16. Renata #2
She says, to me only, without looking back, "The second folder. I'll have something by Friday." She is gone before I can answer. Alex does not ask. She was not meant to hear it.
"How did that go?" I say.
"She's exceptional."
"She said the same about you."
"I know," she says. "I heard her tell you."
"You have very good hearing."
"You have very thin walls."
They are both smiling. Easy between them in a way that is entirely new and entirely familiar. I do not try to name it. I let it be there. Wrong turns have residual benefits.
Max, He Stays
Before I leave, I stop at the workroom door. Lorenzo Jr. is at the cutting table with a pencil and the overnight sketchbook, not in the same room as anyone else in the way he gets when it is going right. Alex is at the door.
"You should eat."
"Renata will make me eat."
Renata, from across the space, without looking up, "I will not. I am a pattern cutter. Not your mother."
"You will definitely make me eat."
"There is bread and cheese in the kitchen. That is not making him eat. That is basic humanity. There is a difference."
Alex looks at her brother: the pencil moving, the first piece on the rail in the charcoal they have been calling Nonno's color since Florence, the villa smelling of chalk and warm fabric.
"Is this what it looks like? When you work?"
"When it's going right."
"Mamma would have been here until nine."
"I know." He does not look up. "I'll be here until eleven."
At six I go to collect Elena from school. I run the day in parallel on the drive: the authentication timeline, Clara's press release amendments, the filing that is coming and the proactive response I have already begun to frame.
At the school gate she comes out with a drawing she has been working on since lunch. I get her into her car seat. She does not stop working on the drawing while I do.
The car stops at the Sixth Avenue building at six-forty. Alex comes out and gets in.
"He's going to be extraordinary."
"He already is."
One nod, then into traffic. She leans back against the window. The road stays forward. But the cadence she has settled into comes through anyway: not managed, not working. Present. Not managed. Not working. Present.
The red light. Elena, from the back seat, holds up the drawing.
"This is us. That's you and me and Daddy and Matteo."
A glance back: a house with a flag, no windows, two very large figures and one medium figure and a small one. "Who is that one?" Alex asks.
"That's Daddy. He's the biggest."
"He is pretty big."
Elena nods like this is obvious and goes back to the drawing.
The red light changes. I drive to Teterboro for a flight to Bangor International FBO.
Max, The Campaign, Bellamare
Back on the way to Bellamare, my phone buzzes twice on the coastal road, twenty minutes from the house. I have been waiting for this. Clara flagged it an hour ago: the post was going up, the timing was deliberate, the shares would come quickly. I look at it. I put it face-down on the seat.
"What is it?" Alex asks.
"Clara flagged a social media post. Elena's mother."
The phone goes across. She reads it. Eyes on the road. The calculation is one I have already run: three hundred shares in six hours is exactly the number the PR firm would have targeted. The caption is what the brief specified. The photograph is the one they chose three weeks ago.
I have seen the investigators' documentation. This is the third image in the sequence. This is not spontaneous. This is a campaign, and it is on schedule.
The proactive response is already framed, the documentation ordered, Clara briefed.
What to do with this is clear. What I do not have a framework for is Alex beside me in the front seat, having read the post, not requiring an explanation, already treating what is mine as something we are going to handle together.
She hands the phone back.
"She's building the story."
"Yes."
"Clara said the filing is expected in three weeks?"
"At the latest."
"Max, you're not carrying this alone."
The word. I have been carrying this alone since Elena was two. I do not have a quick answer for what it means that I am not anymore. I file it as true and let it be true without immediately determining what to do with it.
"Okay."
Elena is asleep in the back seat. I can see her in the mirror: head tipped to the window, drawing still in her hand, completely loose. Five years old. I look at her for the length of a breath and then put my eyes back on the road.
"She already is all right," she says.
"Yes."
"We're going to make sure she stays that way."
"Yes."
The coastal road. The city behind them. The house somewhere in the dark ahead with the fort in the garden and the blue flag on the correct corner. Alex's head is back against the window. Elena sleeps.
The collection is in Renata's hands. Lorenzo Jr. is in the workroom. The press strategy is moving. And the ex-wife's campaign has begun, which means the filing is coming, and it is coming before Florence.
The Florentine archivist called at three this afternoon. One of the three names from the journal confirmed. An old family. Her exact word, in Italian, was antico. Filed and kept driving.