“Jill,” Tammy said gently. “You’re doing it again.”
Jill glanced back at the floating debris. “Oh. Sorry.” Everything dropped. “Sorry. I’m just—from a procedural standpoint, the lighter is critical because it demonstratespremeditation to frame a third party, which elevates the charge from?—“
“Jill.”
“Right. Breathing.” She breathed.
Tony walked back twenty minutes later. He’d handed Claudia off to two officers from the county sheriff’s department, and now he stood in front of me, hands in his coat pockets, face lit by the ambulance lights. Soot on his collar. Smoke in his hair.
“She’s talking,” he said. “Already. Hasn’t shut up since I put the cuffs on.”
“Talking about what?”
“George. How he did it. How she was trying to protect the family. How she only came here tonight because she was afraid of what he might do to you.” His voice was flat. Disgusted. “She’s still performing. She’ll perform through booking, through arraignment, probably through the trial. But the lighter—” one of the crime scene techs had found it, bagged it and showed it to Tony. “That’s her mistake. She planted his evidence at her own crime scene. Hard to claim you’re the scared wife when you’re carrying your husband’s lighter to an arson and murder.”
He sat down on the bumper next to me. The ambulance creaked. His shoulder was against mine, solid and warm and smelling like smoke and coffee and the rumpled-suit exhaustion of a man who’d just run into a burning building.
“How’d you know?” I asked.
“Jill called. Said you were meeting Claudia alone and she had a bad feeling.” He paused. “I’ve learned not to ignore bad feelings lately.”
He didn’t ask about the fire. About the scorch patterns on the floor. About how I was sitting here without a single burn while the room I’d been in was gutted.
Not yet. But he would. And I’d tell him. Somehow.
“Lock your door tonight,” he said.
“You say that every time.”
“You need to hear it every time.”
His hand was on the bumper between us. An inch from mine. Neither of us moved it closer. Neither of us moved it away.
From the dark window of the ambulance, Rosaria’s reflection watched the officers load Claudia into a squad car. Her expression was something I’d never seen from her before—not satisfaction, not triumph, not even relief.
Grief. For the family she’d built, and the woman who’d dismantled it from the inside, one perfect smile at a time.
“She fooled me,” Rosaria said quietly. “Thirty years in my family and I did not see what she was.” A pause. “I suppose we are not so different in that regard, Gina. We both trusted women who were performing.”
I didn’t answer. Not out loud. But I wrapped the blanket tighter around my shoulders and watched the squad car’s taillights disappear down Marsh Road, and something between us—me and the ghost in the glass, the two women Claudia had fooled—felt less like a truce and more like an understanding.
The kind you earn by surviving the same thing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nick was standingon my porch holding a grocery store bouquet and looking like he'd rather be anywhere else on Earth.
"Hey, Mom."
Two words. Two words I hadn't heard from my son in over a year. He stood there in his dental school jacket with his father's face and his grandmother's stubborn jaw, gripping those cellophane-wrapped carnations like a life preserver, and I wanted to cry and hug him and shake him and ask him why it took someone trying to kill me for him to show up.
Instead I said, "Those are pretty."
"They're cheap. The good ones were sold out." He shifted his weight. "Can I come in?"
I held the door open.
It had been five days since the fire on Marsh Road. Five days since Claudia was arrested. Five days since the Ferraro family had its foundation cracked open and everyone had to decide what to do with the rubble.
