Chapter 5: What Isabel Knew
1322 Words
Isabel had watched the whole thing from across the room.
She was good at this — making herself peripheral, which was a skill she had developed young and refined extensively. She could stand at the edge of a social gathering and watch its center without anyone thinking she was watching anything at all. She had a warm smile ready and a glass she appeared to be sipping from and she stood at a perfectly natural angle, and no one in the vicinity had any reason to imagine she was memorizing every microexpression that crossed Valentina Reyes-Moretti's face across the room.
She noted the way Valentina's hand had closed at her side. She noted the exact moment Lorenzo's expression had shifted into something raw and unguarded. She noted the three seconds of silence, and she noted, with the precision of someone whose survival had always depended on reading situations accurately, that those three seconds had contained something enormous.
He was close to knowing.
She had known this moment would come the instant those airport photographs had spread. She had known it with the specific dread of someone watching a wheel they set in motion years ago turn back in their direction.
Five years ago, she had taken a recording of a phone call. A phone call in which Valentina had said: Anna, I'm pregnant, please don't tell my boyfriend — I want to get rid of it. She had taken that recording and she had edited it with a free software tool that took her four hours to learn and forty minutes to use, and she had removed the context — the clarification that came immediately after, the part where Valentina said since I already told you by mistake, I know you don't like me, but can you keep it a secret? I want to tell my boyfriend myself — and she had given the resulting clip to Lorenzo.
She had watched Lorenzo's face when he heard it.
She had never felt anything she was willing to call guilt about this. She had felt something she was willing to call risk management. The risk being: Valentina had everything Isabel had always wanted, and Valentina's relationship with Lorenzo was a bridge to permanence that Isabel had never had, and she had simply removed the bridge.
But now the bridge was in the same room and Lorenzo was looking at it the way men looked at things they had never actually stopped wanting.
She needed to get ahead of this.
She moved through the room with the ease of a woman at her own gala — she had leaned into this role thoroughly over the eight months of the engagement, this room knew her face, she belonged here — and arrived beside Lorenzo as he was still standing motionless where Valentina had left him.
"Tesoro." She touched his arm. He turned, and for a fraction of a second the expression on his face was not the one he wore for her. She noted this also.
"Isabel." He looked at her. Adjusted. "When did you arrive?"
"An hour ago. You were in meetings." She smiled. "I saw you talking to Valentina."
He said nothing.
"It must be strange," she said, with the careful warmth of someone who has rehearsed sincerity. "Having her back. You were so close, all of you, before everything." She tilted her head. "I hope it wasn't uncomfortable."
"No," he said.
She searched his face. He had closed it — Lorenzo was very good at closing his face — but she had spent eight months learning the specific vocabulary of his silences, and this one said more than he was choosing to.
"She looked well," Isabel added. "The children are darling."
"Yes," he said. A pause. "They are."
Something in his inflection. She felt it. They are — not yes I'm sure they are or apparently so, but they are, with the quality of someone who has looked at a thing directly and reached a conclusion.
He knew. Or he was close enough that the difference was irrelevant.
She kept her expression warm and made a decision in the space of a single breath. She needed to move quickly. She needed to find the original recording — the real one, the unedited one — and ensure it stayed buried. She needed to make herself indispensable to Lorenzo before Valentina had any opportunity to have a real conversation with him.
And she needed, perhaps most urgently, to find out if Valentina still had any evidence.
"Come," she said, touching his arm again. "The Morettis want to speak with you. Come."
He let himself be redirected. And Isabel kept her face warm and her eyes clear and her smile in its proper position, and underneath all of it, her thoughts moved with the cold, rapid efficiency of someone who had survived on calculation for most of her life and had no intention of stopping now.
Valentina was in the back of her family's car by ten-thirty, her heels off, her head leaning against the window, watching the city go by.
Her uncle, in the front passenger seat, had not asked her anything. He was reading emails on his phone with the focused concentration of a man whose business interests required attention at all hours, and he was also, she knew, giving her time.
"I spoke to him," she said.
Rafael didn't look up immediately. Then, with the unhurried patience of a man who moved at his own pace: "And?"
"He knows. Or he suspects." She closed her eyes briefly. "He said they're his."
"What did you say?"
"I told him to contact my attorney."
A pause. "Is that what you wanted to say?"
She opened her eyes. Looked at the city. "No," she admitted. "But it's what I'm going to do. I'm not having that conversation in a ballroom while Isabel is watching from across the room with that face she does."
Her uncle lowered his phone. "You think she'll move against you."
"I think she's been moving since the moment those airport photos went out. I think she has been preparing for this since she found out we were coming back." Valentina turned to look at him. "She's not going to let go of Lorenzo's name and everything attached to it without a fight."
"No," Rafael agreed. "She's not." He looked at his niece — this woman who had grown up under his partial custody, who had learned combat from his trainers, who had dismantled a competitor's market position at twenty-four using nothing but information they didn't know she had. "What do you need?"
"I need access to the original phone call," she said. "The real recording. The one she edited. I know I had a copy — I backed everything up during that period." She paused. "I need to know what she's been doing for five years and what she knows and what leverage she thinks she has."
Rafael nodded slowly. "Your cousin Mateo is already on it."
She looked at him.
"You think I waited until tonight?" he said, mildly.
She exhaled. A real exhale — the kind that releases something. "No," she said. "I don't think that."
He returned to his phone. She returned to the window.
The city moved around her. And somewhere behind her, the gala they'd just left was still running, and Lorenzo Caruso was standing in the middle of it, and Isabel was watching him, and the five years between Valentina and all of it were beginning to dissolve in the way of things that were never going to hold permanently anyway.
She thought of Matteo's eyes. Marco's laugh. Mia's quiet certainty.
They deserve their father, she thought. If he deserves them.
And then, to herself, in the privacy of a car moving through a dark city: And I deserve the truth to finally win.
She pressed her palm flat against the cold glass.
So let it.
- Writer
