LOGINValentino's POVThe video call came in at noon on a Saturday.I was in the study reviewing the quarterly financials when the notification appeared on my screen, and for a moment I simply looked at it. The name. The profile picture that was not a photograph but a stylized initial, the kind of image a man chooses when he wants to communicate that he is not obligated to show you his face unless he chooses to.Don Rafael Miaz.He had not video called before. In twelve years of managing the distance between us, he had always used voice. Voice gave less away. Voice allowed a man to be in three different moods simultaneously without the person on the other end being able to verify which one was real.The fact that he was calling on video now told me something.I picked up.He appeared on the screen and I understood immediately why he had made the switch.He wanted me to see him.He was in a room that was clearly
Kiara's POVMaya came home from daycare on Friday with a piece of paper folded into quarters and tucked very carefully into the front pocket of her small backpack, in the specific place she reserved for things she considered important.She waited until she had eaten her afternoon snack and washed her hands and settled herself at the kitchen table with the gravity of someone who has been patient long enough. Then she took the folded paper out of her pocket and smoothed it flat on the table in front of her and looked at it with the expression of a person reviewing work they are reasonably satisfied with."I drew something," she announced."I can see that," I said, coming around to look.It was a drawing done in wax crayon, the way all of Maya's drawings were done because wax crayons were what they had at daycare and because Maya had the specific affection for them that children develop for tools that do exactly w
Kiara's POVThe day of the first custody hearing arrived on a grey Thursday morning that felt entirely appropriate for the occasion.I was up at five. I had ironed my clothes the night before, a dark burgundy suit that I had bought specifically for professional settings and that made me feel, when I wore it, like a version of myself that had not been diminished. I did my hair. I made coffee. I sat in the kitchen in the quiet before the house woke up and I went through the case notes that Adunola had sent me the previous evening, reading each one carefully and absorbing what I needed to absorb.I was not frightened.I want to be precise about this because it surprised me. I had spent weeks dreading this day, imagining it, running through the worst versions of it in the small hours of the night when everything looks most catastrophic. But sitting there in the kitchen on the actual morning, I found that what I f
Kiara's POVMr. Somchai called me on Wednesday afternoon, two days after our lunch, and said three sentences."I would like to introduce you to someone. His name is Chen. He is expecting your call."Then he gave me a number and ended the call before I could ask any of the questions I immediately had, which was either very efficient or very irritating depending on how you looked at it.I looked at it as efficient because I was trying to be the kind of person who did not waste energy being irritated by things she could not change, and also because in the two weeks I had known Mr. Somchai I had learned that he did not do things without a reason and that his reasons, when they eventually became clear, were worth the patience they required.I called the number that evening after Maya was in bed.The man who answered had a voice that was calm and measured in the way of someone who had spent a long time list
Kiara's POVI called my father at six in the morning.I had not slept. That was simply the truth of it. I had gone to bed at three, after the security situation had settled and the house had gone quiet again and Valentino had finally stopped pacing the length of the corridor outside his study, and I had lain in the dark for three hours with my eyes open and my mind going through everything that had happened since yesterday morning in the careful methodical way it had developed since all of this began, cataloguing and assessing and making sure nothing important was sitting unexamined.At six I gave up on sleep and called my father.He picked up on the first ring, which told me he had not slept either."Kiara," he said."Baba," I said. "I have something to tell you."A pause. The particular pause of a man who had been waiting for news for a very long time and was now bracing himself for which kind it was going t
Dylan's POVI drove for a long time before I knew where I was going.That was the honest truth of it, not that I would have admitted it to anyone. I drove through the city with my hands tight on the wheel and the radio off and the kind of noise in my head that has nothing to do with sound, the noise that comes from watching something you built with great care and great patience beginning to come apart at a speed you cannot match.The gun was in the glove compartment.I had not planned to put it there. I had not planned most of what had happened in the last several hours. I had opened the drawer of my desk at eight o'clock looking for a different document and I had found it there, the compact dark weight of it, and something in me that was past strategy and past calculation had simply put it in my pocket.I was not going to use it. I want to be very clear about that, even in my own mind. I was not the kind of man wh







