Chapter 6: Everyone at That Table Is Lying — Aubrey

Tuesday, 6:10 p.m. — Ward Parkway house, my bedroom.

Mom zips me into a blue dress and steams the wrinkles out with her hands.

"Chin up. Shoulders back. Smile like you mean it."

"Which lie is tonight?" I ask.

"Aubrey." She says my name like a warning, checks my collar, and leaves.

I scrub my hands at the sink until the last blue paint is gone. Then I make my rules, because rules are the only thing I have left.

Rule one: smile. Rule two: say little. Rule three: watch everything.

Dad waits at the front door in his gray suit, keys in his fist, eyes anywhere but me.

"You look beautiful," he says.

"Thank you," I say, and it's the first lie we've ever traded at the door.

*   *   *

7:00 p.m. — Mission Hills mansion, the dining room.

The dining room is the size of our whole downstairs. One long table. White candles. A wall of windows going black with night.

The Don sits at the head of the table in his wheelchair, gray blanket over his knees, sharp eyes over a water glass. On his right, Pietro, in a black suit worth more than our car, smiling with his mouth only. On his left, Mom and Dad. Dad hasn't eaten anything. His hand keeps finding his napkin and folding it, unfolding it, folding it again.

And across from me, Dante Vescari.

He looks exactly like a wall that walks. Dark suit. Dark eyes. He watches everybody at the table without moving his head, the way Dad checks mirrors.

A skinny man with a chipped tooth pours the wine. When he finishes, he bends to Pietro's ear and calls him boss — which is strange, because everyone knows the boss is the old man at the head of the table.

The Don taps his glass once. The room goes quiet.

"Six weeks from Saturday. The Vandiver. Three hundred guests," he says. "At ten o'clock, my underboss stands up and announces his engagement to Aubrey Hale. After that, nobody in this city doubts this family's future."

"Guest lists," Mom says, opening a leather folder like it's Christmas morning. "Cortese blue and white, the Vandiver does it beautifully—"

"Food first," the Don says. "Politics after."

Pietro swirls his wine and looks at me down the table.

"So. Aubrey. You and Dante. You have so much in common already." He smiles. "Neither of you talks. It's like watching two statues date."

"Statues don't date," I say. "They just get placed next to each other."

Silence. Mom's smile freezes.

Then the Don laughs — one dry cough of a laugh — and taps the table twice. "The girl has teeth. Good. Teeth last longer than beauty in this family."

Pietro's smile stays exactly where it is, which somehow makes it worse.

Across from me, Dante's eyes come off the window and land on me for the first time all night. Not angry. Not kind. Measuring.

"College keeps you busy, I imagine," he says. Conversational. Like weather.

"Most days. I don't get downtown much."

The words are out before I understand what he's holding in his hand. Downtown. Did I just walk into something?

Dante nods once and drinks his wine. He looks satisfied, and I don't know why, and that scares me more than anything he could have said.

Under the table, Dad's shoe starts tapping.

Dad lies with his mouth. His hands and his feet always tell the truth.

Pietro lifts his glass. "A toast, then. To the happy couple. May they have a long marriage — and honest partners."

The word honest lands on the table like a dropped knife.

Dante raises his glass without standing. "Honesty's underrated," he says, looking at Pietro, not at me. "In most families."

The two men smile at each other across the candles, and I finally understand where I'm sitting. Not at a dinner. At a poker table. Everyone here is holding cards, and I'm the newest deck in the room.

The Don watches them both the way a carpenter watches two boards he plans to nail together.

*   *   *

8:40 p.m. — the hallway.

I escape to get air, and Pietro finds me by the tall window like he was parked there waiting.

"Congratulations," he says, soft and friendly. "Brave girl."

"Brave?"

"Marriages in our world are like weather in Missouri." He checks his rings. "Wait five minutes." Then, closer, almost kind: "Ask Dante about the bridge sometime. Isabel. Pretty name. Pretty crash."

He walks away whistling.

I stand at the window with my stomach somewhere near the floor. Even the Don's son speaks about that woman in a whisper — but he chose to hand the whisper to me.

*   *   *

9:00 p.m. — the terrace.

I get one minute of cold air before the door slides open behind me.

Dante. He carries my coat and holds it out, and I let him put it on my shoulders because refusing feels louder than accepting.

"Your mother is showing the Don flower samples," he says. "You have three minutes."

"Do I need them?"

"Maybe." He looks out at the dark garden, hands in his pockets. "Terms first. You finish school. Nobody touches it. My word on it."

"I heard."

"Your room is the blue one at the end of the hall. South side. It gets the morning light." A pause. "Millie picked the color."

Something in my chest folds in half. "She picked my room?"

"She's expecting you." He says it flat, but his jaw moves like the words cost him. "She told her stuffed rabbit there's a girl coming who paints. I don't know how she knows that."

I stare at him. Walls that walk don't say things like that.

"She'll want to meet you before the wedding," he says. "She doesn't know yet. When she does—" he stops, restarts, "—be careful with her. She scares easy now. She checks doors twice."

"I check doors twice too," I say before I can stop myself.

His head turns, just slightly. Like a man hearing a sound in an empty room.

And then the temperature drops, and I watch it happen on his face — the almost-human moment folding itself away, the measuring eyes coming back.

"One more thing," Dante says. Quiet. Even. "Friday morning. Near the courthouse. A girl in a gray cap, twenty feet from a certain bench, on a certain plaza."

The garden goes very loud in my ears.

"My man is good with a camera," he says. "But he's not good with faces in caps. So I'll ask you once, and you'll think hard before you answer, because in six weeks your answer becomes my problem."

He steps in front of me, and up close his eyes are the exact color of the bridge in the rain.

"Where were you on Friday morning?"