Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Livia
Now. . .
“Livia.” Eleonora’s voice is urgent. “The car is six minutes from your building. Plane is on the ground at Peretola in twenty. Bag you were told to pack, nothing more. We’ll move the rest later.
Leave the apartment unlocked so our people can empty the place.
The institute will be told it’s a family emergency.
Your phone stays with you, airplane mode the moment the car arrives. Confirm.”
My hand closes around the edge of the counter.
For one second, Florence goes completely still around me.
Not the city. The city is moving. It always moves. Someone is laughing below my window. A scooter passes too fast on the street. Somewhere in the building, a door closes with the ordinary confidence of a person who expects to come home again.
I don’t know if I will.
“Okay,” I say.
“You’ll be all right.” The call ends abruptly.
The bag has been ready for three days. A couple of changes of clothes. Personal documents, including my passport, are in the inner zip. The burner. A book. The laptop.
I take it off the closet shelf and put it by the door.
The apartment looks different when I turn back.
Not emptier.
Accused.
My coffee cup is still on the counter. The pastry bag Moises left sits beside it, folded at the top, ridiculous and tender and too human for a room I am about to abandon.
The strawberry bombolone is still inside.
I grab it because I can't leave it sitting there to rot.
I don't know why that is the thing I care about.
I don't know why grief chooses a pastry when the rest of a life is standing in rooms waiting to be erased.
I grab my coat.
I take the key off the wall.
I lock the door behind me.
Then I stop.
My breath comes once, shallow and useless.
I unlock it.
I put the key on the hook beside the frame as they requested. Eleonora’s people will know what to do with a key on a hook.
I go down the stairs.
The car is at the curb when I push the building’s front door open.
Dark sedan. Tinted glass. A man in a black coat stands beside the rear door, already waiting, one hand resting near the handle.
He is broad through the shoulders, expression neutral, the kind of man whose stillness has been trained into him.
“Signorina Crane.”
“Yes.”
“Please.”
He opens the door, I get inside immediately.
The car pulls into the street while I’m still putting my seat belt on, and Florence begins to move past my window in the strange way a city moves when you’re leaving it and don't yet know whether it is for the last time.
Stone walls.
Closed shutters.
A narrow street shining under late light.
A woman walking a small dog beneath an umbrella.
The bakery on the corner, where I learned to order without rehearsing the sentence first.
My life, all of it, receding with no ceremony.
I press the side button on my phone.
Airplane mode.
The little orange icon comes on, and eight years go quiet in my hand.
Peretola is twenty-two minutes from my front door.
The driver doesn’t take the route I would have taken.
He doesn’t stop at lights I would have stopped at.
He doesn’t speak. At a service gate I’ve never seen, he produces a card out of nowhere, and we drive across the tarmac in the dark toward a private jet sitting alone on a strip of asphalt with its stairs down and its cabin lit gold from inside.
A man waits at the bottom of the stairs.
Tall. Probably mid-thirties. Dark hair cut close. He looks composed in the way people look composed when lives have depended on them more than once.
“Livia Crane,” he says. “Welcome. I’m Finnegan Gil. I’ll be your pilot tonight.”
“Thank you.”
“After you.”
He gestures toward the stairs.
The driver hands my bag to another man, almost as tall as Finnegan, older by a few years, and built with the same quiet capability.
Not staff exactly. Not only security. Something in between.
He seems like a man who has carried luggage and bodies and bad news without needing to be thanked for any of it.
The cabin is bigger than my apartment.
Cream leather seats arranged in pairs and a four-seat conference grouping at the back.
A galley to the left with espresso equipment a Florence barista would respect.
Real wood paneling. A small couch along one wall that converts to a bed.
Lamps with shades. A vase with white peonies bolted to the cabinet between the windows because turbulence is real, and someone wanted peonies anyway.
“Derek, ready?” Finnegan asks.
“Almost,” the other man answers, setting my luggage into a cabinet.
Finnegan watches him a second longer than the question requires.
Not openly.
Not carelessly.
But I see it.
The glance that checks without checking. The small shift of his mouth when Derek straightens. The pause Derek gives him in return, as if there is an entire conversation tucked into the space between ready and almost.
Derek gestures toward the sitting area. “We’re wheels-up in four minutes.
Buckle up for takeoff. After that, walk around as you like.
