Brunch with a Traitor

Chapter Three: Brunch with a Traitor

I was home before my husband.

Nero let me out at the corner of my building and waited, engine idling, until I had passed the doorman and the elevator doors had closed on my own pale face. The apartment was dark and quiet and smelled like the lavender candle Rowan had said made it feel like a home, Isa. I stood in the entryway for a full minute without turning on a light.

Then I did what a woman does when her life has just split in two. I took off my coat, hung it on the hook, and went to wash my face.

At 12:34, I heard the key in the lock.

I was in bed by then, on my side, eyes closed, breathing slow and even. I had practiced it in the bathroom mirror. The trick, I discovered, was to think of nothing. To be a woman asleep. To be a house with the lights off.

The bed dipped. A warm weight settled behind me, and I smelled hotel soap, the expensive kind, with a note of something floral that was not mine.

"Isa?" Rowan whispered.

I didn't move.

He pressed a kiss to my shoulder, soft and absent, the way you pat a dog that has waited up. His hand settled on my hip. His thumb moved once, slowly, over the bone.

My whole body wanted to scream. Instead I counted. One. Two. Three. I counted until his breathing slowed, until his hand went heavy and slack, until the clock on the nightstand turned over to 1:00 and he began, very softly, to snore.

Then I lay awake and stared at the ceiling.

At 1:12, my phone lit up on the nightstand.

Unknown number.

Breathe. In for four. Out for six.

I stared at the screen so hard my eyes burned. My thumbs moved before I could stop them.

Who is this?

Dante.

How did you get my number?

Hailey's emergency contacts. She never changes the password.

I almost smiled. It was a terrible, brittle almost-smile, and I buried it in the pillow.

In four, the next message read. Out six. Again.

I did it. I didn't know why. I lay in the dark beside the man who had spent the evening in someone else's bed, breathing to a stranger's count, and for the first time since the gallery, my chest stopped feeling like it was caving in.

Rowan made pancakes in the morning.

That was how I knew his guilt was real. He only cooked when he was sorry. He stood in our kitchen in his gray T-shirt and flannel pants, hair sticking up in the back, flipping blueberry pancakes with a whistle, and I leaned against the doorframe with my coffee and watched his hands.

Those hands had held my sister. Those hands had signed the hotel ledger. They moved easily and without a tremor, the hands of a man who slept very well.

"You're up early," he said, grinning over his shoulder. "Come here. Taste."

He held out a forkful. I took it, because refusing would have been a sentence I couldn't afford. It tasted like ash.

"Good?"

"Perfect," I said, and smiled.

It was the first lie I told him on purpose. It slid out as smooth as silk, and the horror of that was nothing compared to the horror of how easy it was.

"I've been thinking," Rowan said, sliding a plate toward me. "We never do anything anymore. I've been working too hard. I'm sorry about last night, by the way. The harbor thing dragged on forever."

"It's fine."

"No, it's not. It's been a lot of nights." He caught my hand across the counter and squeezed, looking up at me with those warm brown eyes that had once made me believe in everything. "I'm going to fix it. I promise."

Thirty-one Thursdays.

I squeezed back. "I know you will."

I got to the gallery at 8:40, locked myself in my office, and was sick in the small private bathroom. Then I washed my face, retouched my lipstick, and hung the Hartwell placard I had dropped on the floor two nights before.

My phone buzzed at noon.

Brunch with Hailey is Sunday. Tell her you ran into me Thursday night. Nothing else. Let her ask the questions.

I read it twice. Then I typed back.

That's it? That's the plan?

A fish doesn't see the hook until it has already bitten. We're only setting the bait.

Hailey was already seated at the corner table when I arrived at the Ivy Terrace on Sunday, glowing in a cream silk blouse with the sun in her hair.

My little sister had always been the beautiful one. It wasn't a thing anyone resented. It was just a fact, like the weather. She was twenty-five, small and golden, with eyes the color of sea glass and a laugh that made strangers turn their heads. As children, she'd climbed into my bed every thunderstorm. As teenagers, I'd done her homework when she cried. I had thought of her as mine, the way you think of a heart or a hand.

"Isa!" She leapt up and threw her arms around me. She smelled like vanilla and expensive perfume. "God, I've missed you. It's been a week."

"It's been four days."

"Same thing." She pulled back, beaming, and I saw the new bracelet on her wrist. Rose gold, thin, delicate. "Do you like it? Dante bought it. He's been so sweet lately. I think he feels guilty about working so much."

I looked at the bracelet.

I knew exactly what it was. Three weeks ago, I had found a jeweler's receipt in Rowan's coat pocket and had been foolish enough to believe it was for me. Rose gold. A delicate chain. Surprise gift, Isa, I'd told myself, folding the paper back into the lining. Don't ruin it.

I had waited for that gift for three weeks.

"It's beautiful," I heard myself say. "Dante has good taste."

"Dante has no taste. That's why I pick everything out." Hailey laughed and flagged down a waiter. "Mimosas? Please say yes."

"Just coffee."

"Boring. Fine."

We ordered. We talked. Hailey chattered about a new yoga studio, a cousin's engagement, a pair of shoes that had cost too much. I watched her mouth move and thought, This is the woman who typed love you to bits from Room 1412. It was like staring at a stranger wearing my sister's face.

