Chapter 3

The reception was already in full swing by the time Ava figured out how to hold a champagne glass like she belonged to one.

Not to drink it. To carry it. There was a difference she'd picked up somewhere between the ceremony and the coat check, a difference in how you held your shoulders and let your wrist go loose and looked at a room full of people who had more money than God and treated it like a burden.

She was getting better at it by the hour, which was honestly the most unsettling thing about this entire night.

The ballroom was beautiful in the exhausting way that very expensive rooms always were. High ceilings, low gold light, music that stayed just under the conversation so nobody had to raise their voice. The Moretti guests had resettled after the ceremony with the practiced ease of people who had survived worse surprises than a substitute bride. Some of them watched her. Most had decided that watching Dante was more informative.

Dante was across the room talking to two men she didn't know, doing the thing where his face said nothing and his presence said everything.

She stayed near the edge of the room, close enough to look intentional and far enough to breathe.

Her phone buzzed in the clutch someone had pressed into her hands before the ceremony. Leo had called twice already. She'd texted the sitter: still working, tell him I love him, give him the iPad. The sitter had written back a thumbs up and then, two minutes later: he wants to know if you're okay.

He was five years old and he always knew.

She put the phone away and did a slow turn around the perimeter of the room, nodding at the people who looked at her and keeping her expression smooth. It was a skill she'd developed at seventeen, working double shifts for a boss who thought exhaustion was a character flaw.

One of the Moretti wives fell into step beside her near the far end of the room. Forty, maybe, dark hair, expensive earrings, the kind of careful smile that meant she was watching everything and showing nothing.

"You're doing well," the woman said.

"Thank you."

"It's harder than it looks, the first one." She took a small sip of champagne. "You feel like everyone is looking at you."

"They are looking."

The woman smiled at that, a real one this time, brief and a little tired. "Yes. But they're looking at him." She nodded across the room toward Dante. "They're always looking at him. You just have to stay close enough to be in the frame."

Ava watched Dante say something to one of the men he was talking to. One of them laughed. The other didn't. Dante noticed the difference, she could tell, because his eyes moved a fraction and filed it away.

"How long have you been doing this?" Ava asked.

"Eleven years." The woman said it the way you say a number on a page, without emotion. "It gets easier. The looking, I mean. You stop feeling it after a while."

Ava wasn't sure whether that was meant to be reassuring.

Her phone buzzed again.

"Excuse me," she said.

She moved toward the edge of the room and angled herself between two large floral arrangements that gave her three feet of privacy. She picked up on the second ring.

"Hey, Mom."

"Ava." Her mother's voice was thin, the way it got when she was tired and trying to hide it. "Are you okay? The sitter called me. She said you weren't answering."

"I'm working. I told you."

"She said it was a private event."

"It is."

A pause. "Are you safe?"

Ava looked out at the room. The dark suits. The men near the door whose jackets didn't sit right on their shoulders.

"Yes," she said. "I'm fine. How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine." Elena's version of fine and everyone else's version were two entirely different things and they both knew it. "Leo wants to talk to you."

"Mom, I can't right now"

"Ava." Her mother's voice dropped. "He's been asking for an hour. Two minutes."

She pressed her eyes shut for a second. "Put him on."

There was shuffling, a small thud that was probably Leo falling off something he'd climbed, and then his voice came through loud and immediate the way it always did, like he'd been waiting with his mouth already open.

"Mom. Mom. Guess what."

"What."

"I found a bug. A real one. It was in the bathroom."

"Leo"

"It had like a hundred legs. Nadia screamed."

"Please don't terrorize Nadia."

"I didn't terrorize her. I was showing her." A pause. "Are you coming home soon?"

She turned so her back was to the room. "Not tonight, baby. I told you."

"But it's late."

"I know."

"Is it a long job?"

She looked down at the ring on her left hand. Old gold, heavy, worth more than everything she owned combined.

"Yeah," she said. "It's a long job."

"Okay." He thought about that the way he thought about everything, fully, with his whole chest. "Mom?"

"Yeah?"

"I love you the most."

She pressed her lips together. "I love you the most back."

"More than pizza?"

"Way more than pizza."

"Wow," he said, like this was genuinely impressive data. Then she heard him hand the phone back and run somewhere and a door closing, and her mother's voice came back on.

"He's fine," Elena said. "He just misses you."

"I know. I'll call in the morning." She paused. "Get some sleep, Mom."

She hung up and stood between the two floral arrangements for a moment, just long enough to feel the full weight of being needed somewhere she couldn't be. Then she put the phone away and turned back to the room.

That was when she felt it.

Not heard but felt the specific quality of attention that meant someone was watching her with intention, not just curiosity. She turned.

The woman was in her late seventies, maybe older. Small, upright, dressed in dark silk that had probably cost more than Ava's car. Her face had been beautiful a long time ago and had become something better than beautiful with age, structured and still, carrying decades of things she had decided not to say out loud.

She was looking directly at Ava.

Not the way Lucia looked at her, which was top to bottom and dismissive. Not the way the Moretti guests looked at her, which was sideways and careful. This woman was looking at her the way you look at something you recognize but cannot immediately place.

She crossed the room toward Ava without hurrying. The crowd adjusted around her without being asked to, small unconscious shifts, the choreography of people who knew this woman moved where she wanted to move.

She stopped in front of Ava and said nothing for a moment. Her eyes moved to the necklace at Ava's collarbone and stayed there.

It was a simple thing. Old gold, a small pendant with a design Ava had never been able to identify. She'd found it in a box after her father died and wore it because it felt like him. That was all it had ever been to her.

The woman's face did something she controlled almost immediately, a flicker behind the eyes, there and sealed away before most people would have caught it.

Ava caught it.

"That necklace," the woman said. Her voice was quiet, accented lightly in a way that had mostly worn smooth. "Where did you get it?"

"It was my father's." Ava kept her own voice even. "He passed a few years ago. I found it in his things."

The woman looked up from the necklace to Ava's face. The look she gave her was long and careful and carried something in it Ava couldn't name, the beginning of a sentence that had been waiting a long time for the right moment to be spoken.

The moment passed.

"I see," the woman said.

That was all.

She held Ava's gaze for one more breath, and in that breath Ava had the distinct, bone-level feeling that this woman knew exactly who she was. Not what she was doing here, not what her name was. Something deeper than that.

Then she moved back into the crowd without another word, unhurried, the same way she'd come, and the space she left behind felt colder than the rest of the room.

Ava stood there turning it over. The question, the stillness, the way the woman's eyes had gone straight to the necklace before anything else. She filed it the way she filed things she couldn't explain yet and looked up.

Marco was at the bar.

He'd been there long enough to have watched the whole exchange from start to finish. He stood with a glass in one hand, relaxed, patient, the kind of man who always seemed to be exactly where he intended to be.

When he caught Ava looking he raised his glass.

He smiled, warm and unhurried, the kind of smile that made you feel like the most interesting person in the room.

His eyes didn't move with it.

Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his phone, already dialing before he turned away.