She stands at the dressing table like she’s bracing for a guilty verdict, the velvet drawer open like a mouth mid-denial.
“The box…it isn’t here,” she said, and her voice has the wrong kind of break in it.
I cross the room without touching her, reach past the brush and the neat line of lipsticks, and open the lower cabinet where housekeeping stashes spare stationery.
The boxwasthere—empty—exactly where I found it thirty minutes ago when she stepped out to “freshen up” and I went looking for… what? Confirmation? A reason not to ask?
I walk over to the nightstand drawer where I left it, retrieve it, and set the velvet square on the table between us on the bed.
“The box is here, Naomi. Now what I want to know is, where’s the necklace?” My tone is quiet. Chilled. I can hear Eleni in it—my mother when she has decided the house will be clean even if it takes the bones of the day to do it.
Naomi’s throat moves. Her hands—those beautiful careful hands that salted the tomatoes at the right time, that steadiedmy mother’s knife—flatten on the bed as if she can pin the truth there and make it stop bucking.
“I gave it to him,” she says. “To stop him.”
There it is. The line that opens an old door and invites every draft in the house to wake up and move.
“Him,” I say, although we both know the name. “After everything he’s done. After seeing my mother’s hands. After promising to stand on the right side of the ledger, you sent Harrison the necklace I gave you.”
She flinches like I used the blade instead of the name. “To stop him,” she repeats, fiercer, as if emphasis can buy absolution. “He was threatening to leak that the marriage is… not permanent. He said he could poison the trust. He said?—”
“He said jump,” I finish, “and you asked how high without a second thought.”
“That’s not fair.”
“There’s that word again. How very easy it is for you to spit it out when I don’t think you know its true meaning,” I growl. “I’m not auditioning for fair.”
She lifts her chin in that way that used to make me want to kiss her into laughing and now makes my old scars hum. “I chose to protect you.”
“Did you.” I can hear the old driveway in my mouth. Asphalt heat. Rose thorns. Letters tossed in a bin while a man in a nice suit praised a fixer’s efficiency. “You chose for me. You chose instead of me.” I force the next words out evenly. “That’s not protection. That’s your father’s poisoned legacy in a prettier dress.”
Color floods her cheeks. “You’re wrong. I’mnothim.”
“Then stop acting like him.” I point to the box as if it can translate. “He picks up the phone and decides who should dance at the end of his puppet strings and calls it strategy. You call it…whatever twisted version of love this is.”
Her laugh is a sharp, hopeless sound. “Don’t you dare. Do you think I don’t know he diminishes everything he touches? I have been putting out fires he lights since I was old enough to understand why my mother slept with her jewelry in a safe and her heart in a box that turned out not to be as strong as she would’ve liked. I know exactly what my father…what Harrison. Chaos in motion.”
“Then why,” I ask, soft enough that it bruises, “do you bother to think you can contain him? And why the fuck wouldn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes glaze with wet. Anger, humiliation, grief—it looks the same on every woman who has learned to carry it well.
“Because you were…are on the cusp of getting what you want. Because…because your mother finally called me Naomi and she looked at me with kind eyes, and so no, I didn’t want to walk in there and say, ‘By the way, I am still the girl who ruins things.’ Because he said he would make calls that wrecked your plans, and I knew he could, and I knew we were finally holding something good, and I knew—” She breaks off, breath shredding. “Because I panicked. Because I wanted to save it.”
I breathe through the part of me that wants to fold her into my chest and say,Fine. We’ll fix it.I breathe through the part of me that has been waiting ten years to be let in without being told to clean up.
“After everything, Naomi.” I don’t raise my voice because I don’t need to. Because it would wrench open floodgates that hide bigger, heavier things. Things likeforever. Andplease please please love me back. “After you stood on a balcony and told me you didn’t know and I told you and you touched my face and I thought—” I shut my eyes for one ruthless beat and open them again. “You chose him again. Over trusting me.”
“I chose to keep you from being ambushed in a boardroom.” Her hands lift, useless, fall. “I chose the thing I could do in the moments I had.”
I slam the empty box shut because I can’t bear to see the evidence of her betrayal. “And I won’t be blindsided again.” The words arrive without heat, a signed order. “If you can’t stand with me, don’t stand near me.”
She sucks a breath like I’ve driven a fist under her ribs. “Don’t say that.”
“Standwithme,” I say, the plea stripped to its bones, “or stop calling what you’re doing protection.”
“And what are you doing?” she fires back, raw. “This is… fury at Harrison—fine, earned—but there’s something else, Vasso. There always is. You hold me up with one hand and you hold me at arm’s length with the other. You hold me like you l…desire me but you treat me like a tool for your own ends.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
