Chapter 4

The reception was winding down by the time Leo called again.

Ava felt the buzz against her hip and checked the screen before she could stop herself. The sitter's number. Which meant Leo had talked her into handing over the phone again, which meant whatever this was, it wasn't small.

She kept her expression neutral and excused herself from the conversation she'd been half-present in for the last ten minutes as one of the Moretti wives saying something about the house in the hills, Ava nodding at the right intervals and moved toward the far corridor that ran alongside the ballroom.

She picked up on the second ring.

"Nadia, is he okay?"

"He's fine, he's fine." The sitter's voice was low, the careful kind of low that meant she didn't want Leo to hear her. "He just he won't go to sleep. He says he had a bad dream but I think he just wants to hear your voice. I tried everything, Mrs. Hart, I'm sorry, I know you said..."

"It's okay. Put him on."

A pause. Then Leo's voice, smaller than usual, which was the thing that got her every time. In the daytime Leo was a force of nature. At night when something scared him he got quiet in a way that made her chest hurt.

"Mom."

"Hey, baby. I'm here."

"I had a dream."

"What kind of dream?"

"A bad one." He paused. "There was a loud noise and you didn't come."

She turned toward the wall and dropped her voice. "I always come. You know that."

"But you didn't in the dream."

"Dreams aren't real, Leo."

"I know." He didn't sound convinced. "When are you coming home?"

"Tomorrow morning. First thing."

"Promise?"

"Promise." She pressed her free hand flat against the wall and kept her voice steady. "Go back to sleep. Nadia's right there."

"She doesn't do the voice."

"The voice?"

"The one you do. When you sit on the edge of the bed."

She closed her eyes for a second. "I can't do the voice on the phone, bug."

"Can you try?"

"Leo—"

"Just try."

She exhaled and started the song, low and half-under her breath, the one she'd made up when he was eighteen months old and couldn't settle, the one that didn't have real words and probably sounded ridiculous to anyone who wasn't a sleep-deprived mother sitting on the edge of a toddler bed at three in the morning.

She was two lines in when she became aware of someone standing behind her.

She turned.

Dante was in the corridor entrance, one shoulder against the frame, watching her with an expression she couldn't read. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't frowning. He was just looking at her the way he looked at everything, like he was cataloguing the information and deciding later what to do with it.

She held up one finger.

He didn't move.

"Mom?" Leo's voice came back through the phone, softer now, already starting to drift. "Are you still there?"

"Still here," she said quietly. "Close your eyes."

"Okay." A long pause, the kind where she could hear him settling. "Mom?"

"Yeah."

"I love you the most."

"I love you the most back." She waited until his breathing changed, slow and even, and then she heard Nadia come back on.

"He's out," the sitter said. "I'm sorry about that."

"Don't be. Thank you, Nadia. I'll be home in the morning."

She hung up and stood there for a moment with her back to Dante, because she needed one second, just one, before she had to put the face back on.

She turned around.

He was still there.

"Your son," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"How old?"

She considered how to answer that. Considered it for exactly the amount of time it took to realize there was no version of this conversation she could manage by choosing her words carefully.

"Five," she said.

Something moved in Dante's face, quick and controlled. "Where is he?"

"Home. With his sitter."

"What about his dad?"

The question landed between them and sat there. She held his gaze and kept her breathing even and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer and she knew it.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the phone in her hand, then back at her face, and whatever calculation he was running behind his eyes finished itself without her help.

"He will be brought to the mansion tomorrow," Dante said.

Her stomach dropped. "That's not necessary. He's fine where he is, he has school on Monday and his routine is…"

"He is your son. Which makes him my responsibility now." He said it the same way he said everything, flat and certain and leaving no opening for negotiation. "He will be brought tomorrow."

"You can't just…"

"The arrangement includes your family, Mrs. Moretti." He let that land for a second. "All of it."

She stared at him.

He held her gaze without any visible discomfort at all, which was somehow the most infuriating thing about him, that nothing she did or said seemed to find a crack in whatever he was made of.

"He's five years old," she said. "He doesn't understand any of this."

"Then we will make sure he doesn't have to." He pushed off the doorframe and straightened his jacket. "Tomorrow. Before noon."

He turned to go back into the reception.

"Mr. Moretti."

He stopped but didn't turn around.

"He's a child," she said. "Whatever this is between us he's just a child."

A beat of silence.

"I know what he is," Dante said.

Then he walked back into the ballroom and left her standing in the corridor with her phone in her hand and the cold, specific feeling that those four words meant something she hadn't caught yet.