CHAPTER NINE
The Shirt
The alarm went off at ten to three on Wednesday morning.
This time it was the house alarm itself, a sharp electronic whoop that went through every wall at once, and I was out of bed before I was fully awake, with Dante already moving past me toward the door, pulling on a sweatshirt, barefoot.
“Stay here,” he said.
I didn’t stay there. I never did.
The whole back of the house was lit up. The floodlights over the garden had come on, and I could see men moving across the lawn in the rain, flashlight beams crossing and recrossing.
Radios crackled in the kitchen and the front hall.
Grant’s voice came over one of them, clipped and calm: “East fence, section four. Somebody came over and went back. Two, maybe three. We’ve got one on camera. ”
I came into the kitchen and stopped in the doorway.
Alessandra was standing by the island, soaking wet from head to foot.
Her hair was plastered to her face and she was shaking so violently that I could see it from across the room.
She was wearing one of Dante’s old shirts, a gray one with the cuffs worn thin that I’d seen him in a hundred times on Saturday mornings.
It hung nearly to her knees. Someone had rolled the sleeves twice.
Dante was standing close in front of her with one hand on her shoulder, steadying her, and he was speaking in the low, even voice he’d used the first night.
“The fence held. They didn’t get near the house.
Mia’s upstairs with Rosa, and she slept through the whole thing.
It’s over. You’re all right. You’re all right. ”
Rosa told me the whole story afterward, but I could already guess most of it from the doorway.
When the alarm went off, Alessandra had run out through the garden door in her nightgown to check the latch on Mia’s window from outside, because the window faced the east fence and she’d been sure, in her panic, that someone was climbing up to it.
She’d been caught in the downpour. One of Grant’s men had brought her in dripping, and Ines, woken by the alarm, had grabbed the first dry thing in the laundry room, which happened to be Dante’s shirt, and put it on her, and put her wet nightgown in the dryer.
It was nothing. Standing in the doorway in my robe, I knew it was nothing. It was a frightened woman and a man doing what he did best in a crisis, and a housekeeper grabbing the nearest shirt.
But I looked at his hand on her shoulder, and his shirt on her body, and I felt my whole stomach drop, and it had nothing to do with anything I believed about my husband.
It had to do with three weeks of a chair, and a rocking chair, and a garden door, and a Friday, and a red dress, and a corner table at Tavola with a bottle of terrible Montepulciano still waiting in the back.
It had all been building up somewhere I hadn’t been looking, and here it was in one picture, in my own kitchen, at three in the morning.
Dante looked up and saw me.
I watched him see what I saw. I watched it arrive in his face all at once, the kitchen from my side of it, his hand, his shirt, her wet hair, and he took his hand off her shoulder immediately and stepped back.
He had nothing to feel guilty about, and I knew that. He moved his hand because for the first time in three weeks, he was looking at the room from where I stood.
“Vivienne...”
“I’m going back to bed,” I said.
“Viv, wait.”
“Is anyone hurt?”
“No. Nobody’s hurt.”
“Then I’m going back to bed.”
I did. I lay in the dark and listened to the radios go quiet one by one and the rain slacken against the windows, and I didn’t sleep at all.
At four I went back down, because I couldn’t bear not knowing. Grant was in the front hall with a tablet, talking quietly to two of his men. He stopped when he saw me.
“Mrs. Moretti. Everything’s secure.”
“What happened, Grant? Who was it?”
He hesitated, just slightly. “We’re still putting it together, ma’am. I’ll brief Mr. Moretti as soon as we have something.”
“I’m asking you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He looked genuinely uncomfortable. “Mr. Moretti’s asked that the details go through him for now. Given the nature of the threat. I’m sure he’ll fill you in.”
He was polite. He was kind. He’d been with the family since before I married into it, and he had once, in my first year, driven three hours in a snowstorm to bring me a prescription I’d forgotten at the Greenwich house.
He was not being unkind to me now. He was following instructions.
I stood in the front hall of my own house at four in the morning in my robe and understood that there were instructions about what I was allowed to know, and that I hadn’t known they existed.
“Thank you, Grant,” I said, and went back upstairs.
* * *
He came up at five. He sat on the edge of the bed on my side and didn’t lie down.
“You’re awake.”
“Yes.”
