Then I put the folder back exactly where I found it, spin the dial back to zero, close the false panel, and walk out of that house with my face arranged into something that will pass for normal.
Anastasio straightens up against the car when he sees me coming.
"Well?"
"Nothing." I get in, pull the door shut. "Waste of a trip. There's nothing in there."
He watches me for a second too long before he starts the engine. "You sure?"
"I'm sure."
He pulls out onto the street, and I watch Gravesend slide past the window, the house shrinking in the side mirror until it's just another gray shape on a block full of them.
Somewhere past the bridge, nausea rolls through me in one long wave, and my mouth fills with something bitter and metallic that has nothing to do with the coffee I had this morning.
I don't examine it.
I've got too much else to hold right now.
30
LYDIA
The phone sitsface up on my knee, screen dark, and I still haven't stopped seeing what's on it.
Terminal 7.
My father's firm's name on the incorporation papers, Vincent D'Ambrosio's name three lines below as the man who brought him in, matter-of-fact, like it belongs there. I photographed four pages in a shaking hallway in Gravesend this morning. I've looked at them maybe thirty times since, and every time my stomach drops the same half inch.
Frank's photos are still open in another tab. Bruises on a woman's arm that used to be my mother's, that used to be the one I remember. The word relapse sitting under them in his stupid all-caps text like he's proud of the word.
I have all of it at once. That's the part nobody warns you about, how it doesn't come one thing at a time so you can handle each piece before the next one arrives. It just sits there, all of it, all together, and you're supposed to keep breathing anyway.
I keep breathing anyway.
The taste in my mouth is bitter, metal almost, the same one from the car ride back from my father's house, and I tell myself it's the granola bar I ate too fast, or the coffee, or nerves. It has to be nerves. There's plenty to be nervous about.
I don't let myself think it might be something else. Not yet.
For about four minutes,I want to tell Nico everything.
I get as far as standing up. I get as far as the hallway, my hand already halfway to knocking on the door of his study, my mouth already shaping the first few words. I know what happened to my father. I think I know who did it.
I don't knock.
Because I know exactly what he'd do with it. He'd go quiet, that terrible calm quiet he gets, and he'd start making calls. It would take days, maybe weeks, moving pieces around a board only he can see, and at the end of all that patience there'd be bodies. There always are, with him. That's not a guess. That's watching how this family solves problems, up close, for weeks now.
My mother doesn't have weeks. She might not have days.
So I stand in the hallway with my hand still raised, lower it, go back to the room, and sit back down on the bed like nothing happened, because nothing did. That's the whole horror of it. Nothing happened. I just decided something in a hallway, alone, and no one will ever know I stood there at all.
What I'm about to hand Frank isn't just paperwork. I know that. Nico told me about Terminal 7 at the club itself, on the mezzanine, with his guard all the way down, the one place he keeps the worst of what his father made him do, the one thing in his life he still calls his own instead of his father's. He gave me that unguarded. He's never shown that place to anyone else, not once, and I'm about to put it in Frank Carpenter's hands like it's a poker chip.
I think about the first month of this marriage, the shame that used to climb up my throat when some part of me wanted Nico to take control instead of fighting him for it. I hated myself for that for a long time. I told myself it was the only ugly thing about me, the one wire crossed wrong, and if I could just manage that, I'd be fine.
That shame doesn't feel like the big one anymore.
Because underneath the coercion, underneath Frank and the photos and my mother's arm and all of it, there's a small, cold, awake part of me that wants Nico to lose something. Not because I have to give Frank something. Because I think my husband killed my father, and some ugly, unlit room in me wants him to pay for that before I even know for certain that he did.
