Chapter 2: Mask Off

Elettra

I should have walked out the moment he finished. Anyone with sense would have.

But sense doesn't turn up on schedule when the person you loved for five years takes off his face in front of you. I needed to see what was underneath, the way you press a bruise to find out how deep it goes.

So I stayed. I stood against the front door with my shoes dangling from one hand and asked the question I couldn't stop asking.

"Was any of it real?"

Mirella gave a small sigh and turned toward the study as if the conversation bored her. Enzo followed. They left Dario and me alone in the dark hall, with the rain throwing itself against the glass, and that quiet walking away hurt most. They didn't even think I was dangerous enough to guard.

Dario leaned on the wall opposite me. He wasn't in a hurry anymore. He was so calm that it frightened me more than shouting would have.

"You really want to know?"

"Yes."

"Then sit down. This will take a minute."

"I'll stand."

"Fine." He crossed his arms. "Remember the night we met? The gallery on Via Solferino, the little exhibition your friend organised."

"You said you loved the painting I was standing in front of."

"I'd never seen the painting." A short laugh. "I'd spent two weeks learning your habits. Where you drank coffee. Which gallery you visited when you were sad. Your mother gave me a folder, Ettie. A folder. Your schedule, your favourite flowers, the names of your friends. All I had to do was turn up and look interested."

My throat closed.

"She gave you a folder."

"She's a very organised woman." He said it admiringly. "The family needed someone to marry into your trust. Someone you wouldn't question, who'd sit close to the money and keep it moving. I was in debt, and I was good at being liked. It was an easy arrangement."

"We were together five years."

"We were engaged for two. I don't count the rest. That was practice."

I looked at my left hand. The ring was still on it, a pale blue stone in an old setting that Dario said had belonged to his grandmother. He'd cried when he gave it to me, or he'd seemed to. I had kept it on through every fight and every long week apart, and I'd told my friends that a man who cries over a ring is a man who feels things deeply. Now I wanted to tear it off and throw it at his head. My hand only shook, and the little stone caught the lamplight and winked at me like a joke.

"Whose ring is it?" I asked.

"Mirella bought it last spring." He didn't even look at it. "Nice, isn't it? Very convincing."

I heard myself laugh, a horrible small sound. "You held me when my grandmother died. You sat with me in the hospital for three nights."

"And you cried on my shoulder and signed everything I handed you the next week." He shrugged, almost apologetic. "I did like you, I'll be honest. You were never hard to be around. You were easy. But I never meant to marry you for love, Ettie. I'd have married a lamp if the lamp held your trust."

The word lamp hung between us.

I had imagined betrayal in many shapes. In every one there had been a little regret, a crack where the man I knew might still show through. There was nothing here. He wasn't tormented or conflicted. He was a man closing a deal.

"I'm going to destroy you," I said.

He smiled. "With what?"

I don't know what I meant to do. I know I stepped forward and my free hand came up, and I wanted, more than I'd ever wanted anything, to hit that smile off his face. I had never hit anyone in my life. My hands had only ever held pens and teacups. My fingers curled, and I swung.

He caught my wrist before it landed.

"Careful," he said, almost fondly.

I twisted and drove my knee toward him. He turned his hip, and the blow glanced off. His grip tightened, and for a heartbeat we stood locked together like dancers, my breath hot and ragged against his sweater. Then he shoved me, hard.

I hit the edge of the console table. The corner caught me just under the ribs, and the pain was so white and enormous that it blotted out the hall. A porcelain vase went down beside me and burst across the floor. I slid down the wall, and my palm landed in the pieces, and I felt the sharp edges open the skin.

I stared at the blood welling in my hand.

It's strange what the mind chooses to notice. I thought of the vase, which had been my grandmother's and which I'd always been told never to touch. I thought of how the blood looked on the white marble, dark and bright at once, like ink spilt across a letter. A small, clear part of me kept saying, "This is real, this is happening, nobody is telling you a story."