“Ines gave her the shirt. It was in the laundry room. Hers was soaked. She’d gone outside to check Mia’s window.”
“I know. Rosa told me.”
“Then you know it was nothing.”
“I know it was nothing.”
He waited for more. I didn’t give him any. After a while he lay down on top of the covers beside me, still in his sweatshirt, and neither of us touched the other, and the light came up gray in the window.
At seven we had our first real fight in two years.
We had it in the bedroom, with the door closed, in low voices, because Rosa and Mia were in the east wing and Ines was downstairs and neither of us had ever been people who shouted.
He started by explaining the shirt again. He explained it thoroughly. He explained the laundry room and the dryer and where Grant’s man had found Alessandra and the fact that her hands had been so cold she couldn’t hold a cup, and every word of it was true.
“I know,” I kept saying. “I know. I’m not arguing about the shirt.”
“Then what are you arguing about? Because I feel like I’m being tried for a laundry mix-up in the middle of a break-in.”
“I’m not trying you for anything.”
“Then what? What did I do? Tell me the thing I did.”
“There isn’t one thing.”
“There has to be one thing, Vivienne. You don’t lie awake until five over nothing.”
“The rocking chair,” I said.
He stared at me. “The rocking chair. We’re back to the rocking chair?”
“You asked what. That’s one. The garden door. The gala you moved without telling me. Friday dinner. Rosa sending you reports about Mia every night that nobody thought to copy me on. Breakfast. Thursday.”
“I apologized for Thursday. I bought you...”
“I know what you bought me.”
“Each of those things had a reason.” His voice was still low, but his jaw was set.
“The chair, Rosa needed it. The door was Grant’s call, it was a security change, and he fixed your code the same day.
The gala was a genuine safety issue, two hundred people, I had to move it.
Friday I had to be in that meeting. Thursday...
” He stopped. “Thursday I have no excuse for. But the rest of it, every single one, there was a reason.”
“I know there was a reason. There’s always a reason.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
I sat up against the headboard and looked at him, and I understood something I didn’t have words for yet.
He was answering every one of them separately.
He was lining them up like line items on a contract and defending each clause, and each defense was reasonable, and he was winning every single argument, and none of it touched what I was trying to say.
The chair and the door and the gala were only examples. What I meant was that in three weeks every one of those decisions had gone around me. It was the same direction every time, and I was the only one who seemed able to see the pattern.
“I want you to look at all of it at once,” I said.
“I’m looking at it.”
“You’re looking at it one piece at a time. That’s what I’m saying. Every piece makes sense on its own. Every piece. And you keep holding them up one at a time and showing me that each one makes sense, and I agree with you, and it doesn’t help. The trouble is where they all point.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“I don’t know what that means,” he said finally. And he didn’t. He wasn’t being stubborn. He was a man who’d spent his entire life solving problems one at a time, and I’d handed him a problem that didn’t exist in any one place.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand. Grant. They had a plate number from the camera on the east fence.
“I have to take this,” he said.
“I know.”
“We’re not done.”
“I know that too,” I said, and he took the call, and went downstairs, and we were.
Alessandra found me at eleven, in my office. She was carrying the gray shirt, washed and folded, and she stood in the doorway holding it out in front of her with both hands.
“I wanted to give this back to you,” she said. “Not to him. To you.”
I took it. It still smelled faintly of the dryer.
“Ines put it on me,” she said. “I didn’t even look at what it was.
I was so cold I couldn’t feel my hands, and I’d been out in the rain in my nightgown like a madwoman, and when I saw your face in that doorway I understood exactly what it looked like.
” She pressed her lips together. “Nothing happened, Vivienne. I need you to know that. Nothing has ever happened. He was being kind to me the way he’s been kind to me since I was six. ”
“I know,” I said. “I never thought anything happened.”
“But it still hurt.”
I looked at the shirt in my lap. I’d seen him in it a hundred Saturday mornings, reading the paper on the terrace with his feet up.
“Yes,” I said. “It still hurt.”
She nodded slowly, as though that was what she’d expected, and as though she respected me for saying it. “Then I’m sorry,” she said. “For what it looked like. For my part of it.”
“You don’t have a part of it.”
“I think I might,” she said quietly. “I’m still working out how big.” And she went back to the east wing, and I sat with his shirt in my lap for a long time before I went and hung it back in his closet.
* * *