Chapter Three
LIVIA
I find a quiet corner just past the elevator bank and stop walking.
Just stop. Both feet flat on the marble. Back against the cool wall. Eyes closed.
I breathe in, hold it, and let it out slowly the way the midwife taught me during labor when I was alone and terrified and determined not to let anyone see how terrified I was.
In. Hold. Out.
My hands are trembling.
I don't think anyone can see me right now, but I can feel it in my fingers, that fine motor vibration that happens when your nervous system has absorbed more than it was prepared for in a single morning and is now filing a formal complaint.
The lobby is alive around me. Heels on marble. Murmured conversations. The soft chime of elevator doors.
All of it is very elegant, very composed, very much a world that does not care that I just shook hands with the man who is the father of my child and managed to smile while doing it.
A son, I'd said. Right there in the room. I have a son.
He'd looked at me for exactly one beat and then moved on, and I need that to mean nothing.
I need it to be the throwaway line it sounded like to him: context, not confession, just a woman explaining why she wouldn't spy for her estranged billionaire father.
I need it to be nothing.
It was nothing.
My phone is in my hand before I've decided to reach for it.
Piper picks up on the second ring.
"Before you say anything," she announces, "Nico has eaten half a batch of pancakes, destroyed me twice at Go Fish, and is currently explaining the mechanics of a deadbolt lock to my throw pillow. He’s perfect. How'd it go?"
Her voice, loud and warm and profoundly unbothered by the world, makes my eyes sting for no immediately sensible reason.
"I got the job," I say quietly.
A shriek erupts from the phone so loud I have to hold it away from my ear.
"Livia."
"Stop screaming."
"I won't stop screaming, this is screaming behavior! You got it? The Ferretti one? The one you've been rehearsing for since Tuesday?"
"Yes."
"Okay, okay, okay." I can hear her composing herself to the sound of her heels clicking on her kitchen floor.
Piper Vale cannot process big news sitting down. Her brain requires movement.
Good thing I'm about to give her bigger news.
"Tell me everything. Was the panel terrible? Did you do the nervous talking thing?"
"The panel was fine." I pause. "The talking thing was...yeah, it was present."
"Obviously. And? Is the salary good? Is the office nice? Does it smell like money?"
"Pipe."
She hears it immediately. Because she's Piper, and she has known me for eleven years, and she can identify the precise frequency of something is wrong in my voice the way a conductor hears one instrument out of tune in a full orchestra.
The clicking heels go quiet.
"What happened?"
I suck in a deep breath that comes out as a shaky exhale. "Something came up," I say carefully.
"Something."
"About the job."
"About the job."
"About my—" I close my eyes again. Then lower my voice, even though the nearest person is twenty feet away and absorbed in their own call. "About my boss."
"Your boss."
"Piper, I need you to stop repeating everything I say."
"Then say a complete sentence! You're doing the thing where you drop information in pieces and expect me to be calm about it. You know I cannot be calm about it when you do that. Just talk."
I press my back harder against the wall.
Here's the thing about Piper Vale. She’s the most capable person I know. She manages luxury event crises for a living, and not just the pretty part.
The groom goes missing two hours before the ceremony part. The caterer's walk-in freezer fails the morning of a gala for three hundred guests. The keynote speaker has a very public meltdown in a very private venue and someone needs to make all of that disappear before it hits the press.
She handles these things with ease. But when it comes to my love life? The extreme opposite.
Extreme as in slashing the tires of one of my exes at a Whole Foods and signing him on Big Butt Daddies, the gayest app to ever gay, and using his mom's details as the contact information.
Hence my hesitation.
I take a breath.
"The CEO," I start.
"Mhm."
"He came in at the end. Valentino Ferretti."
"Okay."
"He's a problem."
A loaded pause.
"A problem," Piper says slowly. "What kind of problem? Like a difficult-boss problem? Or–" I can practically hear her expression change. "Livia. Is he hot?"
"That's not–"
"Is he hot?"
I exhale hard through my nose. "That's genuinely not the point."
"Oh my God, he's incredibly hot. Okay, okay. Difficult-hot boss, you can work with that, that's practically a rite of passage—"
"Piper."
"—I mean it's inconvenient but manageable, you're a professional, you've dealt with—"
"Piper."
The heels stop clicking again.
"He has a tattoo," I say. "On his wrist. Three olive branches wrapped around a broken key."
Dead silence.
I count to three.
"No," she says.
"Yes."
"Livia."
"I know."
"Livia."
"I know."
"The—" Her voice drops to a whisper so sharp it could cut glass. "The masked man? From Venice?"
I say nothing, but my silence is a full confession.
"The man from that Chester Street Society thing five years ago? The one you said unlocked levels of pleasure so powerful you still picture him when with other men so you can get an orga—”
I start to cough, cheeks flaming. “Yes, yes. Him.”
She gasps. “Oh my God. And he's your boss?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "Apparently."
“Damn,” she breathes, the statement sliding into silence.
When Piper speaks again, her voice has shifted into the tone I privately think of as her crisis-planner register: still dramatic, but with a new layer of focused intensity underneath it, like someone who has assessed the disaster and is now deciding where to start.
"He recognized you."
"No."
"What?"
"He didn't recognize me." The words taste strange. "We were wearing masks, Pipe. The whole night. It was part of the…you know. We weren't supposed to know each other."
"So, he doesn't—" She stops. I can hear her recalibrating. "He has no idea."
"None."
"And Nico…"
"He looks like him,” I confirm, voice cracking. “Those eyes. His mouth…” I trail off.
