Page 96 of Crowned in Sin
She sets the glass down slow. She's been waiting all morning for exactly this question, and she isn't in any hurry to give me the answer I want.
"Gone," she says.
"Gone where."
"I don't know where. Gone is gone, Nicolas." She folds the towel over the oven rail, straightens it twice, and turns to face me full on. She never used to do that when I was a boy, when she was afraid of my father's temper in the next room. She isn't afraid now. "She left this morning with a bag. Didn't say where. Didn't have to. Any fool in this house could see it coming a mile off, except you, apparently, since you were up here hiding from her all night and half the day."
"I wasn't hiding."
"You stood outside a door and listened to her cry and you didn't go in." Flat. No heat in it, which is worse than heat. "Don't tell me what you were doing. I know what you were doing."
I open my mouth and nothing comes.
"You've been telling yourself she needs space since sunup," she says. "I heard you tell Marco that at breakfast. Space. As if she asked you for space. As if she asked you for anything at all before she packed a bag and walked out of a house you swore she'd never have reason to leave."
"I was trying not to make it worse."
"You made it worse the second you didn't open that door." She says it plain, no drama in her voice, and the plainness hits harder than shouting ever could. "You've spent this whole morning protecting yourself from having to look at what you did to her. Call it whatever you like. I call it a coward standing very still and calling it kindness."
Heat climbs my neck. Some old animal part of me wants to bark back at her, wants to remind her whose roof this is. I don't. I can't. Because she's not finished, and some part of me already knows what she's building toward, has known it since the word gone left her mouth.
"You want to know what your father would've done," she says. "If a woman under his roof defied him and walked. He'd have sat in that chair of his and let her suffer for it, and told himself it was mercy that he didn't go looking. Or he'd have gone looking, and God help her when he found her, because with him it was never about getting her back. It was about making sure nobody who belonged to him ever forgot who she belonged to."
"I'm not him."
"Then prove it." She doesn't blink. "Are you your father, Nicolas?"
She's asked me some version of this before, a lifetime ago, standing in almost this same spot. It hits harder now.
The kitchen goes very quiet.
Something in my chest that has been locked since I was eleven years old, since a knife I didn't want to hold and a man's face I didn't want to remember, cracks straight down the middle.
I'm not going after her because I own her.
The thought hurts, and it hurts exactly where Giorgia meant it to.
"Get my keys," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like the man who's been sitting behind a desk all morning. It sounds like the one everyone in this city is afraid of, and for once in my life I'm glad to hear him.
I've got my phone out before I hit the front hall, Anastasio's name already ringing.
"Talk to me," he says, no hello, because he knows my voice by now, knows when it means business.
"Lydia's gone. Since this morning. I need her phone, I need her car, I need eyes on both five minutes ago."
"On it." I hear him moving already, a door, a chair scraping, the particular quiet of a man who saves his breath for what actually gets her back faster. Three minutes. Four. I stand in the front hall with my jaw locked so hard it aches, watching the clock on the wall move slower than any clock has ever moved in my life.
"Got her car," he says finally. "Plate pinged twenty minutes ago heading east out of the city. Direction's Gravesend."
Gravesend. Her mother. The house she grew up running from.
Of course. Of course that's where she'd go, back to the one place that was hers before any of this, before me, before Frank, before a father she never got to bury properly because I was the one who put him in the ground.
"Send me everything," I say. "I'm driving."
The tires scream out of the gate before Giorgia's even got the door shut behind me.
The drive to Gravesend takes forty minutes and every single one of them is its own hell. I run three lights I have no business running. My hands are steady on the wheel and nothing else in me is steady at all. I keep seeing her face last night, the one she wore right before I broke something between us that might not go back together. Underneath that, older, is a girl's face I've never actually seen but built anyway out of one photograph and a decade of guilt, Harry Mitchell's daughter growing up in a house I put a hole in before she ever knew my name.
