"I was monitored," she whispered. "While I talked to the baby. While I cried in the waiting room. Someone knew every appointment."
Frank folded his hands. He did not offer her the usual lie that it was over, because it was not over, and Clara Bennett, who had survived Tommy's death and this house and that terrible party, deserved at least the dignity of the truth.
"Yes," he said. "Someone knew. Now we find out whether they knew to use you, or to keep you alive. And Clara — until we know, you go nowhere that I have not cleared first. Not because you are a prisoner. Because whoever built that paper life for you is still out there, and paper, in the wrong hands, is how real people disappear."
Chapter 8: Gia's Silence
Gia Romano had been raised to smile while a room decided whether she was worth anything. She could sit through a dinner beside men who talked about her as if she were a treaty, could pour wine, could laugh at the correct second, could wear a ring chosen by two families and make it look like love. What she could not do, in the three days after her engagement party, was sleep in the Valenti house without hearing her own scream again.
It had torn out of her in the service corridor when she saw the suitcase in Clara's arms. Not at the police, not at a threat. At a battered brown case she had believed was already gone from the house. Everyone had looked at her as if the scream explained something. Her father, on the telephone that night, had called it unforgivable. Enzo, in person, had called it nothing at all, which was worse, because Enzo's silence was a room he locked and watched through the keyhole.
"You recognised it," he said on the third evening, when he found her alone in the library, a book open and unread on her lap.
Gia closed the book carefully, aligning its edges, buying seconds the way she had bought them all her life. "Many people own brown suitcases."
"Not that one. Not in my house, carried by my maid, on the night of our engagement."
She rose and moved to the window, because if she looked at him she might tell the truth, and the truth had her father's voice behind it, patient and absolute. Aldo Romano did not shout. He reminded. He reminded his daughter that Romano daughters did not improvise, that the alliance had been purchased with concessions no one in the street could see, that a girl who spoiled her father's arrangements out of softness would discover how quickly a family could become a closed door.
She had been nineteen the first time he left her at a convent school in Connecticut for a summer, for nothing worse than contradicting him at lunch. No cruelty anyone could photograph. Just absence, elegantly arranged.
"I cannot explain," she said at last.
"Cannot, or will not?" Enzo's voice stayed level, and that levelness frightened her more than anger would have. Angry men spent themselves. Enzo collected.
"Both." She turned then, because cowardice disgusted her even in herself. "If I speak wrongly, people will be hurt who cannot protect themselves. If I stay silent, you will think the worst of me. My father has arranged it so either choice serves him. Do you understand that? Every road in this was built before I walked it."
Enzo studied her the way he studied a contract someone else had drafted. "Did you put that case in Clara's hands?"
"Yes." The word cost her. She saw his jaw tighten and she hurried on, not to save herself, but because the fragment she could give was owed. "I told her it held linens. I told her to take it to the east wing. I believed — I had been told it would be collected before she reached the stairs. That is all I will say about the order, Enzo. Do not ask me who gave it. You already know the shape of the answer, and if I say the name aloud in your house, he will know within the hour, and Clara will pay for my honesty before your men reach her door."
"She is under my protection."
"She was under your roof when I handed her a frame for a crime!" Gia's voice broke upward, too loud in the quiet room. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, furious at the loss of control, and when she spoke again it was almost a whisper. "Do you think I do not know what would have happened? Police at your gates during the toasts. A pregnant servant, passports with her face, cash. Photographers your cousins invited. My father expressing shock, offering to withdraw from the alliance to protect his family's honour, keeping every term he wanted because you would be the house that harboured a smuggler. I know the play. I have been seated in the audience since I was a child."
For the first time, something in Enzo's expression moved that was not suspicion. "Then why scream? If you knew—"
"Because it was supposed to be gone." She laughed once, without humour. "Because for one stupid, blessed second, when I saw it still in the house, still in her hands, I thought someone had disobeyed him. I thought we had been saved by a mistake. Then I understood it was worse. It was still moving. The plan was still alive and I was watching it walk toward her on soft shoes, and there was nothing — nothing — I could say in a room full of his friends that would not sign her arrest myself."
She did not tell him about the clinic envelopes. She did not tell him about the mornings she had sat in a hired car outside a Bayonne clinic with sunglasses on and her father's driver bribed to forget the route. Those mercies, if he learned them from her mouth now, would become evidence, and Aldo taught his children that evidence was a weapon you never handed an angry man, even a just one — especially a just one.
Enzo crossed the room slowly and stopped an arm's length away. Gia remembered, unwillingly, that she had not disliked him when they met. He had asked her, quite seriously, whether she wanted the engagement announced before or after Christmas, the only man in either family who had framed it as her preference, even if the preference changed nothing.
"Gia," he said. "If you are trapped, say the word and I will treat you as I treat Clara. As someone to be protected, not used."