Page 40 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

“Where I can find them. The foundation has the contacts. It’s just been using them in the wrong direction.”

“Your mother’s things,” she says quietly, and she gets there in one step because she’s watched me pick up each recovered piece and read the inventory number to confirm. “You’re building a machine to bring your mother’s things home, and everyone else’s with them.”

“The public mission is restitution, and I mean it. Bringing my mother’s things home is the part I won’t put in the annual report.” I drink my coffee, too strong, exactly as I like it and she doesn’t. “You’re the only one who’s said it plainly. Platon called it a statement. Angelina would call it a reckoning. You called it what it is.”

“I read provenance for a living. I know a thing pretending to be another thing when I see one.” She says it dryly, but then the dryness fades, and she looks at me without hiding what the decision means to her. “It’s a good thing you’re doing, Nikita. I don’t say that easily. I’ve spent my whole life around men who launder stolen things for buyers who will never care for them as their owners did. You’re the first one I’ve watched run it the other way.”

I don’t have a strategic response to that, and for once, I don’t search for one. We drink our coffee in a kitchen where no one is asking a question that requires either of us to lie, and I catch myself thinking this is what the mornings would be, the ordinary ones, ten thousand of them, if I clear the board in the right order and earn a life where this is just a normal day.

I don’t chase the thought off like I would have a month ago. I let it stay, which is the whole thing that’s new.

She catches me looking. “What is it?”

“Nothing. You have my shirt.”

“I have your whole closet. You’ve been too busy dismantling your father’s crimes to notice you own three shirts now.” She smiles into the cup, and I decide I want a thousand more mornings like this one.

My phone buzzes against the counter.

I almost don’t look. That’s the measure of how far this morning has taken me, that I almost ignore the alert. Then habit wins, because habit is four years deep and one good hour can’t outrank it. I turn the phone over.

The email is from Adrian, time-stamped six minutes ago, subject line Estate, Q3 public calendar, time-sensitive.

I open it standing in the kitchen with Piper three feet away, and the ease between us ends with the first line.

He’s attached an updated property schedule, which I expected. Under it is the part I didn’t. A calendar of public events tied to the estate across the next six weeks, a gala, two board dinners, a museum patrons’ evening, a preservation society luncheon, and beside each one, a line item that reads Recommend Mrs. Rusakov attend as the estate’s surviving representative. A visible, consistent widow settles the ownership questions circling the properties and reduces the likelihood of a challenge while we finalize the transfers. Her absence invites the scrutiny we’re trying to close.

The list holds five events, every one of them public, and every one a room where the widow’s face gets memorized by people who trade in whose face was where.

I read it twice, standing very still. The legal argument is sound, which is the part I don’t like. He wanted her in a public sale after Palm Beach. I refused him. Now he wants her at five events instead, slower, dressed as ownership housekeeping, and each one impossible to refuse without explaining a fear I can’t put in a reply to a lawyer. What bothers me is that I can’t tell which explanation is true, standing in a kitchen that was safe ninety seconds ago.

Piper reads it off my face before I say a word.

“What,” she says, and it isn’t a question now. “You drifted off. Who’s the email from?”

I set the phone down on the counter between us, screen up, and answer her in the voice I keep for the war and not the kitchen.

“Adrian sent the estate schedule. He wants you at five events.”

17

PIPER

Platon drops us at a boutique on Madison and will circle back for us when we call him, because a car idling outside a doctor who keeps no institutional records is a detail that ends up in someone’s file. I don’t want him reporting it to Nikita either.

We shop for exactly long enough to be seen doing it, then walk the rest of the way on foot. Maren loops her arm through mine and steers me east toward the address Mila texted this morning, a brownstone suite with no sign on the door, run by a doctor who keeps her own records under her own lock and never lets a name like mine near a hospital or insurer. “Did you sleep?”

“I slept some.”

“You’re a liar.” She doesn’t slow down or look at me, but she means it kindly. “Do you want to talk, or should I fill the air until we get there?”

“You should fill the air for me.”

She does, as she has since we were both broke and pretending not to be, a running commentary on everyone we pass, including the four-thousand-dollar coat over the two-dollar posture and the handbag that’s a very good fake she clocks instantly. She keeps it up the whole eight blocks, and I let it carry me, because if she stops, I’ll have to think about what I learned eighteen hours ago.

The suite is small and quiet, and it smells like nothing, which my queasy stomach appreciates. A woman at the desk takes my false name without blinking. Maren holds my hand in the waiting room, not gently, like you’d hold a rope, and neither of us says anything until my name that isn’t my name gets called.

“You’re coming in,” I tell her. It isn’t a question.