Chapter 11
Bianca
“Relax,” my companion whispers in my ear. “They’re going to love you.”
I breathe in deep. Easy for him to say. It’s his world, the high society he walks in with ease. People respect him here. I’m not bothered by how he earned this respect, though—tonight, I’m just grateful I have him with me. His hand on my back, just below my shoulder blades, is a welcome balm and infuses a surge of courage in my blood.
I bite my lip and risk a glance up at the man accompanying me. His features are sharp, borderline hard, cheekbones harsh slashes across his pale face. His black hair isn’t all stiff and spiky today. The locks have been left softer, a few of them brushing over his browbone to fall into his wide brown eyes.
I shake my head and laugh softly. In his tuxedo and with such a foppish, romantic look, Hiro Sanada could be cosplaying as an anime prince tonight and no one would deny it.
“Ready?” he asks.
I breathe in again and nod. His hand presses on my back as he urges me forward, toward the man standing in the middle of the glittering ballroom and holding court at this glamorous event.
“ Monsieur l’Ambassadeur ,” Hiro says as we approach.
Pierre Foucault, the French ambassador in Tokyo, turns to us with a brilliant smile.
“ Monsieur Sanada. Quel plaisir ! ” he states. “And who’s this vision of beauty with you?”
“Allow me to introduce Bérénice Picard, a friend from Paris,” Hiro says.
“ Enchanté ,” Pierre Foucault replies, dropping a soft kiss on my knuckles.
“And you are originally from Paris itself, Mademoiselle Picard?” the ambassador’s wife asks.
I smile and gulp softly. Here it is, my cue to slip into my persona irrevocably. “Guilty as charged. And it’s Madame Picard, actually.”
“Oh, is your husband around tonight?” she continues, still in French.
My smile freezes.
“My husband passed away last year, sadly,” I reply, voice lowered.
“My sympathies.”
Her gaze slips to my belly clearly protruding in the front of the flowy Empire-waisted dress I chose for this gala. She’s too polite to ask, though. I provide the explanation nevertheless. After all, it’s part of why we came here tonight, me and Hiro, to seal my position in this society.
“My husband had cancer. Before he…” I pause, inhale a shaky breath, then force a smile on my trembling lips. “IVF, you know?”
She gasps softly and reaches for my hand, clasping it tightly. “ Ma pauvre petite. Of course, I understand. It’s a piece of him, no?”
I smile again, and this time, I don’t have to act to make it look sad. This baby? It is indeed a piece of him, the man who has my heart. He never got to become my husband in the eyes of the law, but I have pledged myself to him, even if he’ll never know this now.
The conversation around me continues, Mrs. Foucault telling me of her own struggles with IVF in the rapid French so typical of Parisians. I match her tit for tat, and before long, she’s taken me under her wing, like an injured duckling she needs to protect.
I exchange a glance with Hiro, who is talking with the ambassador and another man. He lifts his champagne flute and winks at me.
Mission accomplished—I’m in.
How easy was it, in the end? Too easy, almost. Standing their chit-chatting at an international gala held at the French embassy in Tokyo, I’m left wondering what my life has come to, and more importantly, how it got to this.
*
Three months earlier
I’m not bothered having Hana in the bathroom with me as I pee on the stick she handed to me after I threw up in the powder room downstairs. She’ll soon know my deepest, darkest secret— what’s a bit of nudity thrown in there?
And sure enough, the second line appears in the little window on the plastic wand.
I’m pregnant.
I sigh, just as tears pool in my eyes and start to drip down my cheeks.
“I’m not getting rid of this baby, Han,” I tell her, looking up.
Her face is drawn, features severe. “B, it’s not Ardian’s, is it?”
A rush of bile burns the back of my throat. I turn and vomit into the toilet bowl.
“Of course not,” I say after washing my mouth out. “I haven’t gone anywhere near that sick pervert.”
To think of what he could do to me… I shudder.
“I’m not going to ask because it doesn’t really matter, in the scheme of things. You can’t be here and be carrying another man’s baby when you’re engaged to someone in a political alliance,” she adds.
I choke on a sob. Not just any man’s. Leo’s. Possibly his heir, if it’s a boy. If this comes to be known, we’ll have a war on our hands. And I’m not sure we’re going to survive it.
If anything happens to Leo, I wouldn’t be able to bear it. Even more so if it’s my fault.
Then when the Abrashis come to find out I’m not the pure bride they’re expecting, that another man put his seed inside me and it’s already started growing, they’ll kill me, and my child, too.
I can’t let this happen.
I grab Hana’s hands tight. “I have to disappear.”