"Liv," Piper says, and her voice is soft now. The loudness is entirely gone. "You okay, my love?"
"I don't know yet," I admit. "Ask me again when my hands stop shaking."
Piper exhales heavily. "You had a baby with a billionaire security god, and now he's your boss. And he has no idea."
"Please don't."
"I'm just—" She makes a sound. Half laugh, half disbelief. "This is either a lawsuit or a bestseller, and I genuinely cannot tell which yet."
Despite everything, despite the trembling hands and the dried coffee on my silk blouse and the persistent feeling that my life has just gone off some kind of map, I laugh along.
I sober up quickly, worry creeping in. "We’re not telling anyone," I mutter.
"Obviously. Obviously, we're not telling anyone. Come get your kid, he's been explaining door hinges to my ottoman for twenty minutes and I don't know how much longer I can hold out."
Piper's apartment is twelve blocks from the Ferretti building and on a different planet.
The lobby I’m vacating is all marble and gray steel. Piper's place, by contrast, is warm light and bright color. There are silks draped over chairs, a whiteboard covered in her shorthand, two half-drunk mugs of tea, a sample centerpiece on the kitchen table that she's using as a fruit bowl.
It smells like her vanilla candles and whatever she made for breakfast.
She opens the door already holding a mug out to me.
"He asked about the lock on my front door for seven full minutes," she says by way of greeting. "I feel like I've been audited."
I take the mug and step inside and immediately hear him.
"—but if you turn it the other way it's different," Nico is saying, from somewhere near the entryway.
"That means it's locked all the way. pippy?” He calls Piper, pippy. We're both tired of correcting him. “pippy, you hear me?"
"Every word, bug," Piper calls back.
He appears around the corner then, in his little jeans and the yellow shirt we'd agreed on after the blue shirt, holding a set of Piper's spare keys like a toy.
Some kids want action figures. Mine throws his away. Give him a key and toy cars and he'll be alright.
When he sees me his whole face lights up.
"Mama!"
He runs at me full speed and I crouch to catch him. He hits my arms with his full four-year-old weight, smelling like maple syrup and crayon wax, and I hold him tighter than the moment probably calls for.
"My baby," I say into his hair. “How are you?”
"You took so long."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Did you find the car?"
"I will, when we get home."
He pulls back to look at my face, and this is the moment that gets me, every time.
The moment he looks at me with those soft-gray eyes. The same exact shade as that stranger in Venice, now my boss.
"Your shirt is all brown," Nico says seriously, looking at my blouse with the toddler equivalent of terrible concern.
"I know right? I spilled coffee by mistake."
He considers this. "Oh." Then, accepting it completely: "Pippy said more cartoons if you say yes."
I grin, tickling him. "I say yes." Growling playfully, he giggles, wriggling free, and bounds back in.
When I stand upright, Piper is looking at me with worry.
“I googled him,” she says, as we drop onto the couch beside me while Nico watches his cartoon from the floor, cross-legged, the spare keys still in his lap, turning them over in his small hands.
“Yeah?”
She says nothing for a while, eyes focused on Nico. Then, quietly: "I see it."
I sigh. "Told you."
"The eyes especially."
"I know, Pipe."
She pulls her knees up to her chest. "What are you going to do?"
I watch Nico for a moment, nothing concrete coming to mind. "I don't know yet."
"You could—"
"I'm not telling him, Pipe. And I'm not quitting. I need this job."
She tips her head. "I wasn't going to say that, no. I was going to say think carefully."
I look at her. “And by that you mean?”
She's quiet for a moment. Then: "Can I say something without you getting defensive?"
"Girl, don't say things like that if you don't want me to get defensive.”
"He's his father." She cuts in, tone more serious. "Whatever happened in Venice, whatever you decided afterward, whatever you've built…Nico has a father who's alive and apparently in possession of a shit ton of money."
"That's not the point."
"It's not the only point," she corrects. "But Liv." She turns to look at me. "Just…think about it.”
"I don't know what Valentino Ferretti is," I say quietly. "I spent one night with him. One night, five years ago, with our faces covered."
"And then you built a whole person."
I look at Nico.
He has set two of Piper's keys side by side on the floor and is now comparing their shapes with the grave concentration of a very small engineer.
He picks up the larger one, examines the bow, sets it down. Picks up the smaller. Nods to himself, as though confirming something he already suspected. This makes me chuckle.
I discovered I was pregnant on a Tuesday.
A gas station bathroom, three weeks after Venice.
The pill had failed, or I'd failed it. The doctor I later went to asked if I used any antibiotics recently or had been drinking.
I did both.
Treated sinus infection the week before and messed up my hormones from all the pity-drinking Vito triggered.
I stood in that bathroom for a long time with the test in my hand and did the accounting. The math of one night against a whole future.
I'd tried, afterward, to find him.
It was fucking laughable, trying to find your baby daddy through a voice and a tattoo.
The Chester Street Society is a known quantity in certain circles but an impenetrable one.
I'd pulled at threads for three weeks and kept finding longer, more useless threads. I gave up before I lost my mind.
And then Dante found out I was pregnant.
It was fun.
Within that week, I moved. A new apartment, a borrowed deposit, Piper's couch for three weeks while the lease cleared.
I built a wall between my life and my father's world, brick by careful brick, and I‘ve been maintaining it ever since.
Nico has never met his grandfather and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I can manage it.
What I didn’t intend was to walk in for a job interview and find the other half of that equation on the other side of a conference table.