Vasso looks at me finally, and in the look is a question we have avoided for ten years.
“Come on,” he says, not a command, not a request, just a path. “Let’s talk about your father.”
My mouth tastes like Marsala and metal. “And yours?” I say, because fairness is a god, too.
“Mine,” he agrees, and offers his hand.
I take it. The night holds its breath. We leave the table set, the candles burning, the chairs pulled out like ghosts just stood up.
We walk toward the villa, and the bass line follows.
15
VASSO
We don’t speak in the corridor. Old stone swallows sound, and the walk back to our suite feels like moving through a throat that hasn’t decided if it wants to spit us out or swallow us whole. I hold the door for her, close it softly, and the quiet that follows has edges.
Naomi sets her heels beside the chaise with surgical care, as if neatness could anesthetize. “Just for the record,” she says, “I didn’t bring up Harrison. Vecchio did. To throw spanners into the works, I expect?”
“Of course,” I say, rolling one cuff with the kind of precision that keeps my hands from doing something else. “He enjoys seeing what rattles and what sings.”
My jaw can crush diamonds. I feel it in the hinge when I answer questions I didn’t ask, when the past is pulled out like a rug and I’m supposed to applaud the dust pattern.
“You said you and Harrison don’t talk. That’s what all the files said when I did my diligence.” I hold her gaze. “So, tell me straight. Do you still talk to your father?” I bite out.
She goes still. “Not often. Sometimes. But not if I can help it.”
“Not often is not never.”
“No.”
It lands like a betrayal I have no right claiming, and I claim it anyway. In the very short time we’ve been married, some stupid, ancient part of me has decided mine is a verb with teeth. Absurd. Predictable. Exactly like me where she’s concerned.
“And when you can’t help it?” I press, because it matters, because it always has, because the shape of him is made of things I don’t know and want to.
“Then I am courteous. Then I remember that forgiveness isn’t a trophy I owe anyone. Then I get off the phone.”
I roll the other cuff. She watches the tendons in my wrist like the truth is hiding there. Maybe it is. I look back at her and something sharp and private flickers inside me. It’s possession, yes, and the knowledge I have no business being offended and am anyway.
“Useful,” I say, silk over steel. “To know.”
Her chin tips, heat flashing. “Useful? What am I, a spreadsheet?”
“You’re my wife,” I hear myself say, too fast. It hits us both like a dropped glass—loud, messy, undeniably real.
We stand in the wisteria light and stare each other down with ten years between us, each waiting to see who reaches first. She doesn’t posture or perform. She says, calm and lethal, “You’re angry that he was brought up. I can tell. But…I never knew what really happened between your father and mine.”
For a second I think she’s joking. Then I see the clean bewilderment in her face and it takes air out of my lungs like a fist. “You never bothered to find out?” The worst version of me snipes before the best can tackle him. “What? Too busy being engaged to Leo Goldstein at the country club?”
She flinches. I taste regret, copper and instant. I deserve the look she gives me, and I take it.
“Are you going to tell me?” she asks. “Or do I need to go back in time and ask the girl who didn’t know better to beg harder?”
I pace. One minute. Two. Old stone, new rage. When I finally turn back, the mask stays where I dropped it.
“He came to my father with a smile,” I say. “Said the right words about opportunity. Offered him a low marketing job he’d cobbled together the night before. Turned out it was because he needed a signature he could copy later and a patsy to take the fall.”
Her small gasp is horror-filled. And I’m at once furious and forgiving that she kept far away from her own father and never bothered to find out how he decimated mine.
