Chapter Ten
HE CALLED ADRIANO FIRST.
Not because Adriano was closest. Because Adriano was the one person who would hear the thing Olivio was about to say and not flinch, not lecture, not pause with the heaviness of a man weighing whether his son had finally broken.
Adriano Kontides was a lawyer and a friend and a man who'd once destroyed his own marriage and rebuilt it with his bare hands, and if anyone was going to understand what Olivio needed right now, it was him.
The phone rang twice.
Olivio stood at the window of his office, the same window where he'd stood on Day Eight while Chelsea made tea in the apartment below, the same view of Toronto's skyline that used to look like competence and now looked like a city full of places where his wife could disappear.
The glass threw his reflection back at him: a man in a suit, standing in a corner office on the fifty-second floor of a building with his name on it, and none of it could tell him where she was.
"Olivio." Adriano's voice was even, controlled, the voice of a man who'd spent twenty years in courtrooms learning that the first person to rush was the first person to lose.
"Is she with you?"
A pause.
And the pause was wrong. It wasn't the pause of a man who didn't know what Olivio was talking about. It was the pause of a man choosing his words, and the choosing was itself an answer, and Olivio's hand tightened on the phone until the edges bit into his palm.
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm not lying. She's not with us." Another pause. "But Shayla's been trying to reach her for the past hour. Olivio, what happened?"
The question was simple. The answer was not.
Olivio closed his eyes. Beyond the glass, a crane was moving on the Yorkville site, steel and cable swinging against the pale sky with the mechanical patience of something that didn't care about the chaos happening fifty-two floors above it.
"I made a mistake." The words came out harder than he intended. Wrong shape. Too small for the thing they were trying to hold. "She thinks I stayed married to her to close a deal."
"The Marquez property."
Of course Adriano knew. That was what happened when your closest friend was a man who read contracts the way other people read novels and who'd been watching Olivio's marriage with the attention of someone who recognized the early symptoms of a disease he'd survived.
"Did you?" No judgment in the question. Just the clean, surgical directness that made Adriano the most effective lawyer Olivio had ever known.
"Yes."
A beat.
"And?"
"And I need you to draft me a contract." Olivio turned from the window. "I'm backing out of the Marquez deal."
Silence. Not the heavy kind. The calculating kind. Eight months of positioning, the Vancouver waterfront property, the meetings, the dinner, the entire strategic framework that had justified everything, all of it being weighed against five words.
"That's a twenty-three-million-dollar decision."
"I'm aware."
"The Marquezes won't take it well. Jun is old-school. He'll see it as a personal—-"
"I don't care."
Another silence. Longer this time. And then Adriano said, with the gentleness of a man who'd once sat in a hotel room at three in the morning wondering if Shayla Kontides would ever speak to him again: "It's about time."
Olivio's jaw shifted. "Don't."
"I've known you since you were eighteen, Olivio. I watched you at dinner. I watched you carry that girl's book out the door like it was made of glass. I've been waiting for this call."
"I didn't call for commentary."
"No. You called because you need help finding your wife, and the contract is your way of proving to yourself that this is real before you let yourself fall apart." A pause. "Am I wrong?"
Olivio said nothing.
"I'll have the withdrawal drafted within the hour. Now tell me what you need."
"I need to find her. She's not at the apartment. She left the office sometime this afternoon, and no one—-" He stopped. Breathed. The sentence had almost broken in the middle, and Olivio Cannizzaro did not break sentences. "No one saw which direction she went."
"I'll call Shayla. She'll reach out to Chelsea's phone. If that doesn't work, I have resources—-"
"Use them."
"Olivio."
He waited.
"She's not gone. She's hurt. There's a difference. The ones who are hurt don't go far."
"Thank you for—-" He stopped. Could not say those words again. "I'll be here."
He ended the call.
His hand didn't leave the phone. He stood there, in the office he'd built from nothing, surrounded by the evidence of twelve years of discipline and strategy and control, and he looked at the room the way a man looked at a house after a fire, recognizing the structure, unable to find anything in it that still worked.
The couch where Chelsea had curled up with her Bible.
The spot on the carpet where her Mary Janes had left a faint impression because she always sat with her feet tucked the same way.
