Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Livia
Now . . .
The phone rings again.
I stare at it until the sound becomes less like a phone and more like a dare.
My apartment is dark except for the square of light on the nightstand. Outside, Florence is mostly quiet, the city finally asleep or pretending to be. I should let it go to voicemail.
Sensible women let unknown international numbers go to voicemail late at night.
Sensible women don't answer after sending professionally alarming emails to old lawyers attached to wealthy families with trust clauses, questionable provenance records, and surnames that still have access to the softest, stupidest parts of them.
I have never been at my best when sensible.
So, naturally, I pick up.
For one second, there is only the line. A thin hush. A distance big enough to hold an ocean.
“Ms. Crane?”
My hand tightens around the phone. “Who is this?”
“You emailed me earlier,” he says. Not asks. States. “My name is Fitzhenry Everhart.”
I sit up too fast.
The room tilts in protest. The phone nearly slips from my hand, and Bella gives one offended twitch against my thigh, as if she, too, disapproves of men calling from New York after midnight with names pulled straight out of family secrets and old money regret.
“You called quickly,” I say.
“Your email sounded . . . important.”
“I emailed professionally.”
“Those are often the same thing when people are frightened enough to proofread.”
I close my eyes.
Against my better judgment, I like him immediately.
That is inconvenient. I prefer my suspicious men easier to dislike. It saves time.
“I didn’t say I was frightened.”
“No,” he says. “You said your credentials were used to authenticate provenance work you didn't perform. You said Cornelius Saint Claire’s trust language appears to prohibit what the foundation is attempting to do. And you signed the email, L. Crane.”
My breath catches somewhere I don't have time to examine.
“I didn’t know if your email was still active,” I say.
He scoffs. “My website is updated regularly.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“By the email address remaining active? No.”
“By me.”
Another pause.
“No,” he says.
The word enters the room and changes its shape.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. My bare feet touch the cold floor, and the shock of it is almost useful. “Why?”
“Because Cornelius Saint Claire spent the last few years of his life worried that if anything happened to Halston, the foundation would become a laundering mechanism with a charitable tax structure and better stationery.”
I go still.
There are sentences a person knows are true before the facts arrive. That is one of them.
A terrible little click inside the mind. A door opening where there should have been a wall.
“You haven’t stopped it,” I say.
“They let me go soon after . . . everything.”
Everything.
He says it like a file name. Like a legal category. Like the rest of us, didn't have to live inside it with broken ribs and missing time and two men becoming ghosts in different directions.
I don't know what his everything includes.
I only know what mine cost.
“And me?” I ask, before I can stop myself.
“You weren't part of his original concern.”
That should make me feel better.
It doesn't.
“But?” I ask.
“But Halston spoke of you.”
The phone becomes too hot against my ear.
Ridiculous. It is glass and metal and battery acid and poor life choices. It can't burn.
Still, my fingers adjust around it as if I have been caught touching something I should have left alone.
“He did?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Before the accident.”
I close my eyes.
Before the accident is not a time.
It is a country.
One, I lost citizenship in a hospital bed.
“What did he say?”
Mr. Everhart exhales once, as if deciding which truth can survive the journey through a phone line.
“He said you could see falsified history faster than most lawyers could read it.”
A laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it.
It is small and ugly and gone almost immediately.
Of course, Halston would turn affection into a professional assessment. God forbid the man say something simple like she is brilliant, or I love her, or please make sure no one destroys her life with paperwork. No, naturally, he complimented me on my ability to identify fraudulent provenance.
“That sounds like him,” I say.
“It does.”
The silence after that hurts.
I look toward the window. The glass gives my face back to me: tired eyes, work shirt wrinkled from an evening I never changed out of, and hair pinned badly enough to qualify as a cry for help.
I am sitting on the edge of a bed in a city I once used as a hiding place, speaking to a man who knew Halston before my life split into before and after.
Then Fitzhenry clears his throat.
“Also,” he says, “Creed Lafontaine has been looking for you.”
That surprises me so completely I almost forget to breathe.
Which is annoying. Breath is free. I should be better at keeping it.
“Well,” I say, aiming for dry and missing by several humiliating inches, “he has not done a good job.”
