Page 49

“You photographed a sick child in swimwear. For your private collection or your boss’s private collection?”

The implication makes him stammer. “I—I was trying to get pictures of your wife. Not the girl. She was in the way.”

“My exceedingly short child was in the way of a grown woman?”

“I—I⁠—”

“Are you some kind of pervert, or did Matteo tell you to get pictures of everything?”

He blinks, a little confused. Not Matteo, then.

“Or was it Allegra?”

The name shows on his face before his mouth can stop it.

So, this is her thoroughness—her people deciding what my marriage looks like with a telephoto. Not the routes, not the accounts, not me. A child in a swimsuit doing somersaults for her father.

Nothing to do with Veda. Not this go-round.

When Allegra learned I had a child with someone else, she was incensed. Burned down my old cabin in Pennsylvania and painted in red on the driveway “It should have been me.”

So, this is where Allegra Brancati chose to point her investigation. To see the life she never had with me. The life that Veda gets instead.

I sit on the chair next to him. Not touching him. Not threatening him. But I suppose I don’t need to. “Funny thing about your employer. She never bothered to send spies to the hospital when Sarah was hooked up to machines and vomiting until she passed out. When my child was at her worst, Allegra was always too busy to so much as send a birthday card. But now that my bride has her doing better than she has in years, Allegra is jealous. Jealous enough to send you here alone to fetch her pictures of the life she will never have with me. That’s the woman you’re protecting when you lie for her. Is that the woman you’ll take a bullet for?”

A stain spreads over his khaki pants. “I—I don’t want to die.”

“I’ll tell you a secret.” I lean very close to his ear. “I don’t want to kill you. But in this life, we all do things we don’t want to do.”

“Please don’t⁠—”

“Tape his mouth. I don’t like hearing them beg.”

“Please, please n⁠—”

The tape gets wound around his head until his begging is muffled music.

What happens next, I do quickly, because there’s a stopwatch clicking by the pool and I want to be back at it.

When it’s finished, the man is alive. A body draws law, but a terrified man will spread a message. Two of mine walk him to a car, and he goes without struggle. Message received.

Veda is toweling Sarah’s hair when I come back, both of them pink from sun and water. “Dad, Dad, you should have seen it! I spun so hard I thought I was gonna throw up!”

“But she didn’t,” Veda says proudly.

“Any more records broken?”

“Twenty seconds,” Veda says, still smiling. But I see it in there. She knows. But she’s being normal in front of the child, even though she knows. “Historic afternoon.”

That night, after Sarah’s bedtime, Veda comes to our room and shuts the door. She drops the day’s fake brightness. “Tell me what happened.”

“A man was photographing Sarah from the tree line. He won’t again.”

“Won’t again because⁠—”

“Because he’s been given reasons and returned worse for wear to his employer as a demonstration.”

Some cold math computes behind her eyes. “Did you peel him?”