I waited until the food came. Then I stirred my coffee, tapped the spoon twice against the rim, and said, lightly, "Funny thing. I ran into Dante Thursday night."

Hailey's fork paused halfway to her mouth.

"Dante?"

"He came by the gallery. After closing."

A beat. Then she laughed, bright and easy. "Oh my God. Why? Did he lose something? Is he trying to buy art now? Please tell me he didn't try to buy art."

"No. We just talked."

"Talked." She said it like the word was in another language. "About what? Spreadsheets? Shipping manifests?"

"About a lot of things." I took a sip of coffee. "He's different when you actually listen to him."

It was a small sentence. I set it down on the table between us like a coin, and I watched it land.

Hailey's smile stayed exactly where it was. But something behind it flickered, quick as a fish turning in a stream. A tiny contraction at the corner of her left eye.

"What time was this?" she asked.

"Late. Nearly ten. He drove me home afterward."

"Dante drove you?"

"His driver did."

"Oh. Nero." Hailey relaxed, visibly, and waved a hand. "He's just some company guy. Dante's too cheap to hire a real one. I keep telling him to buy a decent car." She took a bite of her eggs and chewed thoughtfully. Then, too casually: "Did he say anything about me?"

There it was. The hook, sliding quietly into the water.

"He mentioned you were out that night," I said. "Book club, right?"

A pause. A very small one. Hailey's lashes dipped.

"Right," she said. "Book club. We were reading that... new thing. The one about the lighthouse."

"I didn't know you were in a book club."

"It's new. I'm still deciding if I like it." Her laugh came out half a note too high. She reached for her mimosa and drank half of it in one swallow.

I folded my napkin on my lap and kept my face perfectly still, the way I'd kept it in the dark beside my husband. Beneath the table, my hands were clenched so hard that my nails left half-moons in my palms.

She had lied to my face without blinking. And I had let her.

It was, I realized, the second thing I'd learned how to do.

We were on the sidewalk, saying our goodbyes, when the black sedan pulled up to the curb.

I knew it before I saw it. The way the traffic seemed to part around it, the quiet purr of the engine, the shaved head behind the wheel. Nero got out first, and opened the rear door, and Dante Marchetti stepped onto the pavement as if he'd done it a thousand times.

He wore a dark suit, no tie, collar open. The scar through his eyebrow caught the afternoon light. He looked, for the first time since I had known him, like a man who belonged to no one.

Hailey stopped mid-sentence.

"Dante?" Her laugh came out as a confused little puff of air. "What are you doing here?"

"Picking up Isadora." He said it simply. He crossed the pavement in four strides and stopped beside me, close enough that the heat of him reached through my coat. "I promised I'd drive her to the gallery. She has a delivery at two."

I hadn't mentioned a delivery. I had no delivery. But I heard myself say, smoothly, "He did. I forgot."

Hailey looked from him to me and back, her sea-glass eyes flicking rapidly. "Since when do you two... drive each other places?"

"Since Thursday," Dante said, and for the first time, a smile touched his mouth. It was small and warm and utterly unlike anything I had ever seen him give my sister.

Then his hand settled at the small of my back.

It was a light touch. Barely a touch at all. His palm rested against my coat just above my waist, steady and warm, and the whole street seemed to narrow around that single point of contact. My breath caught. I hadn't expected it to feel like that.

Hailey saw. I watched her see it. Her gaze dropped to his hand, lingered, and rose again, and the glow drained very slightly out of her face.

"Well," she said brightly. "That's... nice. That you're getting along."

"We are," Dante said.

He opened the car door for me. As I slid in, Hailey caught my wrist, her fingers cold and tight. Her voice dropped to a whisper only I could hear.

"Isa. Dante hasn't touched me in public in two years."

I looked up into her face, my beautiful, treacherous little sister, and for a single heartbeat I saw something there that I had never seen before. It wasn't guilt. It wasn't even jealousy yet. It was only the first thin crack in a pane of glass, spreading outward in the dark.

"Maybe you should ask him why," I said gently.

Then I pulled my wrist free, and Dante closed the door.

The car pulled away from the curb. Through the window, I watched Hailey grow smaller on the pavement, one hand lifted in a slow, uncertain wave.

"She noticed," Dante said beside me, and his hand was already gone from my back as if it had never been there.

"Yes." My voice sounded strange to my own ears. "She noticed."

"Good. That's the first thread."

My phone buzzed in my bag. I took it out, expecting nothing. A grocery reminder, a gallery email.

Rowan: Hailey says Dante picked you up from brunch?? Since when are you two friends? Call me.

I stared at the screen.

The corners of my mouth lifted. I couldn't help it. It was a slow, cold, unfamiliar curve, and I felt it spread across my face like the first light of morning.

Beside me, Dante watched me read. "What does it say?"

I turned the phone toward him. He read it once. Then he looked up, and the gray of his eyes had changed. Something dark and pleased and entirely unhurried moved behind them.

"Rowan," Dante said softly, "has just taken the bait."

I should have been afraid. A good woman would have been afraid. But I sat in the back of a Mafia-run sedan with my sister's husband, watching the city blur past, and for the first time in four days I felt something that wasn't grief.

I felt awake.