Chapter 8
The drive home was quiet.
Not the hostile silence of the week before, or the electric silence of the night of the gala. This was a different quiet — almost gentle, like the air after a storm when the only sound left is the dripping.
At the estate, Carla had left tea in the kitchen. It was four in the morning. The kettle was warm. Two cups.
Norah sat at the kitchen table. Dominic sat across from her. He poured the tea.
She wrapped her hands around the cup and let the warmth soak into her palms. “You could have told me about Liam. From the beginning. You had the leverage. You didn’t need to hide it.”
“I know.”
“Why did you?”
A long pause. He looked at the steam rising from his cup. “Because you would have walked into Il Posto with guilt instead of survival instinct. And survival instinct makes better decisions than guilt.”
She considered this. Turned it over. Found the truth in it, and hated it, and found the truth in it again.
“That’s the most manipulative thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Yes.”
She looked at the ring on her left hand. The diamond caught the lamplight, throwing small fractured rainbows across the table.
“The Tarasov threat is resolved,” she said. “The feds — your racketeering case?”
“Dropped. Last week. Your presence helped.”
She nodded slowly. “So the transaction is complete.”
He didn’t answer immediately. He set down his cup.
“The ring was my grandmother’s,” he said. “She wore it for fifty years. I gave it to one person in my life before you.” A pause. “She gave it back.”
Norah looked up. This was the first real thing he had ever told her about himself. Not a threat, not a bargain, not a performance. A wound.
“I don’t need your history,” she said quietly.
“I know. I’m giving it to you anyway.”
The fire crackled in the kitchen hearth. Outside, the Atlantic was black and enormous, and the first gray light was bleeding along the horizon.
She could leave, she thought. The threat was gone. The deal was done. She could take a cab to the south end, go back to her apartment with its clanking radiator, go back to her shifts in the trauma ward, go back to the life that made sense.
She looked at him across the table in the four a.m. kitchen — this violent, controlled, impossible man, who had unclasped a necklace with careful hands and told her that blood on linoleum is honest, and kissed her in front of a hundred cameras like she was the last thing he’d ever get to keep.
“I want to go back to nursing,” she said.
“I know.”
“Full shifts. My hospital. Simon can drive me.”
“Done.”
She nodded. She stood up. She started for the door.
She stopped.
“The ring stays on,” she said, without turning around.
She heard him exhale. Barely a sound. But she heard it. The release of a breath he had been holding, she suspected, for a very long time.
She went to bed.
May you like
Morning light through the east wing windows. The fire had burned down to embers. Norah stood at the door in her scrubs, her nursing badge on its lanyard — Norah Hastings, RN. She paused with her left hand on the frame, and the diamond caught the light, throwing small fractured rainbows across the dark wood.
She didn’t take it off.
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