“So the choice isn’t hers tonight. It’s yours.”
“What do you want?” Dominic said.
“The phone on the table. And you saying out loud what you did to him.”
Isabella moved faster than anyone expected. Her hand was inside the Birkin before Vincent could step in, and she came up with the second phone like a woman coming up with a weapon, holding it by the corner, screen out.
“You want the truth?” Her voice was bright, almost giddy. “Ask him! Ask the great Dominic Salvatore what he said about Aldo Ferrara!”
Her thumb found the screen. She pressed play and held it up so the whole room could hear.
Dominic’s voice came out thin as a phone line, seven years old and digitized:
“…bring him to the house. If he’s taken so much as a dollar off me, he goes back in the water.”
The sound died into the rain.
Every head in the restaurant turned, slowly, toward the head of the table.
Sofia didn’t move. She had read that transcript eleven times. Hearing it in his voice was something else entirely. Hearing it was like putting her hand flat on a hot stove to prove the hand was still attached to her.
“I said it,” Dominic said. He hadn’t looked up.
” You said it,” Isabella breathed, triumphant, giddy, leaning toward him. “So we all go down together, darling. I’m just a woman who married a murderer —”
“Scroll down, Isabella,” Sofia said.
Her voice was very even.
Isabella’s thumb was already moving — the same reflex that had kept two phones, two lives, two names on two passports — and the next message filled the screen, timestamped seven years ago, 11:52 p.m.:
VINCENT: Done. He fought a little. He went over by the pier.
And beneath it, from Isabella’s own number, four seconds later:
ISABELLA: Good. Then nobody asks me about the accounts again.
The giddiness went out of Isabella’s face like air out of a punctured tire.
But Sofia wasn’t finished. There had been a third thread, printed and dated, that she’d read forty times in the back office that afternoon. She made Isabella scroll to it with two fingers that had begun to shake.
Tonight, 9:12 p.m.
VINCENT: After the cake. Car at the south entrance, 11:40.
ISABELLA: Tickets in both names. Buenos Aires, no connections.
VINCENT: He sleeps six hours. I’ll do the pier myself.
The restaurant had gone past silent. It had reached the kind of quiet where you can hear the ice melting in a glass three tables away.
Behind Dominic, Vincent took his hand out of his jacket.
He wasn’t reaching for the gun. He was holding his own phone, and on it the same thread, because there had only ever been three people in it.
“She said you’d never forgive a thief,” Vincent said. His voice was hoarse, stripped. “She said you’d forgive a liar, because you’d done it before.”
“Vincent —” Isabella began.
