20. Liana
— ? —
Liana
The coffee maker beeped and I stared at it without moving.
My hands were wrapped around an empty mug, my eyes fixed on some middle distance between the counter and the window, my mind still stuck in that restaurant.
One confrontation in a restaurant and I was right back where I started.
The knock at the door made me jump, sloshing cold coffee across my fingers.
I set the mug down and wiped my hand on a dish towel, already knowing who it was before I reached the door. Nobody else knocked like that.
Dominic Costa was on the other side of it. Without a doubt.
He was standing on my porch in a charcoal suit with no tie, his hands in his pockets, looking like he had just stepped out of a magazine spread for men who ruined women’s lives.
“What do you want?” I kept my body in the doorway, not stepping back to let him in. “It’s barely eight in the morning and I haven’t had enough coffee to deal with you yet.”
“Bianca’s birthday is next week.” He said it like I didn’t already know, like I hadn’t been planning a small party at the house with Gina and a cake from the bakery Bianca loved. “I want to do something special for her.”
“We already talked about the party.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Gina’s coming over, we’re doing a princess theme, she gets to pick the cake. It’s handled.”
“I was thinking something bigger.” He pulled a folder from inside his jacket and held it out to me. “A trip. Just the three of us.”
I didn’t take the folder. “You want to take a trip. Together. The three of us.”
“For Bianca’s birthday.” He kept holding the folder out. “The jet leaves Friday morning. I’ve already arranged for a driver to pick you both up.”
“You’ve already arranged.” I heard the edge in my own voice. “You didn’t think to ask me first? To see if maybe I had plans or commitments or any say at all in what happens with my daughter?”
“Our daughter.” He set the folder down on the porch railing when it became clear I wasn’t going to take it. “And I’m asking now. The arrangements can be changed if you have a conflict.”
“The conflict is that you made arrangements without consulting me.” I stepped forward, getting in his space. “The conflict is that you keep doing this, Dominic. Showing up with plans already in motion, expecting me to just go along because saying no would disappoint Bianca.”
“Would it disappoint her?”
“You know it would.”
“Then come.” He held my gaze. “Come for her sake, if not for mine. Let her have a birthday she’ll remember. Let her have both her parents in the same place, doing something fun together, without all the tension and the fighting.”
“There wouldn’t be tension and fighting if you stopped ambushing me with surprise trips.”
“Mama?”
Bianca’s voice came from behind me, and I closed my eyes for a second before turning around.
She was standing at the bottom of the stairs in her pajamas, her crown crooked on her head, her eyes wide and bright.
“Is Papa taking us on a trip?” She bounced on her toes. “I heard you talking about a beach.”
“There’s a beach right here, baby.”
“But that’s old.”
I looked at Dominic over my shoulder. He had the decency to look slightly guilty, though not guilty enough for my taste.
“We’re discussing it, baby.” I crouched down to her level. “Papa surprised Mama with the idea and we haven’t decided yet.”
“But it’s for my birthday.” Bianca’s lower lip trembled. “Papa said it was for my birthday. I’ve never been on a real trip before, Mama. Please can we go? Please?”
The please hit me right in the chest, the way it always did when she looked at me with those big eyes.
“Let me talk to Papa for a minute, okay?” I smoothed her hair back from her face. “Go get dressed and I’ll come up and help you with breakfast.”
She ran back up the stairs, her footsteps thundering on the wood, and I straightened up and turned back to Dominic.
“You did that on purpose.” I kept my voice low so she wouldn’t hear. “You knew she would overhear. You knew she would beg.”
“I didn’t know she was awake.”
“You hoped she was.” I grabbed the folder from the railing and opened it. “Private jet. Beach house. A whole weekend of playing happy family so you can pretend nothing is wrong between us.”
“Nothing has to be wrong between us.” He stepped closer. “We can be civil for Bianca’s sake. We can give her a good birthday without it meaning anything more than that.”
“Everything means something more with you.” I flipped through the pages in the folder. “Plane tickets, house rental, activities planned. You’ve been working on this for weeks.”
“Since before the separation.” His voice was quiet. “I started planning it when things were still good between us.”
I looked up at him, searching his face for the lie.
“Bianca has been talking about going somewhere new for months.” He met my gaze steadily. “She saw a picture in a book at school and she hasn’t stopped asking questions.”
“She asks me those questions too.”
I couldn’t be the one who took that away from her.
“Fine.” I closed the folder. “We’ll go. But this isn’t a reconciliation, Dominic. This is me giving our daughter a birthday present.”
“Understood.” He nodded once. “Friday morning. The driver will be here at seven.”
He turned and walked back to his car, and I stood in the doorway with the folder in my hands and the sinking certainty that I had just agreed to something I was going to regret.
***
The private jet was smaller than I expected.
Not small by normal standards, but smaller than the massive aircraft I had seen Dominic use for business trips over the years.
This one felt almost intimate, with cream leather seats and polished wood accents and windows that looked out onto clouds so white they hurt to look at.
Bianca had spent the first hour of the flight exploring every inch of the cabin, opening compartments and pressing buttons and asking the flight attendant approximately one thousand questions about how planes stayed in the air.
Now she was finally asleep, stretched across two seats with a blanket tucked around her and Gerald the elephant clutched against her chest.
I sat across the aisle from Dominic, a magazine open in my lap that I hadn’t actually read, watching the clouds drift past the window.
“You’re not enjoying this.” His voice was low, pitched not to wake Bianca.
