14. Mia
MIA
Some people fall in love with a voice before they fall in love with a face.
I didn't plan for it to happen like that. I didn't plan for any of this. But Ludo Rossi's handwriting had become the first thing I looked forward to every morning, and that should have been my warning sign.
The journal in front of me was dated nine years after Tony's birth. The ink had faded to warm brown, the letters small and even and full of a patience I could almost touch.
Two hours of transcribing. My coffee was cold. My reading glasses kept sliding down my nose. I didn't care about either.
Ludo had written about the garden. The lavender along the south wall. A neighbor's dog that kept digging under the fence.
Three sentences about a thunderstorm that shook the windows.
Then this:
Tony painted his first canvas today. He is nine years old.
I came into the studio and he was standing on a chair to reach the easel, still in his school uniform, paint on his tie, paint on his shoes, paint in his hair.
The canvas was a sunset. I have seen sunsets in Tuscany and Florence and on the coast of Sardinia.
I have never seen one like the sunset my son painted.
The colors were so alive I wept. My boy sees the world the way the rest of us wish we could.
I stopped typing.
I took off my glasses and covered my face with both hands. The office was quiet. The mountains outside the glass wall were white against a sky that didn't know I was falling apart.
A dead man's love for his son was cracking me open.
I sat there for a long time. Longer than I should have.
Ludo's journals weren't just a record of a life. They were a window into a father who saw his child with such clarity, such wonder, that reading his words was like standing in a cathedral.
And through that window, I was falling for his living son. The painter who hid from the world. The father who carried his daughter on his shoulders.
The man with green eyes and bruised silence and hands that turned color into feeling.
Stop it, Mia.
I put my glasses back on. Wiped my face with the heel of my hand. Kept typing.
The next entry was about rain on the roof and a trip to Rome. I typed it.
The one after that was about a research conference in Florence. I typed that too.
Not a single mention of Angelina. Not one.
The wife-shaped hole in Ludo's journals was still there. Weeks of entries and she didn't exist.
He wrote about neighbors, weather, Tony's drawings, the deer eating his lavender. He wrote about everyone and everything except the woman he married.
I knew what that absence meant. I'd spent years as a journalist reading what people didn't say. The silence was always louder than the words.
Did you know, Ludo?
The question lived behind my ribs now. Heavy. Permanent.
I didn't have the answer. Not yet.
Sophia found me at noon. Or rather, Sophia appeared in the doorway with a tray and the kind of expression that said she wasn't leaving until I ate.
"You've been in here since seven."
"I'm fine."
"You've been crying."
I touched my face. My cheeks were damp. I hadn't noticed.
"The journals are..." I searched for the right word. "Intense."
Sophia set the tray on the corner of my desk. Grilled chicken over greens. Sliced avocado. A glass of water. A napkin folded into a precise square.
She pulled the office chair around and sat down.
We ate together. The chicken was tender and the greens were dressed with something bright and citrusy that tasted like someone who loved you had made it.
Sophia ate without rushing. I matched her pace.
"I've been with this family a long time," Sophia said.
I looked up.
"Tony was a teenager when I came to the house. Fifteen. Skinny. Messy hair." She smiled at the memory but the smile faded fast.
"He was bright. Funny, even. The kind of boy who noticed things." She turned the fork over in her fingers. "He'd ask me about my family, about my cooking, about India. Most teenagers don't ask adults about anything."
I set my fork down.
"Something changed," Sophia said. Her voice dropped. "I don't know exactly when. But the boy who used to laugh in the kitchen stopped coming to the kitchen. He stopped eating with Ludo. He wore long sleeves in summer."
My fingers tightened around the water glass.
"I found bruises." Sophia wasn't looking at me now. She was looking at her hands in her lap. "On his arms. His chest. He was sixteen. I asked him and he said he fell off his bike. But those bruises weren't from falling, Mia. I've seen boys fall off bikes. That wasn't it."
The room was very still. Outside, a bird called from the pines. The sound was thin and far away.
"Angelina," I said. Not a question.
"His stepmother." Sophia's jaw set. "She dismissed it. She told me I was imagining things. She told me to mind my own business. She said I was the help and I should act like it."
Something hot and sharp moved through me. Not grief. Not sadness. Something older and meaner.
"Did you tell Ludo?"
