I wasn't sure which was more dangerous.
"I'm sorry to keep you both waiting." Emilio came through the door slightly breathless and set a file on the desk in front of Constantine's empty chair. "Last minute intel." He caught my eye briefly and I watched him decide something before he looked away.
Constantine moved from the window and took his seat. He didn't open the file immediately. He looked at me first with a long considering look that I held without flinching, because flinching in front of men like this was something you learned not to do early.
"Ms. Avola," he said. "You're in a lot of trouble."
I thought about the car ride. About the way he'd laughed when I'd said fucking Venosas — the surprised laugh of a man who hadn't expected to be amused. About the way he'd shared the family history without heat, almost ruefully, like a man observing an absurd situation from a slight distance. About the way he'd said I understand more than you think and meant it.
I thought about all of that and I decided to be still and let him lead.
"The strong silent type, hmm?" He opened the file. "You left Sicily just over a month ago. Is that correct?"
"That's correct." I wasn't going to volunteer anything he didn't already have.
"You traveled under your own passport. First class to Paris, connecting to Chicago." He turned a page without looking up."You withdrew a significant amount of cash from the household accounts over four months prior to leaving." A brief pause. "Methodical."
I said nothing.
"A woman named Nicola Espinoza helped you escape."
The name hit me like a hand around my throat.
I stared at him.
I hadn't said her name. Not once, not to anyone in Chicago, not to Jacob, not to the woman at the apartment office, not in any conversation I'd had since I landed. I had kept Nicola out of everything because keeping her name out of things was the one protection I could still offer her from this distance.
Constantine's eyes were on me. Not unkind. Not satisfied. Just watching, with the careful attention of a man who understood that what happened next mattered.
"I know you don't trust me, Cecilia." He said my name differently than he'd been saying it — not Ms. Avola, not the formal distance of an interrogation. My name. "But you're going to have to."
He picked up a photograph and slid it across the desk toward me.
I looked down at it.
Nicola's car. I recognized it immediately — the small blue Fiat she'd had since we were eighteen, the one with the cracked side mirror she'd never gotten fixed because she said it gave the car character. It was in a ditch off the road that ran along the vineyard's eastern boundary. The one she would have taken home after dropping me at the airport.
"This doesn't prove anything." My voice came out steadier than I felt. I slid it back across the desk. Neither of us missed the way my hand was shaking.
Emilio leaned forward and set two newspaper clippings in front of me.
I read the first headline.
Then the second.
The office went very quiet. I could hear the rain against the thick glass. I could hear my own breathing, shallow and strange, like someone had reached into my chest and was slowly compressing everything inside it.
Nicola.
She'd driven home in the dark after leaving me at the airport. She'd driven home on that road, the one she'd driven a thousand times, and someone had been waiting for her. Someone who knew she'd helped me. Someone my father had sent, or authorized, or simply not stopped.
She was twenty-two years old. She had her whole life in front of her. She had plans — a job she loved, a flat she'd just painted yellow because she said yellow rooms made mornings easier, a man she'd been seeing for three months who she'd described to me in such careful detail that I knew she was trying not to hope too hard.
She had driven me to the airport in the dark and smiled through her tears and said you bet your ass I will and driven home and someone had been waiting.
Because of me.
A tear fell from my eye and landed on the paper with a splat. I stared at it. Then I looked up at Constantine Venosa and the question came out as barely a whisper.
