Chapter Seven
"I NEVER CHEATED ON you!"
"I know that now," Aislinn said shakily, "but the photo looked so real."
Valerio looked at her in disbelief. "And that's it? You damned me to hell because the photo looked real? Have you never heard of deepfakes?"
"I—well, no—"
Valerio looked as if he wanted to strangle her now. "Well, you should have!"
It was such an absurd thing to shout, and he shouted it so sincerely, this enormous man sitting up in the wreckage of a hotel bed, scandalized across eight years by her insufficient technology literacy, that under any other circumstances Aislinn would have laughed.
But she couldn't.
Because he was right.
She had damned him, and her—she had condemned them to suffer, their own son included, needlessly, and she would bear that sin for the rest of her life.
"I'm so sorry." Her voice wobbled. "I should've asked you about it, but I was just scared you'd convince me to stay, and I was scared I'd say yes, so—"
"No." He caught her hands in both of his. "Don't apologize to me, ma belle. I never told you my last name. Never let you see where I lived. I called that keeping you safe, and it was never anything but a mistake. Mine, first."
She was crying harder now, and he gathered her hands in both of his like something breakable.
"It isn't even the only one." His jaw tightened, and whatever came next seemed to cost him more than the last confession had.
"Because I made a second mistake, just as bad.
When I was told you were dead, I was so far out of my mind with grief that I never once thought to question it.
And I never suspected foul play, because no one knew about us.
Who would ever have had reason to hurt you? "
Something moved through him, slow and terrible, like a held breath finally let go.
"There's a grave," he said. "Upstate. A small cemetery outside Poughkeepsie. Your name is on the stone."
She stared at him. "That's not possible."
"I was told there was an accident. A car, a bad road, a closed casket, because of the nature of it.
" His voice had gone very level, which she was already learning meant the opposite of calm.
"Someone called me. I don't even remember who anymore, only that the details were exact enough to be true, and I had no reason then to think anyone would build me a lie that specific.
I went to the funeral. Small. Quiet. I stood at the back so no one would ask who I was, and I watched them lower a casket I was never allowed to see inside, and then I went home and I grieved you for eight years. "
"Valerio—"
"Eleven months ago I was in the area for something unrelated, and I went to see it.
The grave. First time in years." He looked at his own hands like they belonged to someone else.
"There were fresh flowers on it. Recent.
Someone had been tending a stranger's grave for the better part of a decade, and I remember standing there thinking, that's strange, and then doing nothing about it, because grief doesn't ask good questions. It only asks you to keep grieving."
The room had gone very quiet.
"Someone built you a corpse to bury," Aislinn whispered, "and built me a story to run from."
"Yes." Whatever had been simmering under his composure since the word photo finally broke the surface. "Who, Aislinn?"
"I don't—"
"A name." He was already reaching for the phone on the nightstand, his whole body gone taut and ready, the ballroom-emptying stillness back in full.
"Whoever did this to us. Whoever took eight years and a—" His jaw worked.
"Give me a name." Something low and Italian cracked underneath the English, there and gone, the sound of a man losing a grip he'd held his whole life.
"And I promise you, they will never draw another easy breath. "
"I don't have one." It came out of her in a rush, both hands closing around his arm. "Valerio, please, I never saw a face, I never heard a name, it was just a voice at a library table and I was so scared I didn't ask, I didn't think to ask—"
"Then we start with the library. The date. The table. Someone remembers a face even if you don't—"
"Please." She was shaking now, and it wasn't fear of him, it had never once been fear of him, it was the sheer velocity of it, eight years of grief becoming a manhunt in under a minute. "Please, calm down. Not tonight. I just got you back."
For a moment he didn't move at all, caught between the phone and her hands on his arm, and she watched the war happen behind his eyes in real time.
A knock sounded on the suite door.
"Sir." A member of hotel staff, muffled and apologetic through the wood. "Ms. Marchetti asked me to let you know, the young master is asking for his mother. It's been rather a lot of new, all at once, for a boy his age."
The taut line of Valerio's shoulders didn't quite release, but it bent, just enough, toward the door and the small insistent person on the other side of it.
