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“Oh,” she says, focusing on me with effort. “It’s the help.”

“That’s me.” I approach slowly and crouch a little next to her without getting too close. “And since I’m the help, I might as well ask if you need some. You want a hand?”

“From you?” She laughs, and it’s an awful sound, all ragged edges. “God, the little secretary wants to help me out. Isn’t that just lovely.”

She tries to pull herself up using the banister, but her foot slides again and she hits the ground, the wineglass tumbling out of her hand but, thankfully, landing on the runner without shattering into a million pieces.

I don’t think about it. You don’t, when you’ve spent your life around people coming apart. I just move in and get an arm under hers and take her weight.

“Don’t,” she says, even as she lets me. “Don’t you dare be kind to me. I can’t stand it.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” I lie. “Just don’t want to explain to your brother why his new assistant let his sister crack her head open on her first day on the job. Up we go. Lean on me. There you go.”

“Where are your rooms?” I ask, guiding her toward the stairs.

“This floor. Just… just down the hall. At the end.”

As we pass the stairs, she stops dead, swaying, and looks down the dark hall toward the staircase that goes up to the off-limits floor. Her face is tense, as if she’s scared.

“He’s up there, you know.” There’s a tinge of bitterness in her tone. “The old man. Our father. He’s up there, sitting in the dark in that room he never leaves. And you know why he does it? Because of what he’s done.”

She pauses, her eyes still fixed on the fourth floor. I don’t say a word.

“He’d never admit it. Not in a million years. But all the things he’s done… they weigh on him.” She raises a finger. It trembles. “But don’t get it twisted: He’s not sorry for any of it. Not ever. He’s just scared of the consequences. But if you ask me, I think the consequences are up there with him, like ghosts.”

She turns her eyes back to me, and I see unmistakable fear. “Run. It’s not too late. Take your kid and run and never come back.”

The hair stands up on my arms. I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say to a truth that big from a stranger on a staircase, and she’s already moving again, already pulling me on toward her own door.

“There,” she says, pointing. “That one.”

I get her into her beautiful room that’s gone to chaos: clothes everywhere, bottles on every surface, the curtains drawn. I get her onto the bed. I take her shoes off and pull a blanket up over her and set the wastebasket within reach of her head.

She’s mostly gone by then, sliding into oblivion. But as I straighten up to leave, her hand shoots out and catches my wrist, hard, and her eyes open and fix on me with a sudden, terrible clarity, like for one second the fog has burned all the way off.

“He was kind once,” she says. “Our father. Enzo pretends he never was. Maybe it’s easier to imagine that he never loved us than that he once did but stopped.” Her grip loosens. Her eyes drift. “It’s this house. This family. We’re cursed.”

Then she’s asleep, or close enough, her breathing deep and ragged.

I stand over Genevieve Accardi in the wreck of her beautiful room, and I think about what she said, what it could mean, how much truth there was to it.

And for the first time since I walked back through that gate, I let myself wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake.

CHAPTER 12

STEVIE

Iwalk out of Genevieve’s room with her last words, before passing out, playing over and over in my mind.

Cursed.

Then I see Enzo, and I stop breathing. He’s standing at the stairs, still as stone. It doesn’t even look like he’s breathing. The hall light catches one side of his face and leaves the other dark. His expression is blank, and that blankness is about the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen on a human face.

He knows.

“My study,” he says quietly. “Now.”

Luca got loud, like his anger was half a performance with an audience in mind. Not Enzo. Enzo is quiet, which is somehow worse.