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The forged marriage and the real one require the identical documents. Only the honesty differs.
I pour a drink I don’t touch and look out at the gardeners who aren’t gardeners, my mind on a courthouse in Boston that has no record of us. How easily that empty file could be made full.
The honest thing would take a ring, a question, and more courage than I’ve needed in a long time. Maybe ever.
I pick up the phone and start the forgery, because the coward’s version I can execute tonight. The brave one means asking her, and she’s leaving at some point. There’s no point in asking when I know the answer. That’s what I should have told Nick.
Piano music floats through the walls. I sit in the dark and listen to my wife who isn’t my wife teach my daughter how to play the instrument as I make my calls.
15
VEDA
A call comes while I’m testing Sarah’s dexterity with a deck of cards on the sunroom floor. The screen shows a name I’ve been dodging for a while now. I answer it because Sarah is watching, and I’ve run out of nerve to look guilty in front of her.
“Mark.” I keep my voice bright, aimed at the six-year-old dealing me a crooked hand. “Hey. This is a surprise.”
“Is it?” My brother’s voice is flat. “Two weeks, Vee. Two weeks of texts, a cypress tree, a wine joke. And a wedding I found out about from a stranger’s Instagram.”
I stand and wave Sarah toward the kitchen where Diana is preparing zeppole, then step onto the terrace with the phone pressed to my ear and the lake wind sweeping over me. Through the glass, I see Sarah climb onto her stool at the counter, while Diana hands her a spoon to lick. The simple domestic scene makes what I’m about to do seem like a crime scene.
“It’s a long story,” I start.
“I have a flight’s worth of time. I’m somewhere over Greenland. I ran your credit cards, Veda. No charges in weeks except one coffee in Boston the morning you disappeared.”
A charge I didn’t make. “Mark—”
“The phone pings a tower outside Milan and hasn’t moved since. Your work badge hasn’t clocked in. Adeline posted a screenshot that looks like a hostage video.”
“This isn’t a simple conversation to have over the phone.”
“Do you really think I care about simple at a time like this?”
“Well, no—”
“I got on a plane, and I’m heading to you, so whatever you want to tell me, now’s the time.”
The lake goes wide and cold in front of me. My brother builds machines that read the world, and he reads code like it’s in English. I forgot that a sister leaves a trail those machines can track, and that no one on earth tracks like Mark.
We were the two left after the crash. Fifteen years of him three thousand miles away and still somehow the first call when anything cracked. I taught him to drive. He taught me that love, in our family, looks like showing up uninvited with a duffel bag and a gut feeling.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“You married a man who has no wedding record anywhere I can reach, and I can reach damn near anywhere. Try again.”
Shit.
I am out of options. Tell Mark the truth—kidnapped, fake marriage—and my brother turns his considerable competence straight at Lupo.
And Lupo protects his world the same as he protects his daughter. Absolutely. Creatively.
Two men at odds, measuring each other for a coffin, if I don’t answer this right.
Adeline’s screenshot did this. I know it.
I can’t even be angry—she was scared, and she showed my brother a text that read like a ransom note because it was one, near enough. Everyone who loves me is closing in from a different direction, and I’m on a terrace holding them all off with the same two syllables.
I’m fine.
