Chapter Twelve
THURSDAY MORNING, AISLINN woke up smiling, which was becoming a habit, reached out, and found the bed empty on both frontiers.
Louis and Valerio were already dressed. Both of them. Standing at the foot of the bed like a small committee.
That was the first alarm. The second was her phone, blinking on the nightstand, and the email opened before she was fully upright, and then she was very upright.
"There's a parent council meeting, Louis is—"
"We know."
"How do you—wait, Louis?" She rounded on her son. "Did you hack into your school's system?"
Louis quickly shook his head.
She started to sigh in relief.
"Because Papa already did it."
"Valerio!"
"Louis wasn't accurate." Valerio adjusted his cuff, entirely unrepentant. "I was hacking the parents' phones, not the school's. Only fair, since they were all talking about you."
Aislinn opened her mouth, closed it, and stared at the two identical faces in front of her, one of which had the decency to look slightly sheepish, and the sheepish one did not belong to the seven-year-old.
The school had that swept, braced look of a place expecting weather.
Parents were already filing into the council room in their best fabrics, and staff stood along the walls, and every single conversation died wherever Aislinn walked, which in a strange way was almost restful, like the world had finally agreed to gossip about her in bulk rather than retail.
Minna was waiting at the doors.
She'd appeared the way she apparently always did, tall and bone-colored and pleasant, folder under one arm, and she fell into step beside them like it had been scheduled.
"Is this going to be legal?" Aislinn asked nervously.
"No, I'm just here for emotional support."
Aislinn sighed in relief. She heard herself do it, relief, at the word no, and decided that examining this reaction could wait for a calmer decade.
The council did not begin so much as detonate.
She'd thought she was prepared. She had eight years of practice at being talked about; she'd assumed that a room doing it in unison would simply be the same weather, louder.
It wasn't. It was Amybeth Schnapp's voice leading a coalition, and the words disruption and those people and criminal element and what that man did, and unfit, they used unfit, about her, in front of her son, and other words too, about Louis, her Louis, incident waiting to happen, and Aislinn's hands had become fists in her lap somewhere without her permission.
But Valerio said nothing.
He sat beside her with his legs crossed, watching the room the way he'd once watched an aquarium, and so she held her tongue, because he was holding his, and if eight years had taught her to outlast weather, one day had taught her this. When this man went silent, silence was the strategy.
The furor climbed. It peaked. It cast around for resistance, found none to push against, and finally began to die of exhaustion.
And in the lull, Valerio turned his head, slow, and looked at his cousin.
Amybeth Schnapp saw it.
She saw it, and something happened in her face, and inside her chest her heart began to slam a message on repeat, don't let him nod, don't let him nod, don't let him nod, because she'd been in a ballroom yesterday, she'd stood on marble and watched a finger crook twice and a world end both times, and she was already rising out of her chair with no plan except interruption—
"Mrs. Schnapp!" the principal said. "Please settle down—"
Valerio nodded.
Amybeth Schnapp screamed. "It's going to happen again!"
And every phone in the council room started beeping.
All of them. At once. A rainfall of chimes and buzzes, pockets and purses lighting up around the room, and Aislinn watched forty pairs of hands reach for forty screens with the doomed synchronization of an orchestra, and heard, from forty tiny speakers, slightly out of phase with itself, a fist hitting a door and a voice saying Open up, it's me.
The footage was grainy and high-angled and completely unmistakable.
The room watched a drunk man swing. Watched him miss, twice, and be warned, twice, and pull a knife on a man in a suit who never once raised his voice. Watched what happened after that, all of it, right up until the suit stepped over what was left and walked out of frame without checking his hair.
Somewhere in row three, a father quietly put his phone face-down and stared at the wall.
When the video ended, they all looked at him.
Valerio smiled pleasantly. "I believe this is all a misunderstanding. Isn't it?"
It was remarkable, truly, how many people could agree with one man in under a minute.
It was a stampede of agreement. It was misunderstanding, absolutely, completely, everyone had always said so, and chairs scraped and fabrics rustled and the room emptied with the orderly desperation of a theater that has smelled smoke, and within sixty seconds, it was just them.
Aislinn sat in the echoing council room, still in a daze. "I don't understand."
"Which part?"
"Any of it. All of it. They watched that video, Valerio. They know what you did to Gumwood, and they still walked in here this morning to pick a fight with you."
"People who've never lost anything real believe reputation is armor."
She stared at the abandoned chairs, at the doors still swinging from the stampede. "I spent eight years being scared of the bake-sale committee."
Valerio pulled her close and kissed the top of her head. "Don't ever change."
That was when Minna came back through the doors, folder still crisp, expression very slightly satisfied, and Louis's head came up from his father's side.
"Where did you go, Aunt Minna? I didn't notice you leaving."
"I just had a nice little chat with the principal." She crossed to Valerio, leaned in, and whispered in French, "Quelqu'un l'a payée pour rendre la vie de ta famille misérable."
"What are you talking about?" Aislinn asked.
"They said someone paid Principal Abdul to make our lives miserable."
"Louis!" Minna and Valerio said together, with the exact same wince.
"Why would anyone do that?" Aislinn's voice came out thin.
Valerio exhaled. "Since there's no point hiding—who is it, Minna? Did you get a name?"
Minna looked at Aislinn. "Do you know a woman named Jane Smith?"
"No, and that sounds like a fake name."
"It is a fake name." Minna took her phone out. "But this is what she looks like. Do you know her now?"
Aislinn paled.
"You know her then," Valerio said grimly.
"She's a friend from college." The council room had gone very cold, or she had. "She's the one whose friend saw you cheating on me."