Chapter 2

Blair stepped out into the courtyard, and Andrew turned before the door had even finished closing behind her, like he'd been listening for it.

"There she is." He smiled — the easy, golden smile she'd spent a lifetime being furious she still loved. "The birthday girl."

"You're early." She stayed by the door. Distance felt like the only weapon she had left.

"I wanted five minutes before the whole street shows up and I have to share you." He held up a small wrapped box, turning it once in his fingers like he wasn't sure yet whether to hand it over. "Happy birthday, Blair."

"You didn't have to."

"I know." He crossed the courtyard anyway, closing the distance she'd been careful to leave, and set the box in her hands before she could decide whether to take it. "Open it later. Or don't. I just wanted to see your face when you said yes to the dance."

"I never said yes."

"You will." Something in the way he said it — easy, certain, like a man reading tomorrow's weather instead of guessing at it — made the back of her neck go cold. "You always do."

She made herself hold still instead of stepping back. "That's a strange thing to be so sure of."

"Is it?" His eyes on her didn't move. "I have a good feeling about this year. About us." A pause, half a beat too long. "Like something's finally going to go right."

She thought, and said nothing at all, that it depended entirely on who "right" was supposed to be for.

Somewhere behind him, her mother's voice carried out from the kitchen window, calling something about ice, and the moment broke apart the way ordinary moments do. Andrew's smile came back easy and unbothered, like he hadn't just said something that put ice down her spine.

"I should go help," Blair said.

"Save me that dance." He was already moving toward the gate.

She didn't answer. He didn't seem to need her to.

* * *

By the time the courtyard filled with lanterns and half of old Trapani, Blair had unwrapped his gift — a thin gold bracelet, the kind of thing she'd once have worn for a week straight without taking it off — and put it in a drawer instead.

"You're not wearing it," her cousin Rosa said, appearing at her elbow with two glasses of something sweet and too warm from sitting in the sun. "Andrew's gift. Mamma said it's beautiful."

"It didn't match anything."

Rosa gave her a look that said she wasn't buying it, and handed over a glass instead of arguing. "Uncle Renzo's telling the salt flat story again. The one where he nearly drowned."

"He tells that every year."

"He nearly drowns every year, apparently." Rosa's eyes flicked toward the gate, toward a man Blair didn't recognize standing just outside the ring of lantern light, not drinking, not talking to anyone, watching the party like he was counting heads. "Who's that?"

Blair followed her gaze. Dark suit, too formal for a birthday party. Not local — she'd have known the face if he were.

"No idea."

"He's been out there twenty minutes." Rosa lowered her voice, the way people in this town always did the second a certain kind of subject came up. "You know how Papà says never ask a man in a suit what family he's from unless you already know the answer."

"That's not a real saying."

"It's a real saying in this house." Rosa laughed like it was nothing, and let herself be pulled away by someone calling her name.

He didn't come in. He didn't leave either.

It was another hour before Blair saw her father step outside to speak with him, the two of them just past the lantern light, heads bent close, and something about the set of Stefano's shoulders made her stomach drop before she'd even decided to worry.

She drifted closer without meaning to, skirting the edge of the courtyard with a glass she wasn't drinking from, and caught only a fragment before her father saw her coming and cut himself off mid-sentence.

"— tell Don Lumiere I need more time, that's all I'm asking—"

Then he saw her, and the sentence stopped like a door swinging shut.

"Blair." He said it too warmly, too fast. "Go find your mother, cara, she's looking for you."

"Papà, who was that?"

"No one." He was already turning back toward the gate, toward a man who was no longer there. "Business."

"On my birthday?"

"Business doesn't know what day it is." He smiled at her, and it was a good smile, an easy one, the kind he'd given her a thousand times before — except his hand wasn't quite steady around his glass, and Blair had spent seven years learning exactly what her father's hands looked like when something was wrong.

"Papà—"

"Go dance, Blair." He kissed her forehead, warm and final, the conversation already over whether she liked it or not. "It's your birthday."

She went. She smiled at cousins, accepted every version of happy birthday the courtyard had to offer, let herself be spun once around by an uncle who still thought she was twelve.

But the name sat under her skin the rest of the night, small and cold and entirely unfamiliar.

Don Lumiere.

Whatever her father owed him, he hadn't finished being afraid of it.