Chapter Ten
HE CALLED ADRIANO FIRST.
Not because Adriano was closest. Because Adriano was the one person who would hear the thing Olivio was about to say and not flinch, not lecture, not pause with the heaviness of a man weighing whether his son had finally broken. Adriano Kontides was a lawyer and a friend and a man who'd once destroyed his own marriage and rebuilt it with his bare hands, and if anyone was going to understand what Olivio needed right now, it was him.
The phone rang twice.
Olivio stood at the window of his office, the same window where he'd stood on Day Eight while Chelsea made tea in the apartment below, the same view of Toronto's skyline that used to look like competence and now looked like a city full of places where his wife could disappear. The glass threw his reflection back at him: a man in a suit, standing in a corner office on the fifty-second floor of a building with his name on it, and none of it could tell him where she was.
"Olivio." Adriano's voice was even, controlled, the voice of a man who'd spent twenty years in courtrooms learning that the first person to rush was the first person to lose.
"Is she with you?"
A pause.
And the pause was wrong. It wasn't the pause of a man who didn't know what Olivio was talking about. It was the pause of a man choosing his words, and the choosing was itself an answer, and Olivio's hand tightened on the phone until the edges bit into his palm.
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm not lying. She's not with us." Another pause. "But Shayla's been trying to reach her for the past hour. Olivio, what happened?"
The question was simple. The answer was not.
Olivio closed his eyes. Beyond the glass, a crane was moving on the Yorkville site, steel and cable swinging against the pale sky with the mechanical patience of something that didn't care about the chaos happening fifty-two floors above it.
"I made a mistake." The words came out harder than he intended. Wrong shape. Too small for the thing they were trying to hold. "She thinks I stayed married to her to close a deal."
"The Marquez property."
Of course Adriano knew. That was what happened when your closest friend was a man who read contracts the way other people read novels and who'd been watching Olivio's marriage with the attention of someone who recognized the early symptoms of a disease he'd survived.
"Did you?" No judgment in the question. Just the clean, surgical directness that made Adriano the most effective lawyer Olivio had ever known.
"Yes."
A beat.
