Page 54 of Ruthless Daddy
I tried. I really did.
I read for an hour—pulp, old airport novels, the kind with guns and lawyers and a protagonist who never made the same mistake twice. I did the crossword in the Trib. I watered the basil and put on the radio, a low buzz of NPR that made the place sound like any other morning in any other city.
But I couldn’t sit still. In spare moments, my mind raced. I worried about people finding me, even though I felt safe. I felt anxious that we hadn’t got to the bottom of the situation, that there was still a threat out there. So, I did what I always did, and took matters into my own hands.
I got the laptop out. Not the safe house one—the real one, the one from before, wiped and flashed and rebuilt six times but still mine in a way no device would ever be again. The power button was stiff; I held it down until the blue light came on.
I sat at the table and stared at the search bar. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.
Just my name. Just once. Just to see if anything had surfaced.
He’d told me not to, but could it really hurt that much? Who was going to be checking up on me?
I could rationalize it a hundred ways. Pietro had been up until three, talking to some contact in Palermo, hunting down which channel the leak had come through. The thread was quiet. No new attempts. Tonio had dropped off groceries at five a.m. andleft without so much as a joke. There was nothing moving. The danger was as low as it ever got.
But I knew the real reason I was about to do it.
I wanted to know if I still existed.
I opened a clean browser, not Tor, nothing fancy. I put the cursor in the search box.
I typed Angela Baggio. I hit enter before I had decided to.
Four pages of nothing. The same six articles that had been online for two years: hedge fund whistleblower; trial ends in four convictions; witness enters protection. There was no new news, no sightings, not even a message board post from the underground weirdos who sometimes tracked federal witnesses for the hell of it. It was like I’d been swallowed whole and digested.
I sat there, breathing. The absence of me was louder than the city outside. I thought about the way a person could vanish, not just from the world but from every database and archive and gossip chain that mattered. I thought about how long it would take for anyone to notice if I wasn’t here anymore.
I closed the browser fast, like I’d touched a hot plate.
It was fine. It was five minutes. Nobody was watching.
I shut the laptop and pushed it to the back edge of the table.
My chest felt hollow in the center, like the start of a panic attack, but quieter. Not the full electric storm—just the cold certainty, in the pit of my stomach, that I had done something incredibly, irreversibly stupid.
I went to the sink, poured out the coffee, and ran the hot water until it steamed. I watched it swirl down the drain and tried not to think about the next time he would ask, “What did you do today?”
I lied to myself: I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him after dinner.
But I already knew I wouldn’t.
Ispentthenextthreehours trying and failing to focus on a book. The words kept crawling off the page and hiding in the cracks of the apartment, which frankly was unhelpful.
By five, I was so restless I cleaned the kitchen twice and reorganized the condiments in the fridge. I kept thinking about the search, about the moment of seeing my own name reflected back at me. It replayed every time I blinked, a brief flicker of the screen, the dull ache in my chest.
Pietro was out, doing something or other. I still felt a little uneasy about the fact that he was such a dangerous man. I hoped that he was safe, and I hoped that whatever he was doing wasn’t too gruesome.
At 5:17, the front door opened. He came in wearing black joggers and a shirt so clean it looked like it had never been washed before. His hair was damp at the temples. His face was a blank, but not a neutral one. I had seen that face before—at the trial, when the lead agent had played nice for hours before they dropped the photo on the table, the evidence of my own fuckup.
I sat very still at the table.
He put his phone down, plugged it into the charger, and filled the kettle. He was deliberate, not rushed, but not wasting motion either. He took down the tea, the good kind, not the supermarket bags. He set out two mugs, put the spoon beside mine. He did not say anything.
I could feel it—something simmering away.
The water boiled. He poured, steeped, waited the exact number of seconds on the timer.
He brought the mugs to the table and set one in front of me, then sat across, elbows on the wood, hands folded. He watched the tea as it cooled.