"Look what you made me do," Dario said.

He said it exactly the way he did when I broke a plate, or spilt wine, or got upset in a restaurant. As if I were a clumsy child. As if the whole thing were a little embarrassing, but he forgave me.

Something inside me went very still.

My side burned. I pressed my cut hand against it and felt dampness there too, soaking through the green silk. The corner had gone deeper than I thought. I tried to stand, and my legs wouldn't agree. The marble was cold against my back, and the hall tilted slowly one way and then the other.

"Mamma," I said. It came out before I could stop it.

Dario crouched in front of me. For one moment something crossed his face, and I wanted so badly to believe it was guilt. But it was only calculation. He was working out how much trouble I had become.

"You shouldn't have come early," he said. "It would've been so much gentler if you'd signed on Saturday. You'd have had a nice weekend. We'd have had cake."

"Get away from me."

"I'm trying to help you."

"Get. Away."

He stood. He looked at me for a long moment, then glanced toward the study door. When he spoke again, his voice was lower and practical, a man checking his watch.

"I'll tell your mother you fell."

He walked down the corridor. I heard the study door open and close, and then voices again, muffled now. I pressed my back to the wall and tried to breathe in small, careful sips. Each breath drew a line of fire along my ribs.

My phone.

It was in my bag, and my bag was on the floor by the front door where I'd dropped it when I ran. Three meters away. It might as well have been the moon. I dragged myself across the marble, leaving a dark smear behind me, and every inch took everything I had. My fingers touched the strap. I pulled the bag toward me, tore the zipper open, and dug through lipstick and keys and tissues.

My phone was gone.

It hadn't been lost, I knew that. Maybe I'd left it on the taxi seat when I paid. Maybe Dario took it when he pushed me. Maybe someone else did. It didn't matter how. It was one more door closing.

I tried the front door instead. My hand slipped on the handle, slick with blood. I pulled again, and it didn't give. They had locked it. Not just the latch but the old iron bolt my father used to throw at night, the one so stiff I'd never been able to move it.

Behind me, the study door opened.

I froze with my forehead against the wood.

Footsteps came down the corridor, slow and unhurried, the click of Mirella's good heels. She stopped a few paces behind me. I didn't turn. I didn't trust myself to see her face.

"Dario says you fell," she said.

"He pushed me."

"Don't be dramatic." Her voice was patient. "You've always been a sensitive girl. You make everything bigger than it is."

"I'm bleeding."

"Yes, I can see that." A pause, and then I heard something I'd never heard from her before. It wasn't anger. It was exhaustion, the sound of someone who's carried a heavy thing far too long and is finally about to put it down. "I wish you'd stayed in Milan, Elettra. I truly do."

"Why?" I turned my head. It cost me. "Why are you doing this? I'm your daughter."

Mirella looked at me for a long moment. Her face was perfectly calm, and for a second I thought something moved behind her eyes, something old and grieving. Then it closed over.

"You're a great deal of trouble to this family," she said. "That's all you've ever been."

She took out her own phone and turned away. I watched her walk to the corner of the hall where the lamp made a small circle of light. She spoke quietly, but the house was so still that every word carried.

"It's me. She came early. She heard everything." A pause. "No, there's no one else here tonight. Yes, I know what we agreed. But she's seen too much now. She can't leave this house."

I couldn't breathe.

"I'm telling you," Mirella said, "the problem isn't a signature anymore. If she walks out of here, we lose everything." She listened. Her jaw tightened, and I heard her breathe in. "Then do it quietly. Make it look like an accident, or an illness, I don't care. She must not survive the night."

She hung up. She stood with her back to me, shoulders very straight, and didn't move for a few seconds. She lifted one hand to her face. For a wild moment I thought she might be crying.

When she turned around, her eyes were dry.

"Go and lie down in your old room," she said, in her ordinary voice. "I'll send Enzo with a bandage."

She walked away down the dark corridor, and she never once looked back.