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Ingrid looked at me apologetically. “I thought she knew about the deal with your father.”
“What deal?” Matteo asked.
Fuck me, I thought. I’d spilled to Luca the deal that my father and I had made, which I was starting to realize was a huge mistake. Clearly, he could not keep things to himself these days.
“Where did she go?”
Ingrid’s cheeks turned pink, and she could not meet my eyes. “When I tried to make it better, I might have also told her that you’d been looking into her past.”
“Shit,” I exclaimed loudly enough to draw the attention of the people around us. I didn’t care enough to apologize as I might have previously. “Where is she, Ingrid?”
Ingrid’s bottom lip trembled, and it was probably good that Luca wasn’t here. He’d probably kill me for making her cry. But I didn’t have the time to deal with her guilt. Carla was reactive, and I worried she would get into something.
“She left.”
Fuck, I thought again.
“I don’t know where she went, but she was upset, so maybe she just went home.”
I pulled out my phone and began pressing buttons. “She’s not.” I didn’t know where she was, but from the GPS I’d placed on her phone, I could see that she was heading uptown. I turned to my brother. “Cover for me.”
Matteo opened his mouth, probably to argue, but I did not stick around to see what he was going to say.
Ingrid didn’t either. Her small legs were working overtime to keep up with me, but she was doing a heck of a job in her heels.
“I am so sorry,” she told me. “I didn’t mean to tell her anything.”
“How did this even come up?”
I reminded myself that Ingrid wasn’t a bad person. She had not done any of this on purpose, of that, I was sure. But it didn’t make me any less frustrated. I’d tried to keep Ingrid out of this life, and she hadn’t listened to me.
She’d made her choices, and part of that meant that she needed to learn that her actions had consequences.
“We were just talking. She looked really uncomfortable and—”
“And you thought you would tell her that my father dangled her like a carrot in front of me?”
We were now in the hotel entrance, and Carla was nowhere to be found. Not that I expected her to be here. I didn’t know where she was going, but her first night here, I’d downloaded a tracker onto her phone. I had not had to use it too often, but I appreciated my forethought.
“She asked me about Harvard, and I wasn’t thinking.”
Ingrid’s voice was full of sorrow, and despite myself, I did feel bad for her. She wasn’t malicious. I knew that she made a mistake.
I sighed. “It’s fine.”
Ingrid bit her lip, and I could see the tears in her eyes. “I thought that maybe she knew. The two of you seem close, and you took her to Boston with you, so I just thought…”
I knew what she thought, and while she wasn’t right, she wasn’t wrong either. “Don’t worry about it, Ingrid,” I assured her. “I’ll find her, and I’ll fix it.”
That just seemed to make Ingrid’s frown deepen. “When are you going to start taking care of yourself?”
The question threw me for a loop. “What do you mean?” I should not have been having this conversation with Ingrid, especially when I needed to find Carla, but the comment stopped me.
“You are always taking care of everyone else. Don’t think that people don’t notice.”
I said nothing. Carla wasn’t wrong, but she didn’t understand the why behind it. I didn’t fix things because I just wanted to take care of our family. It was the position that my birth forced me into.
“I know that you think you are the fixer, but Luca and your brother are able to take care of themselves. So is Carla.”
