Chapter 5

On the anniversary of my mother's death, I took Noah to Green-Wood Cemetery.

A bouquet of red roses already lay before the headstone. The card was in Gabriel's hand: Thank you for once giving me a home.

He hadn't forgotten.

When my mother died seven years earlier, he had knelt by her bed and promised to love me and our children the way she loved me. I had always assumed that promise had been worn away by the gunfire of New York.

As Noah crouched to wipe the corner of the stone, two workers came pushing a cutting machine. They held a relocation authorization with my signature on it. The reason given was that the Moretti family was expanding its private burial plot.

"This is forged." I put myself in front of the headstone.

Before the workers stopped, Sophia's car drove in. She was carrying the urn of a white dog, and said Luca could only recover from the trauma of the explosion if the dog he had grown up with was buried here.

"Gabe agreed." She showed me an email. "He said since you can put a price on everything, the grave can be negotiated too."

The email came from Gabriel's private address, and the tone was flawless.

I still didn't move.

In the scuffle, Luca kicked over the candlestick in front of my mother's grave. Sophia pretended to pull him back, but her elbow knocked the ash niche loose. The stone cover shattered, and gray-white powder spilled into the rain.

I rushed forward, tripped over the foot she slid out on the sly, and hit my forehead on the headstone.

Noah screamed and threw himself over me. But Sophia dialed the police first, saying I had threatened a child with a knife. She even took a gardening knife from my tool basket and pressed onto it a fingerprint she had stolen in advance.

Gabriel arrived before the police car did.

He saw the blood on my face at once, took off his coat and wrapped me in it, and gathered my mother's ashes into a clean silk scarf with his own hands, bit by bit. Sophia wept and displayed the scratch on Luca's arm and the knife.

"Not Mom!" Noah screamed hoarsely. "She pushed her!"

Gabriel looked at Sophia, his eyes cold as ice. "Take Luca to the car. Now."

It was the first time he hadn't comforted her.

But the police had to go by the evidence. Gabriel vouched for me, called in lawyers, and had me released in under two hours.

On the drive back, he gripped the wheel, his knuckles white.

"I didn't send that email. I'll find out who did."

"Do you believe I didn't hurt Luca?"

He was silent for two seconds.

"I believe you wouldn't hurt a child on purpose. But the footage is missing, and your prints are on the knife. I need to know what happened in between."

I looked out the window and suddenly found I didn't even have anger left.

He loved me, and he would always wait for evidence to speak for me.

But the truly dangerous person had long since learned to manufacture evidence for him.

Gabriel took us to the hospital and stayed himself until Noah's fever broke. In the small hours, the technicians confirmed the cemetery email had been sent from the family tablet. For the past three days, that tablet had been in the bedroom.

"The only people in the house are you, me, Noah, and two vetted staff." He stated it as fact, without accusation in his tone, and it was more suffocating than an accusation.

"And Sophia."

"Her access doesn't reach the bedroom floor."

"You granted the access, and your people installed the system. You'd rather believe the system can't be wrong?"

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I'll check everyone. Including her."

"But you won't stand on my side first."

"Standing on your side doesn't mean skipping the facts."

I smiled. A marriage isn't a jury. What I needed wasn't for him to falsify the verdict. It was for him not to leave me alone in the dock while the verdict was still out.

The next day, he suspended all of Sophia's electronic access and gave my mother's ashes to a restorer. He really was solving the problems.

But when Noah woke in the night, what he asked was, "Does Dad think Mom did something bad?"

A child doesn't understand a chain of evidence. He only understands that his father never said "I believe her" out loud.