"And Leo?" Adrian said. "And Poppy β she heard the words, she can repeat them. If whoever it is learns what Leo sawβ"
Dominic was already reaching for the telephone. "Then as of this hour, the children do not leave this family's sight, and the little girl's guards are doubled, and no one β no one β is told why."
Chapter 10: The Mother's Fear
June counted the car the way she counted everything that frightened her: precisely, and out loud, and with a pencil.
Once, at eight, going past slow enough that she saw the driver turn his head toward her window β not at the bread, not at the queue. At her. At the little flat above the shop, if she was honest about the angle of it.
Twice, at eleven, parked three doors down with its engine running and nobody getting out.
Three times, at two in the afternoon, while Poppy was upstairs having her rest, at walking pace, with the sun full on its windscreen so she could see nothing inside it at all β and that was somehow the worst of the three.
She wrote it down in the order book, between the sourdough and the wedding consultation: dark car, grey, no plate on the front. Three times. Then she looked at the man Dominic had posted in the shuttered doorway across the street β her man, her guard, her protection β and understood, with the clean click of a key turning, that he was watching the street in one direction, and the car was coming down it from the other.
She did not call the estate, and she did not call the number on the card. She drove to the gates herself, in the bakery van with LANE'S painted on the side, and arrived as the light was going the colour of weak tea, and got out and stood in front of those gates β which had opened all week for grain trucks and gardeners and a man delivering wine β and found them closed to her.
The gate man came out of his lodge with his palms already up. "Mrs. Lane. I have to call the house first, it's the rule since the party, I can'tβ"
"Then call it," June said. "Tell Don Serra the baker is at his gate and she is not leaving it. Tell him I said it in that voice."
Whatever the gate man said into his telephone, it worked faster than courtesy. The gates swung in less than two minutes, and Dominic Serra came down the drive himself β not in a car. On foot, in shirtsleeves, an old man's cardigan over them, with Adrian half a step behind him wearing the expression of a man who has advised against this meeting and been overruled.
"Your gate kept me out," June said. "Two hundred people walked into your house last week and one of them cut your son's brake line, but your gate kept out the baker."
"My gate kept out everyone," Dominic said mildly. "It is what gates are for since last week. You are angry. Come up to the house and be angry where there is coffee."
"I'll be angry here, thank you, where my van can leave." She heard her own voice shaking and hated it and used it anyway. "Three times today, Mr. Serra. A dark car, no front plate, past my shop three times, slow, looking up at my windows. My windows. Where my daughter sleeps. Your man across the street β my protection β he watches the bakery door like you told him to, and meanwhile something is driving past my home counting it. A week ago we were nobody, a widow and a little girl with a cake shop, invisible as wallpaper. Now there is a guard on my street and the whole town asking questions, and your protection has painted a target on my six-year-old daughter and hung a light over it."
Adrian started to speak; his father raised one finger without looking at him, and he stopped.
"Everything you have said," Dominic said, "is true."
June's prepared next sentence died where it stood.
"The car is true. The target is true. You were safer invisible; I have made you visible; I knew it when I did it and I did it anyway, because the alternative was to leave the child who saved my son standing in the open with nothing between her and whoever sent those men but a shop door. Hear me now, June Lane, because this is the first completely honest thing between us: I cannot unknow what your daughter knows. I cannot unsay her whisper. The men who cut that line know a child heard them β that is why there is a car on your street. Not my guards. Their fear. And as long as that is true, the target answers to me. They will find they have to go through Dominic Serra to reach what's inside your windows, and there is not a man in three counties who thinks that arithmetic ends well for him."
"And if the arithmetic ends with my daughter in the middle of it anyway?" she said. "You can stand between her and the world and still be stepped around, Mr. Serra. She's six years old and she sleeps above a bread shop, and the most dangerous thing in her life was supposed to be the stairs."
"Then tell me what to do instead," Dominic said, and it was not a challenge; it was, she realised with a lurch, an actual question, from a man who had not asked an actual question of an outsider in perhaps decades. "Send the guards away and trust the car to lose interest? Name it. You are her mother. It has occurred to me, standing here, that you are the one person in this business I have not once consulted."
"No," she said. "I won't be brought anywhere, and neither will she. We have a home. We have a shop. You don't get to solve us by moving us, Don Serra, like furniture out of a draught." She folded her arms tight, the way she did when the bank manager smiled. "Keep your men. Double them, if that's your language. But point them the right way. Not at my door. At the street. At the car."
"At the street," Dominic repeated, slowly, as if tasting it. "At the whole street."
"The whole street," June said, and got back into her van before her legs or her resolve could reconsider.