And I took Lydia there and showed her every inch of it.
"Anastasio."
"Yeah."
"How."
He doesn't answer right away, and that's when I know he's already been turning it over, already doesn't like the conclusion.
"I drove her to Gravesend," he says. "Couple days back. She told me it was about Frank. She didn't say what, exactly, and I didn't push, because what am I gonna do, follow my boss's wife around like she's a suspect."
"But."
"But she was gone four hours for a coffee with a friend. And she came back different. Quiet. And now I'm sitting here doing math I don't want to do."
I close my eyes.
I don't need the rest of it. I don't need the name of the friend, or the address in Gravesend, or the specific hour she handed something over to somebody who was never a friend at all. I know the shape of it the second Anastasio stops talking. I don't need to see the proof to know it's true.
It's her.
These last few days, her pulling away from me in bed, in conversation, and in every small room where we used to be easy with each other. A solo trip with an excuse that stalled halfway out of her mouth. I told myself it was Frank. I told myself it was her mother in that hospital bed, the weight of all of it pressing her flat. I let myself believe almost anything except the one thing that was sitting right there the whole time.
"Nico." Anastasio again. "You still there."
"I'm here."
"What do you want me to do."
"Nothing," I say. "Not yet."
I hang up before he can ask me what I mean by that.
I findher in the kitchen an hour later, standing at the counter with a mug of coffee she isn't drinking, her hair still damp fromthe shower, and something in her face already braced like she's been waiting for this exact moment to walk through the door.
"Terminal 7," I say.
She doesn't ask what about it. That's the first thing that tells me. A woman caught off guard would ask what happened, would look confused, would reach for her phone. Lydia sets the mug down on the counter very carefully, like the sound of it against the granite might set something off, and she looks at me.
"I heard," she says.
"You heard." I take a step into the room. "It got raided at five this morning. They went straight for the safe. Straight for the real books. Nobody finds that safe by accident,piccola. Somebody had to show them the door."
The word comes out of me bitter. I don't mean it to. It comes out anyway, the last soft thing I have for her, twisted around into something closer to an accusation than an endearment.
"Say it," I tell her. "Just say it."
For a second I think she's going to lie to me. I watch her face for it, watch for the tell she's never quite been good at hiding. But she doesn't lie. She lifts her chin instead, and something in her shifts from defense into attack, fast, all at once.
"Fine," she says. "It was me."
The kitchen goes very quiet.
"I gave Frank the incorporation papers," she says. "The real ones, from the safe. I don't know exactly what he did with them, and I don't want to know. But I gave them to him because he had photographs of what he did to my mother, Nico. Recentones, from her hospital bed. He said he'd release them, put them everywhere, her face, everyone we know. He said he'd send video to your father's whole world of exactly what kind of woman you married. And then he said if that wasn't enough motivation, he'd make sure my mother's ventilator had a bad night."
Her voice cracks once, right in the middle of that sentence, and then hardens right back up.
"So yes. I did it. I handed him what he wanted so my mother could keep breathing and so I didn't have to watch myself get destroyed in every group chat your family owns."
