Chapter 2
The plane hit the runway at JFK with the small definite jolt of a landing done by someone competent. Sophie began to pack her backpack with the meticulous choreography of a child who had rehearsed this in her head.
encils in one pocket. Sketchbook in the main compartment. The red hair clips, which had loosened during the flight, retied with two decisive motions in front of the reflective surface of her tray table.
“Bye,” she said, standing up. “It was nice sitting near you.”
“It was nice sitting near you, Sophie.”
She smiled — the gap-toothed smile — and disappeared into the aisle.
At the exit, a woman was waiting for her. Thirty-five. Dark curls. The specific alertness of someone who worked twelve-hour shifts in an emergency ward and had learned to read a face in the first two seconds of looking at it.
She reached down for Sophie’s hand.
And glanced up at Alessandro as he passed.
She looked at him for perhaps three seconds. It was enough.
“Camille talks about New York,” she said, very quietly, in accented English, “when she thinks Sophie is not listening.”
Alessandro held her gaze. He said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not be either too much or too little.
She did not require an answer. She turned Sophie gently toward the customs line.
Sophie looked back once over her shoulder and waved. A small, unceremonious wave.
He watched them go.
On the tarmac, in the cold air between the plane and the terminal, he dialed a number he did not have to look up.
Enzo Marchetti picked up on the second ring.
“Camille Durant. Paris. Everything. Tonight.”
He ended the call.
He did not go back to the Tribeca apartment. He gave the driver the address of the office instead — the Vitali Holdings tower on Fifty-Third, forty-seventh floor, corner suite — and rode the elevator up in silence with a security guard he had known for eight years and who understood that some nights the boss came in at ten p.m. and did not want to be greeted.
Enzo Marchetti arrived thirty-five minutes later in a coat still buttoned wrong from the speed at which he had left his own apartment.
“Everything you have on her by two a.m.,” Alessandro said.
Enzo did not ask why. Enzo had been Alessandro’s consigliere for eleven years and had made his career on the specific art of not asking why.
He sat up in the conference room down the hall and did not come back until a quarter to two, carrying a slim gray folder and a laptop and the closed expression of a man who had spent four hours reading about a life.
“Sit down,” Alessandro said.
Enzo sat.
“Camille Laurent. Thirty-three. Illustrator. Children’s books mainly, plus some editorial work for a French parenting magazine.
Has her own studio in the Eleventh Arrondissement. Small. Works from the apartment mostly. Never married. No serious partner on record for the last four years. Nothing before that either.”
He paused.
“Nothing after New York.”
He looked at Alessandro.
“Kept going.” Enzo’s voice was careful. “Lives on the third floor of a building on Rue des Tournelles in the Marais. Two-bedroom.
Ground-floor pastry shop. No doorman. Has one child. Sophie Laurent. Six years old. Enrolled at the École Massillon in the Fourth. Very good student. Speaks three languages.”
Alessandro did not move.
Enzo opened the laptop and turned it so Alessandro could see the screen. Then, one by one, he set printed photographs on the desk.
Sophie in a red coat at the Jardin du Luxembourg, chasing pigeons.
Sophie in a navy uniform on what a hand-lettered chalkboard behind her identified as *First Day of School*.
Sophie, cheeks full of air, leaning over a cake with six candles on it. Camille visible at the edge of the frame. Laughing.
Alessandro looked at each one and said nothing. He did not touch them. He did not need to.
Seven minutes passed. Enzo counted because he counted things like that. In eleven years, he had never seen his boss go so long without speaking with a folder open in front of him.
At the end of the seven minutes, Alessandro stood up.
“Go home, Enzo.”
“Sir —”
“I need to see my sister.”
He took the elevator down alone. The garage was almost empty. He drove himself — which he almost never did anymore — out of Manhattan, over the bridge, into the dark, quiet streets of Brooklyn Heights, and stopped in front of a narrow brownstone on Willow Street at exactly four in the morning.
He rang the bell once.
The light in the second-floor window came on within a few seconds. Then the porch light. Then the door.
Bianca stood in the doorway in a robe, her hair loose, her face already arranged.
She had heard the car. She had not been asleep. She had known this night was coming. She had known it for six years and some months.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
She led him into the kitchen without asking. The apartment was small and full of the specific tidiness of a woman who lived alone and had lived that way for a long time.
She set a kettle going, then thought better of it, then put a cold cup of yesterday’s tea in front of herself and wrapped both hands around it because her hands needed something to hold.
Alessandro remained standing.
“From the beginning,” he said.
Bianca closed her eyes for a moment. Opened them.
“Camille came to the hospital in the third week. You were still on the ventilator. She came alone. She was eleven weeks pregnant. She looked exhausted. She had not slept.”
She said it quietly. She did not look at him.
“She had already been to the front desk. They wouldn’t let her past the ICU doors. She was going to leave a note. That was what she told me she came to do. Just to leave a note. In case you woke up.”
Alessandro said nothing.
“Mother was in the corridor between the elevators and the family room. She had been coming and going for two weeks by then. She saw Camille before Camille saw her.”
Bianca’s voice was flat. She was reading it out of somewhere she had been keeping it.
“She was calm. That was the worst part of it. Later, when I went back through it, she was so calm. She told Camille you had woken up the day before. That the first thing you had said was that you did not want Camille in the room. That the family had already spoken to the Delvecchios, and the engagement to Christina would be announced within the month to hold the alliance while you recovered.”
She stopped. Wet her lips. Kept going.
“Camille didn’t scream. She didn’t do anything. She just listened. And then she thanked Mother for being straight with her. And she left.”
Bianca put her forehead down against her knuckles for two seconds and lifted it again.
“I was standing five meters away. Behind the plant near the family room door. I saw all of it. I heard every word. And I did not open my mouth.”
The clock on the microwave clicked over a minute. Then another.
“I went into the visitor bathroom afterward,” she said, “and I screamed into a towel until someone knocked.”
Alessandro walked past her to the window. Beyond the glass, the East River was black and moving under the bridges, and the Manhattan skyline was doing what it always did before dawn: burning very quietly against nothing.
He put his hand on the cold pane and let it stay there.
“You should have told me,” he said, “when I woke up.”
Behind him, Bianca did not move.
“I know,” she said.
He waited.
“I know,” she said again. “And there is no apology big enough for what I owe you. There is nothing I can say that will be adequate to that. I have known that for six years.”
May you like
She was not crying. She had already done that. For six years. In private.
He stayed at the window for a long time. Long enough that the sky beyond began to change color.
