Chapter 3

The kitchen window had a hole in it the size of a fist, and nobody would tell Blair how it got there.

Fiorella was already sweeping when Blair came downstairs, the broom moving too fast and too hard for glass that fine. Last night's streamers still hung looped over the doorframe, like the party hadn't gotten the news yet that something had gone wrong.

"What happened?"

"Nothing." Fiorella didn't look up. "Go eat something."

"Mamma."

"A bird, probably. It happens." Another sharp stroke of the broom, glass skittering across tile.

"Birds don't break glass like that. Not from outside in."

Fiorella straightened, and for one second Blair saw exactly how tired she was underneath yesterday's makeup, still smudged at the corner of one eye. "Blair. Please. Not this morning."

Her father came down five minutes later, already dressed, coat over one arm, looking like a man who hadn't slept and had decided not to mention it. He kissed the top of Fiorella's head on his way past, brisk and automatic, the kind of gesture that happened whether or not he was really in the room.

"Papà, wait—"

"I'll be back by supper." He was already reaching for the door.

"Who were you talking to last night? At the party."

His hand stopped on the handle. For a second he didn't move at all, and the silence stretched long enough that Blair thought he might actually answer.

"Nobody you need to worry about."

The door closed behind him before she could ask again.

Fiorella went back to sweeping like nothing had happened, faster now, and it was almost a full minute before Blair noticed her mother's hands shaking around the broom handle.

"Mamma—"

"I'm fine." A shard caught her thumb; she hissed at it, more annoyed at herself than hurt, and pressed it against her apron without stopping to look.

"You're bleeding."

"It's nothing." Fiorella didn't put the broom down.

* * *

The knock at the door came before Blair could push any further.

Andrew stood on the step in yesterday's easy grin, sleeves already rolled up like he'd come prepared to work. "Small town," he said, before either of them could ask. "My mother heard about the window from the Renaldis before eight."

"It's nothing," Fiorella started, and Andrew was already stepping past her into the kitchen like he hadn't heard.

"I can have it fixed before lunch if someone finds me a broom and a decent putty knife." He glanced at Blair, easy, unbothered, entirely too comfortable in a house that had just been broken into. "Unless you'd rather I didn't."

"Bless you. Genuinely." Fiorella was already reaching for her keys, grateful in the specific, relieved way of a woman handing a problem to someone else. "Blair, help him. I need to run to the market before Rosa's mother calls me twice about the leftover cake."

There wasn't a version of that sentence Blair could argue with, so she didn't try.

She held the frame steady while he worked, close enough to smell yesterday's cologne still on his collar, hating how much of her wanted to lean into it out of pure old habit.

"You're quiet," Andrew said, not looking up from the putty knife.

"I'm holding a window frame."

"You're quiet in a specific way. I know your quiet." He glanced at her sideways, something unreadable in it. "Something's wrong in this house and nobody's saying what."

"Maybe it really was a bird."

"Maybe." He didn't sound like he believed it either. For a moment he just worked in silence, careful and unhurried, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped the easy performance out of it entirely. "You know you can tell me things. Whatever it is."

It would have been so easy, once, to believe that. Some old, stubborn part of her still wanted to.

"I know," Blair said, and didn't tell him anything at all.

He didn't push. He went back to the glass a beat later, whistling something under his breath like the conversation had never happened, and Blair stood there holding a broken window steady with her hands and her nerves both, wondering when exactly comfort and danger had started looking so much alike.

* * *

Stefano came home after dark, later than supper, and ate almost none of what Fiorella put in front of him. The three of them sat through most of the meal in a silence that had never once, in Blair's memory, belonged in this kitchen.

"Long meeting," Fiorella said finally, not quite a question.

"Long day." Stefano didn't look up from his plate.

Blair watched him not eat and thought about a locked, airless dark she'd promised herself she'd never let close in on anyone she loved again, and found she couldn't finish her own dinner either.

Her father went to bed early, before either of them, which had never once happened on a Tuesday in Blair's whole life. Fiorella stayed at the table a long time after, turning her wine glass in slow circles without drinking from it.

"This isn't new, cara." It came out so quietly Blair almost missed it. "Your father's owed a debt since before you were born. Long before either of us had anything to do with it." Her hands twisted the dish towel in her lap. "I thought it died with the old man. Apparently these things don't just die."

"What old man?"

Fiorella's eyes came up too fast, like she'd heard herself say too much already.

"Forget it. Forget I said anything."

She was up and at the sink before Blair could get another word out, water running hard enough to end the conversation on its own terms.

Blair found the card an hour later, half by accident, looking for a pen in the one drawer of her father's desk he never let anyone else open.

It was torn at one corner, the ink faded from handling, but the letterhead was still legible enough to read twice.

Lumiere Trading Co. — Trapani.

Underneath it, in handwriting she didn't recognize, someone had written a single word and underlined it twice.

Overdue.