The conference table where he'd once closed the blinds and kissed a woman in a blue-flowered dress and set in motion the nine days that had unmade everything he understood about himself.
He dialed Aivan.
His brother answered immediately, which meant Aivan already knew. Sienah would've told him, or his father, or the invisible network of Cannizzaro women who communicated information faster than any system Olivio had ever built.
The conversation was short. Aivan didn't say I told you so. He didn't reference the balcony. He simply said: "What do you need?"
"Eyes. Anywhere she might go. She doesn't have family in Toronto, Edgar is the closest thing, and he's already—-" Olivio's hand was gripping the back of his desk chair, knuckles bloodless. "She doesn't know this city. She's been here nine days and she doesn't know anyone who isn't connected to me."
"I'll make calls."
"Aivan."
His brother waited.
"She's on foot. She has a limp. She—-" The sentence dissolved. He rebuilt it. "She's on foot."
"I know." Aivan's voice carried something Olivio had never heard in it before.
Not pity. Recognition. The sound of a man who'd once stood on a doorstep in the rain for seven days waiting for a door to open, and who understood, with the authority of someone who'd survived his own version of this, exactly what Olivio was feeling. "We'll find her."
The call ended.
He scrolled to the next name. Giancarlo Marchetti.
Calling Giancarlo was the equivalent of activating an intelligence service. It was also the kind of favor that would be remembered, catalogued, held in the invisible ledger of obligations that families like theirs maintained across generations.
Olivio didn't care.
He made the call. He explained. He asked.
Giancarlo listened with the focused stillness of a man who'd been raised to hear what wasn't being said, and when Olivio finished, the response was immediate and without conditions.
"Consider it done. I'll have people checking transit, airports, hotels within the hour. If she's still in the city, we'll know."
"Grazie."
"You don't owe me thanks for this. You'd do the same."
The call ended, and Olivio stood in his office with his phone in his hand and the weight of what he'd just done settling over him.
He'd called Adriano and killed a twenty-three-million-dollar deal.
He'd called his brother and let him hear the fracture in his voice.
He'd called Giancarlo Marchetti and asked for help, which was something Olivio Cannizzaro had never done, because asking for help meant admitting that your own resources were insufficient, and his resources had never once in his adult life been insufficient for anything.
Until now.
Until a girl with a limp and a Bible and a chipped white mug had walked out of his building, and every system he'd built couldn't tell him where she was.
He called his father.
Miguel answered on the first ring, and the sound of his voice, firm, unsurprised, carrying the weight of a man who'd been expecting exactly this call at exactly this moment, did something to the last remaining wall inside Olivio.
"I know you already know what's happening." His voice came out rougher than he intended. "You have eyes everywhere."
A pause. Then his father, gently: "Tell me anyway."
And the gentleness was worse than anything else.
Worse than Adriano's directness, worse than Aivan's recognition, worse than the efficient competence of Giancarlo's response.
Because his father's gentleness was the gentleness of a man who'd waited fifteen years to hear his son ask for something real.
"I need help finding her."
"Finding who?"
The question was not a question. It was an offering. A door held open.
"Don't, Father." Olivio gritted out. "You know who I'm talking about."
"I do. But I want to hear you say it."
Olivio's free hand closed into a fist against his thigh.
The skyline blurred beyond the glass. Somewhere out there, in a city of three million people, his wife was walking on a leg that would be hurting, carrying a quilted Bible case and the wreckage of a trust he'd spent nine days earning and one afternoon destroying.
"Chelsea. My wife. She's gone, she left, and I don't know where, and my security team is useless, and Adriano's people haven't found anything, and I've called in every favor I have, and she's—-" He stopped. Breathed. "She's given me the slip. I honestly don't know how. Maybe God told her how."
He heard his father's breath catch. Not at the desperation. At the word.
God.
Olivio Cannizzaro, who'd spent his entire adult life politely declining his family's invitations to faith, had just invoked the name of God in a sentence that wasn't casual and wasn't performative and wasn't a figure of speech.
It was the involuntary appeal of a man who'd run out of his own resources and was reaching for the only one left.
His father was quiet for a long moment.
"Why are you doing all of this, son?"
And there it was.