“We did the first years,” Fitzhenry says. “They just hid you really well.”
We.
First years.
Hid you.
Each phrase touches something tender, then steps back as if it has manners.
I look down at my hand. Bella has gone still against my thigh, which is almost worse than the tremor. Even my body seems to be listening.
Why does Fitzhenry know about Creed?
Why was Creed looking?
Why does the idea of him searching for me hurt more than the years I believed he hadn’t?
No.
Not right now.
I drag myself back to the part of the night that has facts attached.
“Mr. Everhart,” I say, and my voice comes out cleaner than I feel, which is basically my entire brand.
“My name is on at least twenty-seven foundation-linked files. I know I didn’t authenticate at least some of them.
I found a clause in the original charter requiring unrestricted access when provenance is incomplete or disputed.
The access protocol I was sent today does the opposite. ”
“I understand.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t think you do.”
A beat, then I add, “Halston signed it.”
“When?” he asks.
“According to the paperwork we received, he did yesterday.”
“Are you certain it’s his signature?”
“I don’t know yet. The document shows a signature. It looks like his handwriting.”
“Send it to me.”
“I can’t send foundation documents to a stranger.”
There are muffled voices on his end. A drawer, maybe. A door. The faint movement of a man already reaching for something, another saying, “We’re on it, babe”.
Then he says, “Good. Don’t.”
I blink. “That was not what I expected.”
“You are right to be careful. Send nothing from institute servers. Copy nothing into personal accounts. Don’t print anything else. Don’t tell your director yet.”
“My director?”
“No one,” he says.
The warning is quiet enough to be terrifying.
“Why?”
“Because if your credentials were used repeatedly, either someone inside Bianchi is compromised, or someone outside has had access for years.”
My mouth goes dry.
Of course.
Of course.
I had already known it in that awful corner of the mind where competent women store the conclusions they refuse to say aloud because saying them makes them real. Still, hearing it from him makes the apartment feel smaller. The walls draw nearer. The window reflects a woman I recognize and don't.
A woman alone in the dark with a phone, a tremor, and the sudden understanding that her name has been moving through documents without her.
“Do you know where Halston is?” I ask.
A quiet inhale.
“Not precisely.”
I close my eyes. “Not precisely is lawyer for yes.”
“Not precisely is lawyer for ‘I will not say more until I know the line is safe.’”
My fingers tighten again.
“Is he in danger?”
“Probably,” Fitzhenry says.
The word is clean. Brutal. Almost merciful because it doesn't pretend.
My stomach drops, and for one second ,I am back in the old life, back in the place where Halston’s silence meant injury and Creed’s restraint meant he was trying very hard not to break something with his hands.
“And Creed?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Another pause.
Too long.
“Don’t call him tonight,” Fitzhenry says.
I almost laugh.
It comes out closer to a breath with an attitude problem.
“Everyone keeps making bold assumptions about what I will or won’t do.”
“Ms. Crane, if you call him right now, you will not ask about the foundation first.”
I hate him.
A little.
Accurately.
Because he is right, and there are few things more offensive than a man being correct when I am trying to maintain narrative control.
If I called Creed now, I would mean to ask about the foundation. I would prepare a numbered list. I would use words like unauthorized access, amended protocol, and fiduciary obligation.
Then he would say my name.
Not Livia.
Not Ms. Crane.
Liv.
And I would become every version of myself I have tried to outgrow.
The woman in the hospital.
The woman was waiting for an explanation.
The woman who loved two men and somehow ended up with neither.
“What happens next?” I ask.
“I verify what I can from New York. You preserve the folder exactly as received. Tomorrow, you document your travel and location for every file where your credentials appear. Privately.”
“And then?”
“And then,” he says, “we determine whether Cornelius built us a door.”
Us.
The word is small.
It is not nothing.
I stare at my reflection in the window, at the woman sitting too straight on the edge of the bed, because if she bends, she might fold completely.
“Mr. Everhart?”
“Yes?”
“Why are you helping me?”
He is quiet so long I think the line has dropped.
Then he says, “Because ten years ago, I failed to help all three of you fast enough.”
My hand goes still.
Bella does too.
The whole apartment seems to stop with us.
“All three?” I whisper.
But the line has already gone dead.