Decent

I could have signed the Valdés merger weeks ago.

It's a clean deal. Fair numbers, a partner I've trusted for fifteen years. Matteo knows it, Valdés knows it, and every lawyer in that boardroom knew it. For weeks I gave them reasons to wait. I had reasons, good ones, and I'm not saying them out loud.

At five this morning, one of them stopped mattering.

The car is quiet now. Matteo drives and is smart enough not to speak until I do. Outside the glass, the building shrinks in the mirror, and somewhere above those floors Valdés is probably still standing at a window, looking at the door I walked through.

Fifteen years, and to his face he is Mr. Valdés and I am Mr. Vieri. The distance keeps us both safe. There are things the two of us agreed never to say out loud, and a first name is where saying them would begin.

His daughter got mine in twenty minutes.

I noticed the concealer before I noticed anything else.

She had done it well. Three layers, I'd guess, blended to the jaw, the kind of work you only see if you know what a night without sleep does to a face. I know. I've looked at that face in my own mirror at four in the morning. Under the powder, the skin beneath her eyes had the faint bruise of someone who cried until there was nothing left and then kept going.

She had pinned her hair back hard so nothing could fall forward and give her away. No ring. I looked at the bare finger exactly once and made myself stop.

She stopped on page eleven. I expected her to be angry. I did not expect her to be right. Only once, around page six, did her hand shake. She pressed it flat to the table, and nobody saw it but me.

"You wrote that clause on Thursday," Matteo says, eyes on the road. "At midnight. You had Renzo rewrite it twice so it would look boring."

"It was boring."

"It was bait. She took it exactly how you wanted, then made you give it back." He glances at the mirror. "I've watched men lose a finger for less."

"She didn't make me do anything."

"You said *now* to Brandt. In front of his own board."

I don't answer that, which is an answer.

Matteo lets the silence sit a beat longer than is polite. "And the yesterday line. You can't say that to a woman in a room full of people and not expect her to ask how you know."

"She'll ask."

"And?"

"I'll tell her when it's useful."

"That's not a plan, boss. That's a mood."

I almost smile. Almost. "One of ours called last night. Said a girl ran out of my son's building in tears. I wanted her to know someone else had seen it."

"Valdés went white when you said it."

"Valdés has had a long week."

"Valdés has had a long fifteen years."

"Careful," I say. It isn't sharp. It's a hand on a door.

Matteo lifts one palm off the wheel. "I'm driving."

The light changes. We roll forward, and I think about how she held my eyes when I said *almost family.* Most people look away. They find the door, their lawyer, the table, anything that isn't my face. She looked at me like I was a clause she hadn't finished reading.

"Whatever this is," Matteo says, quieter now, "she was Leandro's until yesterday."

"I know exactly whose she was."

It's the answer that should close the subject. It doesn't.

We spend the day the way I spend most days, in the back of a car with two phones and no appetite. I don't go home. At six I tell Matteo to take me back to the Valdés building.

"Pull over."

He does. We're half a block away, far enough that nobody inside will recognize the car. I sit with the engine off and watch the glass doors.

At 6:20 she walks out.

No jacket now, just the blouse and the pinned hair, a bag over one shoulder and a phone in her hand. She stops on the sidewalk and looks at the street, deciding whether to be stubborn. She is. I can see it in her shoulders. She wants to drive herself home because I said not to.

Then she looks down at her phone, and her whole body lets go. Not much. A breath. Her shoulders drop an inch.

She's exhausted. She has been holding herself up since morning.

A black sedan pulls up at the curb, one of Valdés's drivers. She hesitates for exactly one second. Then she gets in.

I hate how relieved I am.

"Follow them."

"Boss, she's going home. Her house has a gate and four guards."

"Then it will be a short drive."

He starts the car, and we pull out two cars back. In the sedan's rear window, I see her head turn. She checks the mirror once, then a second time, and settles back into the seat as if she thinks she's imagining it.

She isn't.

"Drop back another car," I say. "I want her careful. Not afraid."

Matteo glances at me, once. "Understood."

I watch the back of her head all the way to the gates of the Valdés estate, and I tell myself I'm doing it

because it's the decent thing to do.

I've been a lot of things. Decent isn't one I've earned.