithlessly. A faithless man ships the poison, counts the money, and sleeps well.”
“And your son?”
“My son found poison with his own name on it and is burning all of this down to stop it.”
“I cannot stay—”
Her grip tightens. “But he was never faithless. Not to that child, not to you. Learn the difference before you cross an ocean with the wrong one in your heart.”
She lets go. Her face lines with grief and love, a mother watching two people she cares for wreck something that didn’t have to break.
Then she steps aside and lets me pass.
It’s a thousand years before I reach the front door, and when I do, Lupo stands there, all in black. “I’m driving you to the airport.”
“You’re not changing my mind.”
“That’s not… It’s the one right thing I can do right now.”
I’m too hollowed out to fight it. So I sit in the back of the car beside a man I loved, and we don’t speak, and Milan slides by in the dark.
Nick follows in a second car, and behind that, a third with Diana in it. I don’t ask about the procession, because everything in this world travels with an armed escort.
“My mother insisted on coming,” Lupo says. “She’s big on formality, even at times like this.”
“You’ve had other times like this?”
“No—Important things. She likes formality for them.”
I huff and stare out the window. “Hard to believe this is an important thing to any of you.”
He’s quiet for a beat. “I won’t try to talk you into believing that it is. But it is.”
Even now, leaving, he’s managing what I have to feel. I don’t know whether to hate it or grieve it, so I do both, quietly, in the dark.
The suspicion works on me the whole drive, because a mind trained to diagnose can’t stop running differentials even in ruins. What if he didn’t know—really didn’t, at the start—that the Brancatis were up to no good? What if he found it exactly the way he said, that morning at Genoa, and everything since has been a man trying to undo a thing done in his name? It has the ugly consistency of truth.
“You said you didn’t know before we got here.”
“That’s right.”
“But you said you brought me here to help sell the story of a family visit while you dismantled things. Which is it?”
He sighs. “I had suspicions before we left the States. Nothing was confirmed until Genoa.”
Yep. The ugly consistency of the truth. Nothing is ever black and white. It’s smudgy little bits of gray.
Does it matter whether he knew? Because I was there. My face is beside his in whatever Allegra’s people photographed. If any of this surfaces with my name near it, I don’t lose just an argument about his intentions.
I lose my license, my reputation, my freedom.
A doctor found within arm’s reach of a counterfeit-pharmaceutical operation does not get to explain. I have to get to Boston. I have to put an ocean between me and this, and the money in my account means I can disappear into a long quiet life while I figure out whether any of it was real.
