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“He kidnapped you.” Flat. Dangerous. “Say that part again.”
“Yes. In the beginning. It’s not the whole—”
“There’s no rest of the sentence that fixes kidnapped, Veda.”
“I know. I’m not trying to fix it. I’m trying to tell you what happened, and the truth is complicated, and you asked for it, so let me finish.”
A long breath on the line. “Finish. I’m not going anywhere, I’m strapped into a seat over the Alps. Finish.”
“You remember Sarah, and that’s she’s sick, right?”
“The kid.” Something shifts in his voice as he sighs. “Fuck.”
“Exactly. I met her, and I stopped trying to escape. I’m her stepmom. She thinks I’m coming back tomorrow to fix her piano hand, and I can’t, because I left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye, and that’s the thing out of all of it I can’t stop seeing.”
“Veda, slow down—”
But I can’t. It all comes spilling out. Eventually, once I’ve relayed the whole story with its nasty details, I breathe. “The first story, the one that says I’m a criminal—that was his ex, Allegra Brancati. She built it out of real photographs arranged into a lie. The second one, the one clearing me, Lupo just released at the cost of everything he has, because it also convicts him. He ruined himself, in part, to set me free.”
“That’s…” Another deep breath. “Truly fucked up.”
I make myself say the last of it. “That’s the whole of it that you’re landing in, Mark. And I lied to you on that terrace to keep you off a road exactly like the one I was on last night. I didn’t know what might happen if I told you the full truth then. I hated myself for being so mean to you. Still do. But I thought I was saving you by doing it.”
The silence goes long enough that I check the screen to see if the call dropped.
“Okay,” Mark says finally.
“Okay?”
“What do you need right now?”
No I told you so. No how could you? None of the reckonings I earned and expected.
Just the question he’s been asking me since we were kids. The only question that’s ever mattered between us.
It undoes me more completely than anything Lupo said on the table. Lupo’s honesty was a confession, a thing he needed to hand over. Mark’s question asks nothing of me at all.
“I have no idea. But I’m sorry. I just—”
“Stop apologizing. You were kidnapped. You do not owe me an apology for how well you managed being kidnapped.”
“I owe you for the terrace. I was cruel to you, Mark.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I knew it was a lie while you were telling it. I got back on the plane home because you asked me to, not because I believed you.” A rough breath. “So we’re even. You lied to protect me. I pretended to buy it to protect you. We’re our parents’ kids.”
I snort a wet laugh. “Yeah. That’s definitely something they would have done.”
“So, again. What do you need right now?” he says again, gentler, when I don’t answer.
“I don’t know,” I admit, and it comes out cracked. “That’s the honest answer. I wanted to go home, and there’s no home to go to. The man who took that from me is the same man who just burned himself down to give me my name back. I don’t… My whole adult life has been me in control. Since I met Lupo, I haven’t been in control of much of anything. And I’ve loved most of that. So genuinely, Mark, I have no idea.”
“Alright. Here’s what happens. I land, I come to you, wherever you are—and I am not here for him. I want that clear, Vee. I am not flying across the world to help the maniac who kidnapped my sister. I’m coming for you, to stand next to you while you figure out what you want. Lupo can just fucking deal.”
“That’s fair.”
“Is he going to be a problem when I come? Because I’ll walk in there either way, Vee, but I’d like to know if I’m walking into a man who lets people leave.”
I remember Lupo in his office. The way he said I was free to go. “He lets people leave. He’ll let you take me anywhere I want to go.”
