I lift my chin, willing the heat in my chest to show up as composure and not tears. “He’s loud and he’s vile and unconscionably self-centered, but he’s my father. And…I’m keeping him out of your way.”
“Loud people like audiences,” he says softly on a breath of quiet fury. “They don’t perform to empty halls. If he’s loud now, it’s because someone is listening.”
Before I can craft an answer that doesn’t confess, a PR woman in a coral dress materializes like a benevolent gargoyle and chirps that the chef is ready to present the crudo course and could we please do the toast again at the bow because the last photo caught a waiter in mid-sneeze.
I smile as if my teeth don’t hurt and let Vasso lead me forward because cameras are easier than honesty and I have made a habit of doing the thing I can control when the thing I should do feels fatal.
We perform with terrifying ease that doesn’t feel like a performance any longer. Because what I said on the deck was true. I’m containing my father for my husband because I treasure the latter way more than I do the former.
And it’s an emotion I recognize has just been barely dormant these last ten years, and is now rearing its head with a vengeance.
I love Vasso Dillinger.
Desperately.
I never stopped.
Dinneron the villa terrace later is a stunning watercolor, with candles guttering in glass chimneys and lemon trees giving up their perfume.
We sit with a trustee who rhapsodizes about bird migration, a journalist who will describe my dress as “old-money simple,” and Mara, who is the only person I know who can drink espresso at ten p.m. and then sleep. I perform wife with finesse and just enough heat to sell headlines, and if my phone vibrates in my evening bag while I’m laughing at something Vasso murmurs, I let it. Off means off. Off means a reprieve measured in hours.
When we finally retreat to our suite—a white room with a view that makes the moon look like an expensive prop—I go straight to the dressing table and pull open the shallow drawer where I placed the velvet box earlier, the way a penitent checkswhether the reliquary is still holding the saint’s finger. Habit; penance; I don’t know. My hand expects weight.
There isn’t any.
For a second my mind simply… refuses. The drawer is lined in pale suede; the impression from the box is faintly visible, the ghost of what I put there before a day of makeup and microphones and a day pretending I didn’t make a bargain I hate.
The drawer is empty.
The space where the necklace shouldn’t be but where its box should be, where the proof of my lie should have remained hidden until I could make it right—empty.
Behind me, I hear the soft hiss of linen as Vasso shrugs out of his jacket, the catch of a cufflink he removes without looking. He crosses the room, kisses the hinge of my jaw as if the day hasn’t been chewing mine to bone, and reaches past me for his watch laid on the table. His gaze follows my hand into the drawer out of simple curiosity, perhaps, or because of the charged stillness I can’t quite mask. Or, even better and worse, he’s playing his own game.
“What are you looking for?” he asks, mild as a man asking whether I’ve misplaced a comb. But I hear the quiet sonic boom beneath the question.
“The…” My tongue feels enormous in my mouth, clumsy. I swallow and try again. “The box. It isn’t here.”
He frowns, not in suspicion—yet—but in the way of a man remodeling a sentence in his head. “Which box?”
“The necklace,” I say, and hear the small wreck in my voice because there is no way to replace it with poise now. “I— it’s not here.”
The room changes temperature, not dramatically, not enough to make a scene, just enough that the hair at the nape of my neck pays attention. He looks down into the drawer, thenat my face, then at the drawer again as if a thing might manifest under the pressure of his gaze.
“Naomi,” he says, and my name in that tone is a closed door and a hand on the knob. “Where could the necklace possibly be?”
My mouth opens. The truth sprints for my teeth and slams into a wall I built with my own hands—a wall called protect him, protect us, protect the deal, protect the life you are trying to have without burning it down to build it. Behind my ribs something knocks, hard, like a creature trying to get out.
“I—I—” I start, and the word fractures.
Because between those two feeble words, I’ve found the gap between what you mean to say and what you don’t.
And plunged a knife between my own ribs.
20
VASSO
Iwatch Naomi twists her fingers together and the idiot in me wants to alleviate her distress.
