Chapter 3 - The Cost of a Kindness
Bianca was waiting in the blue sitting room when Leah returned to the estate. It was nearly two in the morning. A fire burned behind the brass screen, and two untouched cups of tea sat on a tray between the chairs. Bianca had dressed for bed, but the pearls were still at her throat. Leah remembered a thirteen-year-old version of herself mistaking those pearls for evidence that Bianca had never been afraid of anything.
“I gave them the photograph,” Bianca said before Leah sat.
“I know.”
“Salvatore said the project would preserve the kitchen. He showed me a restoration proposal and promised housing for the families during the work. I thought—”
“Did you meet the families?”
Bianca stared at her hands. “No.”
“Did you ask Mae?”
“No.”
“Did you ask me?”
A long pause. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”
Leah let out a laugh that hurt her throat. “My mother spent half her life being thanked by people who wouldn't ask what she wanted. You turned her into a surprise.”
Bianca closed her eyes. “That's fair.”
“No, it isn't fair. Mae nearly got locked out tonight. A grandmother and two boys sleep upstairs. That is what happened while the donors applauded your wonderful surprise.”
Dante stood in the doorway. He'd changed into a dark sweater, but the tension in his shoulders remained. He started to speak, saw Leah's face, and stayed silent. At last, somebody was learning.
Bianca lifted one of the cups, then set it down again. “Your mother told me something the week before she went into the hospital. She said she didn't want her name over any door unless the people inside could open it themselves.”
Leah couldn't breathe for a moment. “You remember her saying that?”
“Perfectly.”
“And you let them put her name on a building they plan to clear.”
“I thought I could make it right after the announcement.”
“That's what people always say when the photograph is easier than the work.”
The fire cracked softly. Leah thought about her mother coming home exhausted, sitting on the edge of the bed to take off shoes that had left red marks around her ankles. Bianca had paid for Leah's education after Mara died. She had ensured the girl was clothed and safe, but safety had come with a private instruction Leah had never heard aloud: don't make the people who help you uncomfortable.
“I loved her,” Bianca said.
“I know you did. That doesn't mean you listened.”
Bianca took off her pearls and placed them on the table, an odd little surrender. “No. It doesn't.”
Dante finally crossed the room. “Vittorio Caruso authorized the locksmith using the estate office access. Raphael has the internal request. I'm having Vittorio explain it in the morning.”
“Don't wait for his explanation to stop the work,” Leah said. “The tenants need a commitment in writing from the people who control the building.”
“I've told our company to suspend anything connected to the site.”
“And Salvatore?”
“He'll be angry.”
“Then he'll experience a feeling he apparently thinks is unique to him.”
For a heartbeat, Dante almost smiled. Leah didn't. She stood and went to the narrow shelf beside the fireplace, where Bianca kept family photographs. There was Leah at her college graduation, holding her diploma with both hands. Dante stood behind her in the picture, proud and unsmiling. He had shown up after a business trip because she had said, once, that she wished somebody would. She had loved him for that effort before she understood how easy it was to love someone who could leave whenever a conversation grew difficult.
“Why do you call me your sister?” she asked him.
Bianca looked away. Dante's face went still.
“Leah, not tonight.”
“Especially tonight. You wanted to know who I talked to. You canceled a meeting to come and stare at Julian. Then you told him I was family like it explained why you were allowed to interfere.”
“When you were seventeen, that word kept a man away from you.”
“I remember. I was grateful then.” Her voice softened without losing its edge. “I was seventeen. I'm twenty-six now. Why are you still using it?”
Dante rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Because I didn't know what else to say.”
“Try the truth.”
He looked at Bianca, then back at Leah. “Somewhere along the way, after you were grown and making your own life, what I felt changed. I didn't know how to say it without making you question whether this house had ever been safe.”
There were several things she might have said to that, some kind and some sharp. She chose the one that mattered.
“You don't get to protect me from information by making decisions for me.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because tonight you looked like you wanted to decide who could touch me.”
“I was jealous,” he said. The admission sounded as if he'd had to drag it out of himself. “It wasn't fair to you or Julian.”
Leah's eyes stung. She'd imagined those words for years. Hearing them beside a discussion of an almost-evicted family made them feel smaller and more honest at the same time.
“I have to go back to Mercer Street tomorrow,” she said. “I don't know what I feel about you right now.”
“You don't have to tell me.”
She turned to Bianca. “I'd like the photograph removed from the campaign until Mae and the residents decide what they want. And I need the freedom to do this work without anybody reminding me who paid my school fees.”
Bianca rose so quickly her cup rattled. “I would never—”
“You don't have to say it for me to hear it.”
The older woman sat down again. “Then I'll make sure you never have to hear it from me.”
Leah went upstairs, not to the room she'd been given as a child but to the small apartment over the garage she'd paid to renovate five years earlier. She began packing a bag. She wasn't moving because Dante had finally told her how he felt. She was moving because she wanted to remember what it was like to decide where she woke up.
May you like
At the bottom of her wardrobe she found her mother's old canvas apron. In one pocket was a folded grocery list and a tiny penciled sentence in Mara's neat writing: ASK MAE ABOUT THE SECOND TABLE.
Leah stared at the words. Her mother had never mentioned a second table. Downstairs, beyond the gates, somebody had just turned on the estate's outdoor lights. Leah wondered how many important things had happened in this house while everyone assumed she was too grateful to ask.
