**"GET THAT OLD WOMAN BACK UPSTAIRS!

I did not hear what was said in the study.

But I heard the moment it changed.

I was in the sitting room with Sophie and Teresa — Sophie was drawing at the low table, Teresa was watching her with the quiet contentment of a woman who had been given back something she thought was gone — when a voice rose on the other side of the wall.

Vanessa's voice.

Not the pleasant one.

The other one.

"You cannot prove any of this."

Then Luca's, level and unhurried.

"Marco's phone records place eleven calls to Reid's personal number over the last six weeks.

Three of those calls were made from this house, from your phone, while you were alone with my mother."

"Marco is a driver who is trying to protect himself from his own wrongdoing—"

"The address he was given matches a property registered to a shell company.

That company was incorporated four years ago." A pause.

"The same month you and I met."

Silence.

Sophie looked up from her drawing.

"Why are they arguing?" she asked.

"Grown-up things," I said.

"Keep drawing.

Show me what you're making."

She turned back to her paper.

A house with a large sun.

A woman with yellow hair and a smaller figure beside her.

I looked at Teresa.

Teresa was still watching Sophie.

But her hand was resting flat on the arm of the wheelchair, and her fingers were very still.

Through the wall:

"The engagement is over, Vanessa."

"Luca—"

"That isn't a conversation.

It's a fact."

"You are making a decision based on the word of a maid and a sick old woman who cannot—"

"Say that sentence again."

Absolute quiet.

Then Vanessa's voice, lower now, the pleasantness stripped away entirely.

"You will regret this.

Reid has material that will surface regardless of what happens to me.

You cannot contain this."

"I'm not trying to contain it.

I'm letting it surface.

I've already spoken to two people this morning who would like very much to speak to Reid themselves."

"You're bluffing."

"I'm not, actually.

That's always been the difference between us."

A chair.

Footsteps.

"The ring," Luca said.

A long pause.

Something small and hard placed on a wooden surface.

More footsteps.

Heels on the hallway floor, moving fast.

Sophie had put down her pencil.

"Is Vanessa leaving?" she asked.

"I think so, sweetheart."

"Okay." She picked the pencil back up.

"She smelled like the flowers Daddy doesn't like."

Teresa made a sound that I realized, after a moment, was a laugh.

Small and rough and unpracticed from long disuse.

But a laugh.

I put my hand over my mouth.

Sophie looked up, confused.

"What?"

"Nothing," I managed.

"It's nothing.

Keep drawing."

The front door closed.

The house went quiet in the way that houses go quiet when something that has been wrong for a long time has finally been removed from them.

Teresa reached over and patted my arm.

Two pats.

Her signal.

I looked at her.

She tilted her head toward the doorway.

He was standing there.

Luca Moretti, without his jacket, his expression carrying the particular exhaustion of a man who has spent six hours taking apart something he spent two years building.

He looked at his mother.

She looked back at him.

Then he crossed the room, sat down on the footstool beside her chair, and rested his forehead against her hand the way Sophie had rested hers against his shoulder the night before on the gravel.

Teresa put her other hand on the back of his head.

Neither of them spoke.

I stood.

"I'll go check on breakfast," I said quietly.

I was almost at the doorway when Luca said, without lifting his head, "Hannah."

I stopped.

"Thank you."