“I’ll look into it,” he said. “No promises. And I’m going to need you to come back with something more concrete than ‘I know things.’”
“Fair enough.”
I stood too, gathered my purse, and turned toward the door. Behind me, I heard him pick up his phone.
Rosaria appeared one more time, a shimmer in the glass door as I pushed it open.
“He does not believe you,” she said.
“No,” I agreed quietly. “But he’s going to look anyway.”
“That is something.” She paused. “He has good posture, at least. For a man who clearly lives on caffeine and stubbornness.”
I walked out the door and didn’t dignify that with a response.
CHAPTER FIVE
Carmen’s textcame at six in the morning:Dad’s clearing out the garage Saturday. Your last boxes are still in there. Paula says come get them before he dumps everything. I’ll be there. Please come.
I read it three times, standing in the kitchen in my bathrobe, coffee going cold in my hand. My last boxes. The ones I hadn’t grabbed when I’d moved out because I’d been too busy shoving clothes and toiletries into suitcases and trying not to cry in front of the movers.
Three months ago I’d taken what I could carry and fled to Aunt Amelia’s cottage, and whatever was left in that garage had been sitting there since, waiting for me to come back for it. Probably the things Sal hadn’t bothered to notice — my grandmother’s recipe tin, the photo albums from before digital, the Christmas ornaments the kids had made in elementary school that he’d never cared about because decorating was my job.
“Paula suggested it,” Rosaria said from the toaster’s chrome side. She looked smug, which was impressive for a reflection the size of a playing card. “She was always susceptible. A little nudge in the right direction and she picks up the phone.”
I turned the toaster to face the wall. “You put this idea in Paula’s head?”
“I cannot move objects or dial telephones. But I can... suggest. When someone is open to it.” Rosaria’s voice carried the faintest hint of satisfaction. “Paula was thinking about you already. Missing you, though she would never admit it. I simply gave the thought a push.”
“That’s manipulative.”
“That is efficient. I need you in that house, Gina. I need your eyes where mine cannot go anymore. I need you to find out what my family is up to.”
I didn’t want to go. Every cell in my body was voting against it. But the recipe tin had been my grandmother’s, and Carmen would be there, and underneath the dread was something I didn’t want to examine too closely — I wanted to see my kids.
“Fine,” I told the toaster. “But you don’t get to coach me. I’m getting my boxes and I’m leaving.”
Rosaria said nothing, which was her version of agreeing to nothing.
The house sat on a hill in a suburb overlooking the ocean, and pulling into the driveway felt like driving back into a life I’d already shed. Sal had bought it when his practice took off — too big, too new, trying too hard. Rosaria had picked out every tile and fixture, because Sal’s idea of decorating was a recliner and a TV, and I’d spent fifteen years living in my mother-in-law’s taste and pretending it was mine. Three months ago I’d walked out the front door with two suitcases and a garbage bag of shoes and hadn’t been back since.
Three cars were already parked out front. I recognized Sal’s BMW, George and Claudia’s SUV, and Paula’s paint-splattered Subaru. Carmen’s little Honda was tucked at the end of the row.
I sat in my car for a full minute, hands on the steering wheel, breathing the way Lori had taught me. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Don’t set anything on fire.
Carmen met me at the front door. She threw her arms around me before I’d even crossed the threshold, and I held on longer than I should have, breathing in her shampoo, feeling her solid and real and here. Twenty-three years old and still the bravest person I knew.
“You look good, Mom,” she said, pulling back to study me. “Rested.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, you look alive. That’s an improvement over last time.”
The foyer opened into the living room, where Josie was sitting on the couch scrolling her phone.
She glanced up when I walked in, and for half a second something moved across her face — not warmth, exactly, but recognition. The muscle memory of a daughter seeing her mother. Her lips parted. Her phone lowered an inch. Then her eyes flicked to the dining room, where Sal’s voice was carrying, and whatever she’d been about to say retreated behind her teeth. She gave me a nod so small it barely qualified as a facial movement and looked back down.
That nod. Twenty-eight years of raising her, and I got a nod. But it was the glance toward her father that stayed with me — the checking, the calibrating. She’d looked at Sal the way you look at a boss before you speak out of turn.
