Chapter 17 Alone
He came after midnight, when the house was asleep.
Since Sunday I’d met him only where there were witnesses: the desk, the dining terrace, a corridor with a housekeeper’s cart in it. Three days of the manager’s face and the manager’s “sir.” Now the house was dark, and we were alone for the first time since he’d left me at this same villa.
I was at my desk with the seating plan for Thursday when the door opened. No knock.
Brandon came in with a glass of red wine in his hand and looked the room over, pricing it. The desk. The folders. The ring of keys on the bronze pear. He stood in the doorway with the glass, in no hurry to come in.
“So this is where you run the kingdom.” He lifted the glass an inch at the walls. “Snug. Small, but snug.”
Wine on his breath. I set my pen down on the plan.
“Guests aren’t allowed back here, sir. What do you need?”
“Sir.” He laughed, one note, stepped in, and shut the door behind him with his heel. “Drop it. There’s no porter in here. None of your Italians. It’s just us.”
I stood up, and not from fear. I wasn’t going to sit while he stood over me. Not again. He saw it, and for half a second he had no line ready. He’d come in for the woman who used to get smaller when he was in the room, and got one who looked at him.
He took his time looking back, top to bottom.
“You look good,” he said. “The tan. The dress. The way you stand. You used to be this mousy little thing I had to bring to client dinners and pray nobody talked to. Now people turn around when you walk through a room. Funny. All it took was me dumping you for you to finally bloom.”
“Yes.”
He set the glass down on my desk, on top of Thursday’s plan.
“I’ll be straight with you, because you’ve earned it.
Sunday, when I saw you behind that desk, I thought, Brandon, you’ve been stupid.
Jules is bright. She’s fun. She’s also empty, and a year of empty and I’m bored out of my mind.
And you. Look what you’ve built here, out of nothing.
You were always the domestic one, Katie. That’s your gift.”
His hand came up and found the loose hair at my temple and put it back behind my ear, the way a man straightens a picture in his own hallway.
“So here’s the deal. Wrap up the hotel circus. Come home. And I let all of it go. Everything. Forgiven. Clean slate. Done.”
There was a time that speech would have taken my legs out from under me. I took his hand off my face.
“Don’t touch me.”
He didn’t step back. He came the last half step in, and the look came up in his eyes that I’d been more afraid of than his shouting, the one that said I was inventory. “You’re mine, Katie. Four years mine. You think a tan cancels that?”
“It does.”
I walked around the desk, so that there was a slab of wood and three feet of air between us.
“I’m not a thing in a shop window, Brandon. Not a mouse. Not anymore.”
He stopped, and the smile came off. He’d beckoned, as he always had, and the wall hadn’t moved.
I asked the thing that had been burning since Sunday.
“You haven’t asked about Maddie.”
“What?”
“Your daughter. You’ve been here since Sunday.
You haven’t asked where she is. You haven’t asked how she is.
For a year you called me every week. A Cook County judge.
Sole custody. A Hague petition. A federal crime.
Maddie on a plane back to Chicago and me not on it.
You broke me over that phone once a week, and you show up here and forget there’s a child. ”
What crossed his face then was the worst thing in the room. Not shame. Surprise.
He shrugged and picked up the glass.
“Custody. Katie. Come on. Did you actually believe that? The lawyers told me not to waste the money. I bought the tickets. I flew you and the kid here myself. I left you here and shut off the card. There’s a paper trail a mile long.
You can’t kidnap a child to the place her own father brought her.
And the Hague thing runs on a one-year clock, and that ran out this month.
I never filed a thing about her. Not the Hague petition, not a page.
The divorce went through in February with the kid stuff reserved, because I never asked for her. ”
“Then why.” It came out and stopped, and I had to go and get the rest of it. “Why did you threaten to take her from me every week.”
“So you’d come back.” A sip. “You’d die for that kid. You press on the kid, and Katie crawls home. It was a leash, Katie. A good strong one.” A small grimace. “It just didn’t work. Turns out you’re stubborn.”
The last thread that still ran from me to him let go then. I wasn’t afraid of him. I wasn’t even disgusted.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For finally showing me all of you. It’s easier now.”
He didn’t like my calm, or the thanks, or the word “easier.” He was used to leaving a room in pieces. He set the glass down and started around the desk with the heavy anger I also remembered.
I got in first.
“Thursday you’re having dinner with Signor Conti. It’s important. It’s your whole deal. You’ll want it to go well.” I smiled at him, lightly, the last thing he was ready for. “So I’d strongly advise you to be polite to me until then. Here, at this villa, I decide how your guest sees you.”
He stopped. He didn’t understand it, and he heard the tone. He hunted for a line, found none, said something about talking in the morning when he was sober, and left.
On the seating plan, where the glass had stood, there was a red ring.
I dropped into the chair. Only then the shaking came, up through my hands and out. I’d stood face to face with him, alone, at night, and I hadn’t broken, and I’d come out whole. One hook of his had still been in me. It was out.
I went out into the yard for air, and he was there.
Alex stood by the red car on the gravel, looking up at my office window. It was still lit. He’d watched my ex-husband walk out of it a minute ago. That was on his face, and so was the story he’d built out of it, the one he’d been afraid of all year.
“Alex, it isn’t what you—”
He put a palm up. When he spoke there was no anger in it, only a flatness I’d never heard in him.
“Past midnight. Your office. That man walking out of it with that face on him.” He looked at the window again. “You don’t have to explain anything, Kate. I’m not blind.”
“That’s not what he came for. I swear to you, it’s the opposite of—”
“I waited a year.” He opened the car door. “A year watching you put yourself back together, telling myself one day you’d let me in. And you let him in. At night. Into the office where even I’m not always allowed.”
“Give me until tomorrow night.” Even to me it sounded pathetic, and I said the rest anyway. “One day. Then it’s all settled, and you’ll understand.”
He stopped with his hand on the door and looked at me, so tired that I would have taken shouting instead.
“He got a night alone with you. I get ‘give me a day’ one more time.” He got in behind the wheel. “I’m gone at dawn. You find a reason to stop me before then, you’ve got the time. You don’t, then I was a summer thing, and it ends with the season.”
He turned the key. The engine caught, coughed, and died, and he didn’t try it again. He sat in the dark with both hands on the wheel.
I stood on the gravel between the two. Behind me, the lit window, and on the desk under it the plan for Thursday, a year in the making. In front of me, the dark car, with the one man I wanted sitting in it, leaving.
I had until dawn to choose: finish what I’d started, the one thing I’d promised myself since the night I saw his name on the screen, or drop all of it and stop him.