Galley is yours. Couch is yours. Wi-Fi will come on at cruising altitude.
There’s a satellite phone in the cabinet by your seat if you prefer it.
Anything you need, press the call button. I’m the co-pilot—”
“You’re not co-piloting, babe,” Finnegan says. “You’re my plus one.”
“Same thing,” Derek says, and laughs under his breath. “Your cousin Lang sending you to do his bidding on your own was very . . .”
He looks at me, then back at Finnegan.
“I’m not a fan.”
“Two of his kids are sick,” Finnegan says. “Ours are healthy, and Piper has everything under control.”
Derek gives him a look that says this isn’t the point, and that also I love you too much to fight about it before takeoff.
Finnegan shrugs and looks at me. “The wife always has everything under control. Or our in-laws are there.”
It doesn’t take me long to do the math.
A wife.
Ours.
In-laws.
Children.
A life built with more than two hands holding it up.
The realization moves through me quietly, then hurts more than it should. Not because they have it. I don’t resent them—that. I'm not that far gone.
It hurts because once, I had everything.
Two men.
A plan.
A future that had started to feel less impossible every time one of us said when instead of if.
Now I have a bag, a burner phone, and a pastry I may never eat.
Who knows what waits for me on the other side of this trip?
“Ready to head home, Ms. Crane?” Derek asks.
“Call me Livia,” I say, instead of correcting him that my home is Italy.
Or was.
Or that I don’t know exactly where I belong anymore.
“Livia,” he says with a nod.
“Thank you, both, for helping us,” I add, because ‘thank you’ is the only sentence I have that doesn’t leak grief.
“No need to thank us,” Finnegan says from near the cockpit.
Derek nods toward the back. “Once we reach cruising altitude, the flight attendant will come through and help you settle. Food, tea, anything you need. Until then, buckle in.”
The cockpit door closes behind them.
I sit.
I buckle.
I look out the small window at the Tuscan dark and the runway lights and the absence of everything I have ever paid attention to before from this angle.
The engines spool up.
Yes. That is the word.
The sound builds low through the cabin floor, more vibration than noise at first, then a rising force under my feet and in the seat beneath me.
The plane begins to move. It picks up speed faster than a commercial aircraft does, and my body presses back into the leather as if the future has put a hand on my sternum and shoved.
The nose lifts.
The cabin tilts.
Florence falls away under my left wing in a smear of yellow light that becomes, briefly, the entire city.
Then we bank west.
The city slips behind me.
The Atlantic waits ahead.
The seat belt sign clicks off.
For a while, I do nothing.
I sit in a cabin built for comfort and feel none of it.
Then I open my bag.
I take out the burner.
The satellite phone is in the cabinet by my seat, where Derek said it would be. I look at it. I look at the burner. I look at the Wi-Fi indicator on the small screen mounted in the cabinet, which has just come on.
I choose to open the laptop.
I connect.
There is one notification waiting for me on the burner.
Creed’s number.
Two words.
I’m here.
My hand covers my mouth before I realize I’ve moved.
Not crying.
Not yet.
Something worse.
Believing.
Instead of using the computer, I use the phone. I'm not ready to see his face from inside this cabin at thirty-six thousand feet. I will see his face when I have to see it. Audio is what I can hold tonight.
It rings once.
“Liv.”
His voice in my ear has the same effect it had three nights ago in my Florence kitchen. The same drops through my body. The same private recognition.
He is real.
He is a man with a voice.
I have been carrying him as a name, a couple of tattoos, and a face on a screen for ten years, and tonight he is a sound in my ear in a cabin that someone built to bring me back.
“I’m on the plane,” I say.
“They told me.”
A small silence.
He’s doing what Creed does, which is letting me say what I’m here to say at my own pace, on my own schedule, with no pressure from him.
I haven’t had that room from a man in ten years.
I had forgotten what it tastes like.
“Thank you,” I say. “For coming for me.”
There is a longer silence on his end.
Then he says, “Liv. You’ve always been the one who rescues us.”
The sentence lands in a place that has not been true in ten years. It lands in a part of me I closed off because keeping it open meant leaving a door cracked for two men I had been told to forget.
Now, in this cabin, with Creed’s voice in my ear, the door opens anyway.
A January afternoon I have not allowed myself to think about in a decade comes back as if it has been waiting in the next room the whole time.
I close my eyes.
The cabin disappears.