Chapter 14: Claire Comes Home
Claire Stallone arrived at the estate in a hired car with one suitcase, no warning, and a fury she had been feeding, apparently, for the entire flight from New York.
Elena heard her before she saw her — a voice in the hall, younger than Dominic's and built from the same iron. "Don't take my bag upstairs, thank you, I haven't decided if I'm staying. Where is he? Is he in the study? Of course he's in the study. He was always in the study."
Dominic came out of that study the way a man comes out to face weather he has been watching through glass. "Claire."
"You learned I was alive," she said, "from my turning up. Congratulations. I learned you nearly weren't from a push notification in an airport. A stranger's telephone told me, Dad. A headline. 'Gala drama at Stallone Vineyards.' Drama. As if you'd dropped a tray."
"I did not want to worry you with half a story over the—"
"You did not want to worry me." She set her suitcase down with a precision that was, Elena thought, pure Ada, though neither woman would ever know it. "That has been the family policy for six years. Do not worry Claire. Do not tell Claire the treatment had stopped working; she is filming. Do not tell Claire it was the last month; she will be home in spring. Do not tell Claire anything true until it is too late for her to do anything but grieve efficiently. Well. I am worried now, and I am here, and both of those things are your doing by omission, which is your favourite kind of doing."
"Your mother asked—" Dominic began, and stopped, because the sentence had nowhere honest to go.
"My mother asked you to protect me," Claire said, and her voice cracked for the first time. "She did not ask you to bury me alive in good intentions. I sat in New York editing other people's families — other people's whole, ordinary, arguing families — while mine held a funeral I got to attend like a guest who'd been sent the wrong date. And then you built a gala on top of it. Two hundred guests. Champagne. While I got an invitation so formal it might as well have been addressed to the press."
"It was addressed to you," Dominic said quietly. "I wrote it myself. I sat at that desk for an hour over one card, because every version sounded like a press release. Your mother used to do the wording. I never learned the trick of sounding like myself on paper."
Claire looked at him then — really looked, past the famous jaw and the performance of him, at an old man in a study doorway whose hands were not quite steady. Something in her face fought itself and did not entirely win.
"The vineyard was hers too," he said. "That is the part you never let me say. I didn't choose it over her. I held on to it after her because it was the last place she was still—" He gestured helplessly at the windows, the long green order of the vines. "Working. Laughing. Swearing at the irrigation in Italian. If I'd sold it, or left it, I'd have lost the only room in the world where she still answered back."
"You could have told me that in six years."
"Yes," Dominic said. "Write that on my stone. He could have said it in time."
It was Elena, coming through with a tray she had no real reason to carry, who broke the silence that followed — not with words, but by being caught in it. Claire turned, and took her in whole: the uniform, the notebook in the apron pocket, the woman the headlines had called, in three days, a heroine, a fraud, and a thief.
"You're Elena," Claire said. "You're the one who took the glass."
"I am sorry you learned of it from the newspapers, Miss Stallone."
"Claire. Nobody is Miss Stallone; it sounds like a wine we failed to sell." She studied Elena with a filmmaker's shamelessness. "The press says you recognised the bottle by a scratch you made on the foil that morning. Is that true, or is that the part they invented because it sounds good?"
"It is true. I noted the foil, the wire, the position. When it was carried in, all three were wrong."
"And the bracelet they say was found in your room?"
"Also found," Elena said. "Not by me, and not by my hand. The cameras have shown I was never near Simone's rooms. Mr. Osei can show you the footage, and Ada can show you the ledger. I would rather you believed the books than believed me. Books do not get nervous."
Claire laughed before she could stop herself — one short, startled sound. "God. No wonder he kept you." She glanced at her father, and some of the war went out of her shoulders, leaving the grief standing there by itself, which was smaller and much sadder. "I came here to shout at a monument," she said. "I prepared speeches. I have notes."
"Bring them to dinner," Dominic said. "Ada is making too much food, as a form of national defence. You can shout between courses. It's how your mother preferred it — she said rage kept better warm."
Claire turned back to Elena, unwilling, Elena thought, to let the practical world go quite yet, because the practical world did not ask anything of her heart. "One more thing. In the hall just now, nobody introduced us. Nobody vouched for you. In my line of work, that means the story hasn't been stage-managed. So tell me plainly: why did you step in at the toast? You could have been wrong. In front of everyone. You could have lost everything you have here."
"I could have been wrong about a bottle," Elena said. "I was not wrong about the risk. If I was wrong, I would lose a position. If I was right and I stood still—" She looked at Dominic, and chose honesty over tact, as she generally did when the two could not both be fed. "Positions can be found again, Miss—Claire. People at a table, less often."
Dominic made a sound that might have been a laugh in a younger chest. "She has been correcting my manners for two years," he told his daughter. "You two will get on terribly well. It is the rest of us I am worried for."
"You should be," Claire said, but she said it to her father the way other families say pass the salt, and the room understood the difference.
Claire picked up her suitcase. "One dinner," she said. "And I want to see this footage. And the notebook. And then—" She stopped at the stairs, and did not look back, so that the words could arrive without witnesses. "And then we'll see, Dad. We'll see."
Elena watched her go up, one suitcase banging softly at every third step, like a small, determined drum coming home.