Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
She didn't know why, but she just knew...this conversation had to happen.
Kelly lowered her phone. She didn't leave the window.
Chelsea turned back to her stepmother, and what she found there made her stomach drop, because Francesca was smiling. Not the performative smile Chelsea had grown up seeing at dinner parties, the one that said everything is wonderful, darling, pass the wine. This was the smile of a woman who had come to deliver a wound and wanted to watch it land.
Francesca's body was shaking beneath the careful stillness she had composed for this moment. The rage was feeding on itself, feeding on the sight of Chelsea sitting across from her in this charming little cafe with her earnest face and her chamomile tea and her limp and her inexplicable, infuriating contentment.
The contentment was the worst of it. Francesca had spent her entire adult life pursuing the kind of security that was supposed to produce contentment, had married for it, had schemed for it, had fought for every scrap of financial certainty with the desperation of a woman who had grown up without any, and she was not content. She was hollowed out. She was sitting across from a girl who had lost her father and her health and three years of her life and had somehow emerged from all of it glowing with a peace that Francesca had never once, not for a single day, possessed.
It was unbearable.
And so she would take it away.
"You might think you've won, but you haven't."
"Francesca—-"
"You can say whatever you want about me, darling, but you know I've never been so weak as to pretend to be something I'm not." Francesca leaned forward, and her voice dropped to something intimate and poisonous. "But your husband, though?"
Chelsea couldn't understand why her stomach had started cramping. It was a sensation she recognized from the hospital, the body's alarm system, firing before the mind could catch up, a warning that something was coming that would require more of her than she currently had available.
Her stepmother leaned closer.
"Did he tell you about the Marquez deal?"
No no no.
Something inside her was already fracturing, already knowing, the way her body had known in the elevator on Day One that the man behind her was going to matter, the way her body had known in the conference room that his kiss was going to change everything. Her body always knew before her mind did, and right now her body was telling her that the next words out of Francesca's mouth were going to rearrange the world she'd been living in for the past nine days, and she couldn't stop it, couldn't unhear it, couldn't go back to five seconds ago when she was sitting in this cafe thinking about green tabs and manuscript evidence and whether her husband had started reading the book she'd given him because she loved him and wanted him in Heaven.
Francesca's lips curved slowly.
"I can see it in your eyes, darling." A pause that lasted forever. "You already know what I'm about to say...don't you?"
Chapter Nine
NORMAL.
Everything was normal.
Olivio Cannizzaro sat through his nine o'clock with the Contini group and made three decisions that would move fourteen million dollars across two borders before lunch. He approved a revised timeline for the Yorkville development, flagged an inconsistency in the environmental report that his team had missed, and ended the call four minutes ahead of schedule because four minutes was four minutes and he didn't waste them.
Normal.
He picked up his phone. Opened the thread with Chelsea's name. Typed five words without thinking about them, the way he'd started doing sometime around Day Four, the way the gesture had entered his routine without his permission, the way so many things involving his wife had become part of him whether he wanted them to or not.
How is your day, tesoro?
He sent it. Set the phone face-down on the desk. Aligned the Contini file with the edge of his blotter, and reached for the book.
It was sitting where he'd left it that morning. Not in his briefcase. Not in the drawer where he kept things he intended to deal with later. It was on his desk, beside his coffee, its spine soft with use and its colored tabs catching the overhead light like small, earnest flags planted in territory she was hoping he'd visit.
He opened it to the green tab near the beginning.
He'd told himself he would read one page. A courtesy. The kind of thing a man did when his wife asked him to do something and the asking had mattered to her more than anything she'd ever asked of him, and the least he could do was read a single page of a book that she'd held against her body like something precious before handing it over.
One page.
That had been the plan at seven-forty this morning, in the back of his car, with her voice still in his head and her kiss still on his mouth and the city scrolling past like something that no longer concerned him.