Chapter 3
He was looking at me the way he had looked at me in the office two days ago — the specific, layered assessment of a man who was determining something.
“Your sister,” he said. “Nursing school.”
“Finishing in May,” I said.
“There are hospitals in this city that have foundation connections. If she needs placement after graduation—”
“She’ll find her own placement,” I said. “She’s good at what she does.”
He accepted this without argument.
“What will you do?” he said.
I thought about it.
I had an accounting background — the informal kind, built from years of managing the cleaning business and my sister’s tuition and the careful architecture of two people’s survival on an income that did not have margin for error. I had spent six months in a house where I had been invisible while watching the machinery of serious financial crime operate around me.
I had thoughts about what to do with that.
“I have a meeting on Thursday,” I said. “With someone who runs a forensic accounting firm.”
He looked at me.
“How did you arrange that?” he said.
“The same way you arranged things,” I said. “Carefully. And without telling anyone.”
This time he did smile.
A real one — brief and unperformed and there before I could prepare for it, and gone before I could look at it too long.
“Your father would have liked that,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
I picked up my bag.
I left.
The estate looked smaller from the outside than it always had.
That was the thing about places you had lived inside for six months — they reorganized themselves when you left them, shrinking to their actual dimensions rather than the dimensions they had occupied in your daily life. The iron gates and the frozen gardens and the marble stairs were still what they were. They just looked, from the street, like what they were. A house. A large one, with guards and history and all the complicated weight of what had happened inside it. But just a house.
I took the bus.
Not because I couldn’t afford a cab — the circumstances of the morning had changed certain things about what I could afford — but because the bus was what I knew and what I trusted and what I had taken since I was seventeen years old, riding home from the hospital the night they called me from school.
I sat in the window seat.
Chicago moved past in its January way — grey and specific and entirely itself, indifferent to galas and mafia cases and the particular morning that had just ended, because cities are indifferent in the way that only very large things can be, which is not hostility but simply the ongoing fact of their own enormous life.
My phone buzzed.
My sister: did you see the news?? isn’t that the family you work for??
I looked at the message for a moment.
Then I typed: I’ll explain tonight. Also I quit.
Her response came back in four seconds: WHAT
Then: are you ok
Then: emily why do you always do things without TELLING me
I smiled at the phone.
I’m fine, I typed. I’ll be home by six. I’m making dinner.
She sent back a string of question marks.
I put the phone in my pocket.
Outside the window, the city kept going.
My father had been precise and discreet for eleven years and had tried to do the right thing and had paid for it in a way that had cost him everything and had cost my sister and me the specific, particular shape of a future that had his name in it.
The record was now accurate.
Marco Vitelli was in federal custody.
My father’s documentation was doing what he had intended it to do.
And I was on a bus heading home to make dinner for my sister, who was finishing nursing school in May and who would find her own placement because she was good at what she did, and who sent strings of question marks when alarmed, which was a quality inherited from a man who had been precise and discreet and had remembered people’s names and had tried, once, to do the right thing.
That was who we were.
That was still who we were.
The bus stopped.
I got off.
I walked the four blocks to the apartment in the cold, and the cold was what it always was, and the street was what it always was, and the building with the buzzer that stuck on the third press was what it always was.
I pressed it three times.
My sister’s voice came through: “You have so much explaining to do.”
“I know,” I said. “Buzz me in.”
May you like
She did.
I went upstairs.
