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They go. I climb the stairs to my sister, and she doesn’t run, which tells me everything before she says a word.

“Gen.”

“I know.” Her voice is barely there. “I know what you’re going to do. Do it. You should have done it years ago.”

“Tell me.”

So she tells me.

The tables at the Gilded Crown. The debts. Luca, charming and patient, telling her she mattered when no one in this house had said it in years. The affair. The questions that started small. Where will he be on Tuesday? Who is he meeting? And the leash, once she understood what she’d done: keep talking, or he tells our father everything.

“I stopped for a while,” she whispers. “After the night Stevie found me on the stairs and put me to bed like I was worth the trouble. I didn’t answer him for almost three weeks. Not until he figured out why his information had gone stale.”

The Bracco date. The source that went cold. It was my sister all along.

“Then he started threatening me, and I was so scared, Enzo…” She presses the back of her hand to her mouth. “Northern Boulevard. I heard you and Carmine talking about Donati in the living room. I told him.”

The garage. Carmine on a hospital bed with a tube in his arm.

“And the cabin,” I say.

She nods. Tears run straight down her face, and she doesn’t wipe them away. “He asked if there was anywhere outside the city. I remembered when you bought it. I remembered you saying you’d never been brave enough to use it.”

“He asked about the boy, too. Whose he was.” She shakes her head hard. “I never told him that, Enzo. Whatever else I did, I never told him that.”

I don’t hit her. I want to. I have never wanted to put my hands on anyone the way I want to put them on my sister right now, and I don’t, and I will never be able to explain to anyone what that costs.

“I never wanted them hurt,” she says. “Stevie was good to me when she had no reason to be. And Matthew…” Her voice breaks clean in half. “I would take it back. I would die to take it back.”

“Maybe you should.”

The voice comes from the landing above us.

My father stands at the top of the staircase that leads to the fourth floor. He’s wearing a navy suit I haven’t seen on him in ten years, a white shirt, his good shoes. He has his cane, but he holds it like a man who might decide to stop needing it.

“But not today,” Michael Accardi says, coming down one slow step at a time. “Today she’s going to be useful. For once in her life, my daughter is going to help this family instead of bleeding it.”

CHAPTER 39

ENZO

My father takes the head of my mother’s table like he never left it.

He has summoned me to his rooms a hundred times since I was grown, and I have always left the door open behind me, whatever he says about the cold. The last time it was closed with the two of us inside, I was nine years old, and I walked out of it with two broken fingers and a lesson about lying. I learned it very well.

“Your woman came up to my floor a few nights ago,” he says. “Did she tell you?”

“No.”

“She stood in my room and told me I built all of this and then abandoned it. Nobody has spoken to me like that in twenty years.” His mouth twists. “I sat with it. I decided it was too late. That my punishment was to sit in that room and watch it all rot.” He lifts his eyes to mine. “Then I heard my grandson was in a van on the Northway, and I found out I was wrong.”

My phone buzzes.

A photo. Stevie in the back of a van, pale, chin up anyway, my son in her lap with his face buried in that gray rabbit. Under it, a message.

Midnight. Alone. One car. Hands empty. Address at 11:30. I see anyone else, the kid goes in the creek. Wear something nice. You’re going to be on camera.

A minute later, a second message.