She remains silent for so long, my heart drops into a bottomless pit of despair. If she tells Mattia, or my father, they’ll be adamant I get rid of this baby. I wouldn’t put it past my father to then hire a surgeon who can build me a new hymen so there’ll be a barrier for my husband to break and blood staining the sheets on our wedding night.
“I’ll help you,” she finally says.
All the breath whooshes out of me as I slump into her arms. “Thank you.”
A part of me wants to ask why she is doing this for me. We’re friends, yes, but she’s married to my brother. Her loyalty should be to him, not me. But I’m also not going to look down on such womanly solidarity, so I stay silent and let her take control.
And take control, she does. In the week that follows, Hana directs all my moves. She takes me to a club in SoHo one night, past the bar, the VIP lounge, the door marked ‘Staff Only’—it’s like she’s a regular here. No one stops her. I’ll admit I’m totally surprised, since it looks like she has a side of her life I know nothing about. We go downstairs to a basement where she plops me onto a stool and steps back with a frown.
“You trust me, B?”
Funny, she’s stopped calling me Bianca since that day in her bathroom when we found out I’m pregnant. Again, I didn’t ask why. She’s got her reasons—I’m more concerned with protecting the child growing inside me.
I take a deep breath and nod.
“Say it.”
I look her right in the eye. “I trust you.”
“Good. Because from here, there’s no going back.”
It sounds ominous, but what choice do I have? This baby inside me? I’m already its mother.
“Do it,” I say, a note of finality in my tone.
It will mean leaving the life I’ve known here, my family, Leo.
As much as it crushes me, I’m ready for it.
She pulls my hair into a loose bun on my head and places a flat cap on top. Next, a wig is dropped and arranged on top. I can hardly see through the wispy curtain of bangs on my eyebrows and dipping within my field of vision. The hair leaves my nape bare while the longer locks in front brush past my collar bones.
Hana then gets a pouch and sets to work on my face. When she pulls a mirror in front of me, I hardly recognize myself. I look like a rendition of Cleopatra or some other high-born Ancient Egypt aristocrat with the straight hair and bangs.
I’m also getting a new identity. I want something that sounds like my name, so at least starting with a B. And if I’d gotten to live my life as I wanted to, I would’ve ended up with Leo. Mrs. Pellegrini.
I refocus on Hana. “Can my initials be BP?”
She nods. “Okay. Now let’s go in.”
Next, she takes me through a concealed panel and what looks like a hacker’s lair, and in a corner is a setup with a white background and a camera on a tripod in front.
“B, this is Alfie.” Hana makes the presentations. “Alfie, this is B.”
“Oh, so we’re going with B as first initial, are we?” He rummages in a drawer—I can see a sea of passports of different colors. “You speak French, right, love?” He looks up at me and lifts up a small booklet. “Canadian? Quebec?”
I don’t know where the insight comes as I speak up. “No way. I can’t do that accent.”
He nods. “ So French it is, then.”
I’ve lived in Paris for five years, and it wasn’t hard for me to pick up the way Parisians speak. I can be way more convincing as a Parisian than a Quebecoise.
Hana had my new passport in hand the next day. She told me to attend to any last tasks I had in the city, then we would be on our way. I did as told, bid a quiet adieu to Central Park, my gaze landing on the Richmond Club a few hundred yards ahead. What I wouldn’t give to step in and see if Leo was dining there that night, one last look even if I can’t say goodbye.
But I can’t. I have to make this as clean a break as possible, make it look like there’s nothing pre-meditated about my disappearance. No one can have an inkling I’m saying goodbye—my whole ruse will be a moot point otherwise.
On my last night in New York, I stay at my father’s house. Hana found a way to send me an encrypted text, asking me to meet in an area of The Bronx—it can’t be traced, but speculation can run that my fiancé set me up this way, sending me into Albanian territory to then abduct me, or worse.
I tell my father I’m meeting Ardian, get into the Uber in front, alight in The Bronx. I let a camera from an ATM catch me as I walk, then I slip down a dark alley, pause for a small task, and wind my way down a series of little connecting ways until I come out in a blind spot Hana told me about.
A car is waiting there—dark sedan, tinted windows. The driver hands me a purse when I slip in. In it is my new passport and a one-way ticket for Tokyo. So Hana’s sending me to her home country. She didn’t say anything about the plan, and I didn’t ask. It seemed easier to just follow along.
On the way to JFK airport, we stop at a clandestine salon where my hair is cut in the style on the passport photo and the woman shows me how to do my makeup which will be my new look from here on out.
I thus pass security at the airport and board the plane as Bérénice Picard, using the fourteen-hour flight to come to terms with the momentous jump I just made, the life I’ve left behind, the completely unknown one expecting me in a land I know next to nothing about.
