"We have slowed it," the doctor said. "Medication, rest, monitoring. The contractions have eased and spaced. He is early, and we are watching him very closely, but his heartbeat is strong, and for now — for now — he is staying where he is, which is the best possible news. Miss Bennett is asleep. She asked for you," she said to Gia, "before she slept. She is safe. They both, at this moment, are safe."
Gia sat down very suddenly in the chair she had just risen from, and put her face in her hands, and wept at last like a person, not a Romano. Enzo, across the room, turned from the window with an expression no one in that hospital would ever see again, and said, to no one in particular, "Good. Good. Now nobody moves her. Nobody touches her. Frank — tell the council we will be ready when they are. It is their turn to come to us."
Chapter 24: What Gia Told the Council
The council sat again three days after the storm, in the same long room as before, with the rain-washed city bright beyond the windows and Clara Bennett safe in a hospital bed across the water, her labour held, her son unborn and stubbornly alive.
Gia Romano entered that room on no man's arm.
Enzo had offered — through Frank, correctly, at a distance — to have her brought to the house first and taken in with the Valenti party, so that no one could say she had walked into that room unprotected. Gia had refused, in a message she dictated word for word: she would arrive alone, as she had driven alone, because what she was about to do could not be borrowed from anyone else's courage. She wore black, not as theatre, but because it was the only dress she owned that she had not chosen to please her father. Her hands, this time, did not shake. She had rehearsed to no mirror. She had spent the previous night in a hospital chair holding a sleeping girl's hand at intervals, and terror, like grief, has a limit to how long it can shout.
Aldo rose when she entered. It was the only discourtesy he allowed himself, and everyone in the room registered it: a father does not stand to intimidate the room. He stands to remind a witness whose daughter she is.
"Gia," he said. "Whatever these men have told you to say — "
"Sit down, Aldo," said the oldest man at the table, not loudly. "The council will hear her. That was agreed. You agreed it."
Aldo sat. Gia took the chair that had been placed for her — not at the table, but before it, where witnesses and petitioners and the accused had sat in that room for fifty years — and she looked once at Enzo, who gave her nothing but his complete attention, and once at Frank, who had a notebook open and a pen laid ready and did not pick it up, because some testimony, she understood, he intended the room itself to remember. Then she began, in a clear voice, at the beginning, as she had decided in the hospital corridor that she would.
"My name is Gia Romano. I am the daughter of Aldo Romano. I am engaged — I was engaged — to Enzo Valenti under the alliance this council approved. I am here to tell you what my father ordered, what I did, and what I failed to do, in the matter of Clara Bennett and the brown suitcase."
No one interrupted her. She told them about her father's choosing of Clara — a girl with no family to ask questions, in the Valenti house, carrying a Valenti man's child, perfect, her father had said, because no one would spend honour defending a maid. She told them about the suitcase ordered packed as trousseau linens, the cash, the forged passports ordered from the printer on Mott Street in Clara's photograph under false names, the clinic cards applied for in Clara's name without Clara's knowledge, so that her whole innocent medical history could be reframed as a courier's trail. She told them about the planned tip-off during the engagement celebrations, and the second tip-off, after the council last sat, that had sent police to the Valenti house to find a suitcase already in Enzo Valenti's hands — and she watched two men at the table who had not known that detail look, slowly, at her father.
"I knew enough, and I did the smallest thing I could," she said. "I paid Miss Bennett's clinic bills, anonymously, for months. I told myself it was kindness. It was conscience, at a discount. On the day of the suitcase I learned it was to be carried down by Clara herself, and I tried — too late, and badly — to have it taken another way. I screamed at Mr. Valenti not to open it. The council has wondered whether that scream was panic or performance. It was panic. I was watching a trap close on a pregnant girl and on the man I was supposed to marry, built by my own father, and I had helped furnish the room it was closing in by saying nothing for months. I am not here to be forgiven for that. I am here so that it is said, by a Romano, in this room, on the record your memories keep: I no longer say nothing."
Aldo's voice cut across the end of it, controlled and cold. "My daughter has been turned. She is emotional. She was always — she has been got at, in that house, by people with every reason to — "
"By a hospital chair?" Gia said, and turned in her seat and faced him fully for the first time. The room went very quiet. "No one in that house asked me for this, Father. Mr. Valenti offered me protection if I testified and exactly the same protection if I did not, and Mr. Deluca wrote nothing down when I promised, because he said this house would remember. What turned me was a telephone call in a dark corridor, when a girl was in labour at eight and a half months because men you sent came through a storm for her — and you asked me to open a door for them. I have brought the council no papers. The ledger will speak for itself, and others will speak to the printer and the money. I have brought you only this: your own daughter, telling you that the orders were yours."
She stood then, because she had finished, and because witnesses who have finished do not linger. No one applauded; that room did not applaud. But the oldest man at the table inclined his head to her — a small, grave, unmistakable courtesy, of the kind that room had given, in living memory, to very few women and to no one's daughter speaking against her own father — and two others, after a moment, did the same.