Sophia's face tightened. "I tried. Twice. But Angelina..." She trailed off. Pressed her lips together. "She intercepted. She was good at that. She was good at a lot of things."
I didn't push. I could see the guilt sitting on Sophia's shoulders. Years of it. The weight of not doing enough and knowing it and carrying it anyway.
"I've said too much." Sophia stood. Collected the tray.
"You haven't said enough."
She paused at the door. Turned. Her gaze was dark and full of something I recognized. The same expression Lucas wore when he told me about the cameras in my apartment.
"He doesn't talk about it," she said. "Not to anyone. Not to Jamie. Not to me."
She left. The door closed behind her. The office went quiet.
I sat at my desk and stared at the mountains. My hands were shaking.
That evening, the cottage floor became my war room. Laptop open. Everything I had on Angelina Marshall spread across the screen.
The society page photos from weeks ago had been enough to recognize her. The dark hair. The cat-like smile. The way she held a man's arm like it was a trophy she'd won.
But recognition was one thing. Now I wanted the full picture.
The interview footage was still online. Three years old. Hadley Winslow in a navy blazer, hair swept to one side, studio lights turning brown eyes to honey. Angelina Marshall across the desk in a cream suit, legs crossed, diamond pendant catching the light.
On screen, Hadley asked questions she already knew the answers to. The pyramid scheme through the shell company. The faked illness. The sympathy donations routed to a private account. Angelina's smile froze. Her lawyer leaned forward. Hadley didn't flinch.
Our Lady of Perpetual Victimhood. I'd said it on national television. Three million viewers. I'd meant every word.
After the interview, Angelina had called the station owner. Demanded my termination. Jack had laughed her off the phone.
She'd sent a lawyer. Then a second lawyer. Then a letter that landed just short of a death threat.
The footage closed. The article archive opened. Angelina Marshall, socialite. Angelina Marshall, philanthropist. Angelina Marshall, wife of the late Ludovico Rossi, art collector, museum benefactor.
The photographs loaded. Angelina at charity galas. Angelina on red carpets. Angelina at Ludo's side, her hand on his arm, that polished performance of a woman who wanted the world to see her shine.
And somewhere behind all of it, a sixteen-year-old boy with bruises on his arms and a lie about a bicycle.
I closed the laptop. Set it on the floor. Drew my knees up tight and dropped my forehead against them.
The rage came slow. It started in my stomach and climbed. Through my ribs. Into my throat. Into my skull.
I'd interviewed this woman. I'd sat across from her and torn her story apart with facts and follow-up questions. I'd known she was a fraud. I'd known she was dangerous.
I hadn't known she was a monster.
My whole body shook. I flattened my palms against the cottage floor and breathed through it. In. Out. In. The floorboards were cold under my fingers. The mountain dark crowded the windows.
She had hurt him. She had hurt a boy who drew sunsets that made his father weep. She had taken something from him that couldn't be given back.
And she was still out there. Still polished. Still performing. Still free.
A knock at the door.
I flinched. Scrubbed my face with my palms. Stood up.
Tony was on the porch. Dark T-shirt, jeans, unlaced boots like he'd shoved them on at the last second. He was holding a piece of paper in one hand. Avery's crayon drawing. A house with purple windows and what was either a dog or a very ambitious potato.
"Avery said this goes on your fridge," he said. "She was specific."
His voice was low and easy. Casual. He didn't know that twenty minutes ago I'd been shaking on the floor because of what someone had done to him as a child.
"Of course it does," I managed. My voice was almost normal. Almost.
He looked at me. The easy expression shifted. Something behind his green eyes sharpened.
"You've been crying."
"No."
"Your eyes are red, Mia."
I took the drawing from his hand. Our fingers brushed. I held on a half-second too long and I didn't care.
"Come inside," I said.
He did. He ducked under the low doorframe and the cottage shrank around him the way it always did when he was in it. Six-foot-five of paint-stained man in a space built for someone half his size.
I put the drawing on the fridge. Avery's purple house stared back at me from behind a magnet shaped like Colorado that Sophia had left in a drawer.
Tony was watching me. I could feel it the way I always could. That focus. That weight. Like standing in front of a canvas and knowing someone was studying every line.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Nothing happened."
"Mia."
Just my name. Just the way he said it. Low and direct and patient.