Chapter 3
I didn't stand up right away. My legs wouldn't have held me. I sat on the edge where the wood had been cut, my hands flat on the warm floor, and breathed. The dust down there had been in my throat for years and now there was air.
Raffaele hadn't moved. He still held the end of the veil and his knuckles were white around the pearls. Bianca stayed by the window with her arms crossed tight over that sequined dress, like she was holding herself together.
The boy was the only one who made a sound.
He pulled a little against the housemaid's hand and looked straight at me. His voice was small and clear in that big suite.
"Who is she?"
The housemaid bent down. She didn't let go of him. She pushed his hair back off his forehead and whispered, not to me, to him, but I heard every word.
"That's Leo," she whispered. "Sweetheart, this is... honey, remember what we told you? Your mom left before the wedding."
I felt it before I understood it. My eyes went to his left wrist where his sleeve had ridden up. There was a pale brown mark, shaped like a crescent, just below the bone. I'd counted that mark on a hospital blanket five years ago. The nurse had said look, he has your little moon.
He was five. He had to be five. The suit was too big in the shoulders and his sneakers were scuffed at the toes. Light brown hair, same as mine when I pulled it back in the mornings before my shift at the diner on Route 17. I did the math without meaning to. If he was five, I'd been pregnant in that white dress. If he was five, I'd had him and then I'd disappeared.
"Leo," I said. My voice broke on it. It had been so long since I'd said a name out loud.
He stared at me. He didn't smile. He didn't cry. He just studied my face the way kids do when they're trying to match a story to a person.
Raffaele crouched then. He let the veil fall to the floor. He put one hand on the wood beside mine, not touching me, and looked at the boy.
"Leo is ours," he said. His voice was low and rough. He wasn't looking at Bianca. He was looking at me, and I could see he was asking me to believe him and also to forgive him at the same time. "He's yours. He's my son. You were eight months along that day. You remember."
Bianca made a sharp inhale by the window.
"Don't do this, Raffaele," she said. "You were there. She ran. She left you standing in that dressing suite and you waited for an hour. I raised that child. I fed him every night when you were working late. I signed every school form. I am his legal guardian. Don't you rewrite this because she learned how to hide."
She said it calm and even, like she was correcting a detail on an invitation. Her earrings caught the daylight and didn't move. The housemaid tightened her arm around Leo's shoulders.
I looked at Leo again. My hands were shaking. I wanted to reach for him so badly my chest hurt, but he was pressed into the housemaid's apron and he didn't know my hands.
"Did you live here the whole time?" Leo asked me.
I swallowed. The air still felt too thin.
"I never left this house," I said.
Bianca stepped forward one step and stopped. The floor creaked under her heel.
"See? This is confusion. She's confused," Bianca said quickly, to Raffaele, to the room. "Raffaele, you need to think about what you're doing. You think the court will give him to someone who was under our floor? I have papers. I have proof she abandoned you both."
Raffaele didn't answer her. He looked at Leo.
Leo let go of the housemaid's hand. He took three small steps toward me across the polished wood. He stopped just out of reach. I could see the gray in his eyes. I could see the way his bottom lip tucked when he was nervous, exactly the way mine did.
He didn't touch me. I didn't touch him. We just looked at each other, and the space between us was about two feet and five years wide.
Bianca's voice came from behind him, steady now, claiming.
May you like
"He calls me Momma-Bianca," she said. "And the judge knows it."
Leo kept his eyes on me.