"It's fine. It's fine." He caught her chin, and whatever he'd been about to become simply set itself carefully aside, folded and put away for later, the way she'd watched him do with the word photo not five minutes before.
"But look at me. I realize I've never told you this.
I love you? I've only ever loved you, and now that includes Louis.
Never doubt me again, ma belle. Do you understand? "
"I promise."
"And if I ask you to come with me now, no questions asked?"
"How soon do you want me to go?"
Something moved through his face at that, something enormous that he clearly had no intention of letting loose in front of witnesses, and twenty minutes later they stepped out of the elevator looking almost respectable, which Aislinn considered a group achievement.
Minna was already waiting beside the limousine, and Louis was already in it, kneeling backward on the seat with the air of a boy who'd spent the interval conducting a thorough inspection of every button the vehicle possessed.
"Papa." He didn't even wait for the door to finish closing. "Can we go home first? I need to pick up my favorite toy."
"Of course."
The limousine pulled away from the hotel, which its new owner did not give a second glance, and Louis resumed operations.
"Do you have a helicopter?"
"Three."
"Do you get seasick?"
"No."
"Does Aunt Minna work for you or with you?"
"For me," said Valerio, at the exact moment Minna said, "With him," and neither of them elaborated, and Louis nodded as though both answers had confirmed something.
"Are you really a stuntman?" Louis asked next. "Because Brooklyn's mama said you own the hotel, and I looked, and stuntmen make forty-one thousand dollars a year."
Aislinn choked on nothing. Valerio, unbothered, glanced at her once, and something passed between them over the top of their son's head, eight years of it, an intersection, an orange, a lie he'd told with fruit in his hand.
"No," he said. "I was never a stuntman. Your mother decided I was one, and I..." A pause. "I liked who I was when she believed it."
"Then what are you?"
"A businessman. A very rich one." He said it the way other men said their blood type, information, not achievement. "And a long time ago, before you were born, I was someone who made bad mistakes. Mistakes that hurt people. I've spent a long time putting them right, and I'm not finished yet."
Louis considered this with the unblinking gravity he brought to all major disclosures.
"Okay," he said. "What kind of helicopter?"
And that was that, and Aislinn sat in a limousine between the two halves of her whole heart, listening to rotor specifications, learning eight years too late that she'd fallen in love with a billionaire because she'd ordered him to be a stuntman and he'd obeyed.
Their building did not improve with a limousine parked in front of it.
It stood there in the late afternoon, three stories of tired brick and one broken buzzer, and Aislinn felt the old reflexive apology rise in her throat and made herself swallow it.
Louis was already out and up the first step.
Minna elected to stay with the driver, on the grounds, she said, that the vehicle contained her billable hours.
They were halfway up the outside stairs when Louis stopped, dug into his backpack, and held out a folded piece of paper to his father with both hands, formally, like a treaty.
"What's this, son?"
"A list."
"What kind of list?"
"Of the people who hurt Mama."
Aislinn gasped and snatched it away so fast the paper cracked, her face going hot, because she'd caught a glimpse, that was the horrible part, a glimpse of neat pencil columns with names and dates, her seven-year-old had been keeping records, but Valerio only smiled.
"It's fine. I've already memorized the list."
"You're lying," she said, half-laughing despite herself.
"Do you think our son is a genius by accident?"
"Well, he takes after me, of course."
"Of course," Louis and Valerio said, in perfect unison, right away.
She made a face at the both of them. "Very funny."
The apartment was one room and a half, if you were generous about the half.
Aislinn had scrubbed every inch of it into submission, and none of that scrubbing changed what it was.
A water stain on the ceiling shaped like Australia, a window painted shut by some previous decade, a space heater standing in for a furnace that worked when it felt spiritual about it, and a kitchen where you could touch both walls at once, which Louis had once described as efficient and she'd loved him so much she'd had to leave the room.
She watched Valerio see it.
She watched his eyes go around the room once, cataloguing, the stain, the window, the heater, the neat stack of secondhand textbooks, the twin mattress and the smaller mattress beside it, and she watched his face turn to stone by degrees, and it was Louis who cracked first, because apparently their son could not stand that face any better than she could.