“I’m not here to enjoy myself.” I didn’t look at him. “I’m here for her.”
“You could be here for both.” He shifted in his seat, turning to face me more fully. “You could let yourself relax for one weekend. Let yourself have a good time without keeping score.”
“I’m not keeping score.”
“You’ve been keeping score since the moment I showed up at your door.” There was no accusation in his voice, just observation. “Counting every move I make, waiting for the trap to spring.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’ve given you plenty of reasons to be suspicious. I just hoped that this, at least, could be different.”
I turned to look at him finally, at his face soft in the dim light of the cabin, at the circles under his eyes that told me he hadn’t been sleeping any better than I had.
“This is you weaponizing our daughter’s birthday to get what you want.”
“What I want is to see her happy.” He held my gaze. “What I want is to give her a memory she’ll carry for the rest of her life. If that’s weaponizing her birthday, then I’m guilty.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you think I mean.” He leaned back in his seat. “But I’m not trying to trick you into anything, Liana. I’m not expecting you to fall back into my arms just because we’re spending a weekend in the same house.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m hoping.” His voice dropped even lower. “But I’m not expecting.”
I turned back to the window because looking at him was too hard, because the honesty in his face was doing something to my chest that I didn’t want to examine too closely.
***
The house was ridiculous.
That was my first thought when the car pulled up the long driveway lined with palm trees and flowering bushes I couldn’t name.
It sat right on the water, a sprawling white structure with floor-to-ceiling windows that caught the afternoon sun and threw it back in dazzling fragments.
A private beach stretched out behind it, the sand pale, the water that impossible turquoise that didn’t look real.
“Papa.” Bianca pressed her face against the car window. “Is this a hotel?”
“It’s a house.” Dominic reached over and unbuckled her seatbelt. “Just for us, for the whole weekend.”
“A whole house just for us?” Her eyes went wide. “That’s so many rooms.”
“Two.” He opened the door and lifted her out. “One for you, one for your mama and me.”
I heard it. I let it slide off me and told myself he meant nothing by it, and I got out of the car before he could see my face.
Bianca was already running toward the front door, her sandals slapping against the stone, her voice echoing back to us in delighted shrieks.
I counted the doors as we walked through, the way you count exits.
There were two. One at the top of the stairs, painted white, a child’s room made up in soft pink with a canopy bed and a window seat and a closet standing open on dress-up clothes in every color.
And one across the hall. One bed in it. A wide one, white sheets, too many pillows, the whole ocean framed in the window behind it.
Two rooms. Three people.
I did the arithmetic standing in the hallway and felt my pulse climb into my throat.
“The kitchen’s stocked.” Dominic came up beside me. “There’s a woman who comes in to cook, or we fend for ourselves.”
“There are two bedrooms.”
“There are two bedrooms,” he agreed, like I’d remarked on the weather.
“Then I’ll sleep in Bianca’s room.” I said it fast. “She and I will share. You take the big one.”
“Ask her.” He tipped his head toward the pink room, and there was something maddening in the calm of it. “See what she says.”
Bianca was standing in the middle of her castle with her hands pressed to her cheeks, turning a slow circle to take it all in. When she saw me in the doorway she stopped and drew herself up.
“This is my room.” She fixed me with a serious look. “I’m the queen of the castle. Queens sleep alone. That’s the rule.”
“Baby.” I crouched down to her level, and I could hear the edge working into my own voice. “I thought you and I could share tonight. Just us girls. We can leave the nightlight on.”
“No.” She shook her head, firm, arms crossing over her chest in an imitation of her father so exact it stung. “Queens don’t share. It’s the most important rule. I read it in a book.”
“Which book?”
“A book about queens.” She shrugged like the details were beneath her. “You and Papa can share. You used to share all the time in the big house. I remember.”
She turned her back on me and marched to the window seat and started arranging pillows into a throne, and I understood that no amount of negotiating was going to move her.
I straightened up slowly. Dominic was leaning in the doorway across the hall, in front of the one wide bed, his hands raised in mock surrender. His palms were out. His eyes were not surrendered at all.
“I didn’t plan that.” He kept his voice under Bianca’s hearing.
“You planned the whole house.” I gestured at the water, the windows, the two doors. “Don’t tell me you didn’t plan the house.”
“I planned the house.” His mouth curved. “I did not coach our daughter on the divine right of queens. That one’s hers.”
I looked past him at the bed. One bed. White sheets and the sea going gold behind it, and a couch downstairs that neither of us mentioned, and a daughter who would not be argued out of her throne.
“I’ll take the couch downstairs,” he offered, and the offer had a hook in it, and we both knew it.
“You will not take the couch.” It came out before I could stop it, too fast, the panic wearing the mask of practicality. “It’s a wide bed. There’s a side for each of us.”
I could have slept on the window seat in the queen’s castle. I could have sent him downstairs. I knew it was a choice when I made it.
“Is there?” He said it low. He remembered every time we’d told ourselves that before and been wrong by morning, and he let me see that he remembered.
“There is tonight.” I pushed past him into the room and put my back to him so he couldn’t read my face. “I’m unpacking. Go make sure the queen hasn’t started levying taxes.”
His laugh followed me in, low and warm and no comfort at all.
I shut the door and leaned against it and looked at the bed that was going to be the ruin of my weekend.
One bed. Two people who had never once in ten years managed to keep to their own side of it.
I was in so much trouble.