Chapter 8

The silence stretched between them until Leo sighed, rubbed a hand over his face, and finally spoke.

"Is this your chair?" he said, looking at Dante with the patient directness that only a5 year old  could harness and he was prepared to ask again if necessary.

Dante looked at him. Then he crossed to the desk, pulled out the visitor's chair, and sat down in it.

"Yes," he said.

Leo looked at the chair he was sitting in, then at the one Dante had just taken. "You're sitting in the other one."

"I am."

"Why?"

"Because you're in mine."

Leo thought about this seriously. "Do you want it back?"

"Not yet," Dante said.

Not yet. Ava stood near the door and watched her son process that answer with a small nod like it was reasonable, like a man sitting in the wrong chair in his own office while a five-year-old occupied his was a perfectly ordinary arrangement.

"I'm Leo," Leo said.

"I know."

"Did my mom tell you about me?"

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

Dante looked at Ava briefly. "That you exist."

Leo looked at her too, with the expression that meant he recognised the accuracy of that and found it only slightly unfair. Then he looked back at Dante and pointed at the shelf behind the desk. "What's that thing on the second shelf?"

"A piece older than you are Little man."

"Can I hold it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it's old," Dante said, in the tone of a man who had given a complete answer and considered the matter closed.

Leo swivelled slightly in the chair and looked at the shelf and then back at Dante, working through whether there was another angle on this he hadn't tried yet. Apparently deciding there wasn't, he put both hands on the armrests and looked around the office instead, at the desk, the papers, the pen sitting beside them.

"Do you work a lot?" he said.

"I don’t know."

"My mom works a lot too." He said it without accusation, just as information. "and always tired."

Dante said nothing.

"Is your job dangerous?"

A pause. "Hmmm, Sometimes."

"How dangerous?"

"Leo," Ava said. "That's enough. He has work to do, we need to go."

Leo looked at her, then at Dante, clearly performing a calculation about whose authority carried more weight in this particular room.

"She's right," Dante said. "I have a call in ten minutes."

Leo got out of the chair without arguing, which surprised her, and came around the desk to her side. He looked up at Dante one more time.

"You can have your chair back," he said generously.

"Thank you," Dante said, and something in his voice was so dry and so close to something else that by the time Ava looked at him, and he was already reaching for the papers on his desk and his face was giving nothing away.

She put her hand on Leo's shoulder and steered him out.

In the corridor she crouched down to his level.

"What did I say about bothering people?" she said quietly.

"I wasn't bothering him. We were talking."

"Leo, He has work!"

"He didn't seem bothered," Leo said, with the confidence of a child who had read the room correctly and knew it. "He seemed like he wanted to keep talking but didn't know how."

She looked at him.

Five years old, she thought. He is five years old.

"Go find your room," she said. "I'll be up in ten minutes."

He went, and she watched him go down the corridor and turn the corner toward the staircase, and then she stood up and stood very still in the corridor for a moment and listened to the house.

She had been thinking about the microphone since she found it the night she arrived. She had been thinking about it more since she saw Marco look at Leo's hands at dinner which has rolled over to most of all this morning, watching Leo walk into Dante's office like he owned it, understanding that her son was now inside this house and inside whatever was happening in it, and she could not afford to not know who was listening.

She walked back toward her room.

The corridor was quiet, the wall sconces burning low, the shadow gathering at the far end the way it always did at this time of morning. She passed two staff members who nodded at her and kept moving. She went into her room and left the door slightly open the way she always left it when Leo was somewhere in the house so she could hear him.

She stood near the vanity mirror.

"I have to be at the east wing this afternoon," she said as she walked towards to the window and sat in the chair and watched the garden.

At 2:45pm she went downstairs and stood in the main corridor where she could see both the east wing entrance and the staircase. At 2:52pm a staff member she hadn't seen before came down the corridor from the direction of the kitchen, slowed when he reached the east wing entrance, looked down it, and kept walking.

There it is. She thought,

Straightaway, she went to find Rafe. who was in the kitchen as always in the kitchen.

"Someone's monitoring my room," she said.

He looked at her over his mug. "What did you do?"

She told him. He set the mug down and said show me, and she took him to the mirror and he crouched and looked at it with the small flashlight he kept in his jacket pocket and was quiet for a long time.

When he stood up his face had changed in a way she was learning to read. Tighter. More careful.

"The staff member," he said. "Late thirties, dark hair, morning shift."

"Yes."

"His name is Ferri. His reference doesn't check out."

"Who put him here?"

Rafe looked at the mirror. Then at her.

"The mic behind the mirror," he said, low enough that the walls would have to work for it. "We didn't plant it."

She looked at her own reflection looking back at her. At the ring on her left hand. At the room behind her in the glass, beautiful and still and full of things she hadn't chosen.

"So someone else built part of this house's surveillance," she said. "Before I got here. Without Dante knowing."

"Yes," Rafe said.

One word. No dressing.

*And Leo is in this house,* she thought. *Leo is somewhere upstairs right now and someone has been listening since before we arrived.*

"Find out who," she said.

"I'm already looking," Rafe said.