Chapter 2: Sold at Dinner — Aubrey

7:00 p.m. — Ward Parkway house, the dining room.

The night my parents sell me, Mom makes Dad's favorite meal.

I know something is wrong before I even sit down. Roast chicken. Real candles. Dad's suit jacket off and folded over his chair like he plans to stay a long time. Dad is always home at seven, but he is never nervous at seven. He keeps looking at the window.

"You're staring, sweetheart," Mom says.

"You told me to get dressed for dinner. We eat pizza on Tuesdays."

"Not tonight," Dad says quietly.

I'm twenty years old. I paint. I fail my Pilates class. My biggest problem this week is that I spilled turpentine on my only good jeans. So when my father folds his hands and says, "We have news," I laugh.

"You're pregnant," I say. "Gross. Congratulations."

Dad doesn't laugh. That kills the laugh in my throat.

"We've made a decision about your future," he says.

My fork stops halfway to my mouth. "Okay. Say it."

"You're going to marry Dante Vescari."

The name drops into the room like a rock into a lake. I wait for the punch line. Nobody blinks. Mom is smiling at me like I won a trophy.

I know that name the way everyone in our life knows it. Dante Vescari. The widower. Thirty-three. His wife, Isabel, died fourteen months ago in a crash on the Gladstone Bridge, and nobody in this city says the word accident without lowering their voice. He has a little girl. And he runs the family's business like a knife that never gets put away.

"I met him four times," I say. "At parties. He's not a man, he's a wall that walks."

"Dante is a strong match," Mom says. "He's second only to the Don himself. Do you know what that makes you? The future wife of the next boss. This is the best thing that has ever happened to our family."

"Our family." I put my fork down very slowly, because if I don't put it down, I will throw it. "Is this happening to me, or to our family?"

"Aubrey," Dad says.

"No. Tell me exactly what you told them." My voice comes out small and cold, and I don't recognize it. "Did you tell the Don yes before you asked me one question?"

Dad looks at the candles. "The arrangement was made this morning."

Arrangement. Like a couch. Like a truck shipment.

I stand up so fast my chair screams on the floor. "I'm a person. I'm in college. I have a name."

"You will always have your name," Mom says. "You'll have a bigger one."

"Mom. His wife died on a bridge and people whisper about it. They whisper. You want me in that house?"

"Enough," Dad says, sharp, and Mom flinches, and that's when I see it. Dad isn't calm. Under the table, his hand is flat against his leg, pressing down, like he's holding the floor still. My father is the calmest man I know. He talks angry captains out of killing each other for a living.

He looks like a man sitting in a burning house, pretending it's warm.

"Sit, please," he says, softer. "Hear the terms."

I sit. Because it's Dad asking.

"One — you finish school. Your senior year, your degree. He insisted on that himself. Nobody touches it."

"That's his big gift? I get to keep my own life?"

"Two — after the wedding, you live in his house. Loose Park. Not here." Dad's voice catches on the last word, just barely.

"With his daughter."

"Millie," Dad says. "She's five. She's a good kid, from everything I hear."

The fight drains out of me and leaves something worse behind. "When do I even meet him? Properly, I mean."

"The Founders' Gala. Six weeks. Hotel Vandiver. The whole city will see the announcement," Mom says, glowing. "Six weeks, Aubrey. We have a dress to plan, and a venue, and—"

"Six weeks." I laugh, and it comes out awful. "I have a chemistry midterm in six weeks."

"Aubrey," Dad says again.

"Do I get a choice? At all? Yes or no."

The candles burn. The chicken smells like Sunday. My father, who has never once lied to me, looks me dead in the eye.

"You are a Hale," he says. "This is what a Hale does."

That's a no.

*   *   *

11:40 p.m. — my bedroom.

I can't paint. I tried. My hands shook too hard, so the canvas has one ugly red line across it, like a cut.

I lie on my bed in the dark and do the math a twenty-year-old shouldn't have to do. Married in a few months. Living in a stranger's house. A wall that walks. A little girl who lost her mother. And me — a girl who still calls her dad when the car makes a weird noise.

Sometime after midnight, I hear their voices through the wall. Low. Then Mom's heels on the stairs, then the bedroom door, then quiet.

Then Dad's voice, alone in the hallway. On the phone. Whispering.

Dad never whispers.

I slide out of bed and press my ear to the cold wood of the door, and I hate myself, and I don't stop.

"It's done," he's saying. "She said what I trained her to say. She'll marry Vescari."

Silence. The voice on the other end is small and sharp, like a fly in the dark.

"Don't say her name. Don't you ever—" A breath. "Yes. The gala. The Vandiver. I'll be there."

My heart is suddenly very loud.

"Listen to me," Dad whispers, and his voice cracks in the middle like cheap ice. "The girl is off limits. Whatever happens at that courthouse Friday — that's between grown men. My daughter marries Vescari, and after that it's out of my hands. You promised me she'd never know."

Courthouse. Friday.

I know that word. Everyone in our world knows that word. Grown men walk into courthouses only one kind of way, and it's not to vote.

I stand there with my hand over my own mouth.

My father — the calmest man I know, the man who taught me to sketch, who carried me on his shoulders at every lake summer — is scared of someone on that phone. Not of Dante. Not of the Don.

Of the person he calls before midnight and sir.

The call ends. I hear him stand in the hall a long moment. Then, so quiet I almost miss it:

"God forgive me."

His door closes.

I climb back into bed and stare at the ceiling, and the last of my childhood goes out like one of those candles downstairs.

In six weeks I'm marrying a stranger. Fine. I can survive a stranger.

Because the question making my hands cold under the blanket is this: what happens at the courthouse on Friday — and why did my father sell me to the most dangerous man in Kansas City to keep me away from it?