I don’t cry, though. My focus, and my hand, are on my belly, cradling the life growing there. This baby is my last link with my life as Bianca Bonucci, yet it is also the future awaiting me. I’m doing all this for him or her. I can’t ever forget this. In fact, I must draw my strength from this. As I let my life as I’ve known it so far, and more heartbreakingly, the very thought of Leo Pellegrini, behind me, I turn into the mother this baby needs, the protector who will look after it for as long as we both shall live. That’s it, that’s all. Bianca Bonucci is dead, and so is the version of me who was her.
It’s mid-afternoon when I land in Tokyo. Nerves grip me as I exit the plane and go to the luggage carousel, not having any clue what to expect here. I trust Hana, though. She must have made arrangements.
I’m looking around the wide, so glossy it’s almost clinical space when I feel someone brushing past me.
“ Bérénice? ” a man says. “ C’est Hana qui m’envoie. ”
So the person sent to get me knows I’m French, addressing me in the tongue.
I turn to look at him, surprise making me blink. He’s young, which I didn’t expect from that rich voice that addressed me. There’s something familiar about him, though I can’t pinpoint it. Must be reminding me of the handsome manga princes I used to drool over when I was a teenager. Endymion from Sailor Moon ? One of my first crushes.
“That’s all your luggage?” he asks, still in French.
French isn’t a language I’d expected a Japanese person to know, and even though his is good, I aim to help make us more at ease. “I speak English, too, you know.”
He laughs. “Gives me a chance to practice.”
I smile at him, taken in by his easy, open manner. “I must learn Japanese. Maybe we can help each other?”
I leave a pause at the end, and he picks up the cue I was asking for his name.
He stops, bows slightly. “I am Hiro.”
I bow, too. “Pleasure to meet you.”
*
And that was it. How I was introduced to my new life, staying in a high-rise luxury apartment in Minato City in Tokyo, the iconic Tokyo Tower visible from one side of my place that covers half a floor, Hiro Sanada living in the other half.
He took me there from the airport, and I jumped in fright when I came out of the shower, thankfully dressed in a robe, to find him in my kitchen, bare-chested, making me dinner—the best caccio e pepe I’ve ever tasted in my life. Hiro is a huge fan of Stanley Tucci.
Hiro is also Hana’s little brother.
And that first day, more than his presence in my kitchen, it’s the sight of his near-naked body that gave me pause. At first, I’d thought Hana had sold me off to him or something, until he revealed their family bond. I still wasn’t convinced he didn’t expect more from me—there was, after all, a connecting door between our apartments—but he’s been the ultimate gentleman all this time.
I let my gaze find him across the ball room. In the tux, nothing gives away his secret. Well, un secret de Polichinelle , as the French say: supposedly well-kept, but everyone knows it. Looking at the men talking to him tonight, it’s obvious they know who he really is.
I’d wondered, upon first meeting him at the airport, how and why he’d wear a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up all the way to his throat in the extreme humid heat of the Japanese capital. I got my answer in the kitchen later that day.
From his collarbones to his biceps, all the way down his chest and back, the middle line of his torso along the sternum bare, run intricate and colorful tattoos.
The marks of the Yakuza.
Hiro Sanada is the kobun of the oyabun of a powerful branch of the nink yō dantai —the foster son of the renowned boss of their chivalrous organization, as they refer to themselves despite the police calling them bō ryokudan or violent groups.
Hana is his blood sister, and this secret, nobody knows about it.
I was floored when I found out. But Hana is keeping my secret for me, so I’ll keep hers. Hiro is the only one who knows who I really am, the sister of the man his sister is married to.
The ambassador’s wife is still talking to me, and she stops mid-sentence as Hiro approaches us with a tall man in tow.
“Sir Arthur, dah-ling,” she croons in English. “It’s been too long.”
She makes the presentations; the man is Sir Arthur Hewitt, from Hong Kong.
“Sir Arthur,” Hiro is saying. “Bérénice is the woman I was telling you about. She’s the perfect artist for your new children’s division.”
I smile at the man.
It turns out he owns a publishing house based in Hong Kong. It also turns out that, bored out of my mind inside the apartment where Hiro says I’ve been moping, I’ve started to sketch and dabble in watercolors again. On the side, I’ve also started a children’s book I’m illustrating with the paint as I go along.
Hiro winks at me and smiles. I take a deep breath and face Sir Arthur.
It seems my moping days are over—I’m getting a job as a children’s book illustrator.
And so starts my new life in Tokyo. I have a baby on the way, and the man I’m with is not the one I yearn to be with. Leo… I have just the memory of him now, even though a piece of him is growing in my womb. This: our child, my memories—they’re all I’ll ever have. They’re going to have to be enough.