Page 20 of Merciless Daddy

“Yes, Papa.”

“Understood?”

“Understood.”

He nodded once and was finished with me, the ledger closed.

Gianni, of course, could not leave anything closed.

“You know what I think?” He said it to the car at large, and his hand came off the seat back and landed on my knee. Landed and stayed. “I think my little bird enjoyed it. All those questions from the family accountant. Compressors, contractors. He looked at you like a man reading a menu, ptichka. Did you like that? Being read?”

His fingers spread on my knee, over the silk. Not gripping. Testing. He wanted the flinch. I did not give him the satisfaction. Instead, I looked down at his hand with the mild, distant interest of a woman noticing lint.

“The family accountant,” I repeated. “Is that what he is? He didn’t count like an accountant. He counted like an owner.”

“He counts other men’s money. It’s what the Chicago branch is for now.” Gianni’s hand tightened a fraction. “Answer the question. Did you enjoy the attention?”

“Enjoy it?” I let the words sit a moment, as though I were genuinely weighing them, and then I gave him my sweetest voice, the one with the razor folded inside it. “Gianni. He wasn’t admiring me. He was surprised. A man hears a woman produce accurate figures and it startles him, the way a talking horse startles people—not because the horse is brilliant, but because it’s a horse.” I turned my head and looked at my fiancé fully for the first time since the restaurant. “Competence looks remarkable in your company because it’s rare there. You should hire better lawyers. Then no one at any table will ever be surprised by anything again.”

For a second I watched it work through him—the sentence entering, searching for something to wound, finding the lawyers and settling there, because Gianni could survive any insult that came with someone else attached to blame. His jaw moved. My father made a low sound that might have been amusement and might have been a warning, and was probably, being my father, both.

“The lawyers,” Gianni said. “Yes. Idiots. I’m dealing with the lawyers.” His hand left my knee to gesture, because Gianni could not be angry without conducting it, and I breathed for the first time in a mile.

Then the car slowed for the ramp, and he found his target.

“Why are we on the Belt?” He leaned forward, toward the partition, his voice climbing. “Hey. Old man. Why are we on the Belt? The Belt at this hour, with the construction — what are you, a tourist? You take the parkway, everyone knows you take the parkway—“

The driver’s eyes came up in the mirror. He was seventy if he was a day, a good man; he had driven my mother to her chemotherapy and never once let her see him cry.

“—maybe your license expires with the rest of you, maybe it’s time somebody looked at whether—”

“I asked him to take the water.”

It came out smooth. Unhurried. I said it to the window, as if confessing a small vanity, and I felt the whole car pivot toward me.

“You asked him,” Gianni said.

“Before we left. I wanted to see the ocean.” I gave a small shrug, the useless-ornamental shrug, the one that had bought me safe passage through a hundred rooms. “Three weeks of fittings and florists and lawyers ahead of me. I wanted ten minutes of water first. Blame the bride, Gianni. The driver only did as he was told, which I’m given to understand is the whole virtue of drivers.”

The old man’s eyes found mine in the mirror for one half-second. I did not acknowledge them. That’s the rule; the kindness dies if anyone sees it change hands.

Gianni sat back. He looked at me for a long moment, and something unpleasant happened in his face—not anger. Comprehension. He was vain and he was lazy and he had never in his life read a contract to the end, but he was not, whatever I preferred to believe on my better days, entirely stupid. He’d watched me do it now. The wine glass at the restaurant weeks ago. The waiter tonight. The driver. He was assembling the pattern, and I watched him arrive at it, and I kept my face turned to the black water sliding past because there was nothing else to do.

He leaned in close. His cologne arrived first. His mouth stopped an inch from my ear, and his voice came out low and warm, for me alone, in the register other men used for endearments.

“I see what you do,” he said. “The little rescues. Stepping in front of things. Very touching, ptichka. Very noble.” His hand returned to my knee, and this time it gripped. “Enjoy it. Three more weeks. After the wedding, my wife does not manage me in front of other people. My wife will have other ways to occupy her hands.”

He sat back, satisfied, and looked out his own window, a man restored.

Across the car, my father watched the ocean and said nothing, and the manifest burned against my ribs like a coal I intended to build a fire with.

Gianni’s men stayed with the cars. He didn’t. I heard his shoes on the marble behind me before I reached the third stair, and I understood the evening wasn’t finished with me yet.

My father had already gone toward his study without a good night, and the house had arranged itself into its evening quiet. Gianni climbed the stairs behind me at a pace calibrated to say I go where I like in this house. Which was almost true. Three more weeks and it would be entirely true.

I could have turned at the landing. Made an excuse. But excuses are ammunition and I was running low, so I walked to my door with my spine straight.

He came in behind me without asking, and closed the door.