She played it on a Tuesday.
I had been expecting something. Victor's announcement had removed most of her ammunition — the pregnancy was no longer a secret she could weaponize, the Romano family acknowledgment had removed the *convenient* implication from any story she could build. But Stella had not survived twenty-three years of being exactly who she was by running out of moves.
She went to my father.
Not to my phone. Not to a journalist. To my father — directly, in person, at his office, where she sat across from him and told him things she had assembled over weeks with the specific skill of someone who understood that the most effective attacks were the ones that came through people who loved you.
Dad called me that afternoon.
He sounded — careful. The specific careful quality of
