Mia POV
I walked to the balcony before I said anything else.
Not because I thought anyone was listening or maybe exactly because I thought someone might be. I stepped outside into the night air and pulled the door mostly closed behind me and stood at the railing with the ocean black and endless below and my aunt's breathing sharp and uneven in my ear.
"Gloria," I said. "Start over. Slowly."
"There is no time for slowly." Her voice had that particular edge it got when she was frightened and covering it with authority I had grown up listening to that voice, I knew every version of it. "Dante Calabrese is not a normal man. He is extremely dangerous and you are on his property and you need to find a way off that island before"
"How do you know his name?"
Silence.
Not the silence of someone thinking. The silence of someone who just walked into a room they did not mean to enter and is now standing very still hoping nobody notices.
"I told you," she said. "I looked it up. After the wedding."
"After the wedding," I repeated.
"Yes."
"Gloria." I kept my voice very even. "Harold Finch was shot dead in front of fifty people. There were screaming guests and a body on the floor and police sirens within minutes. You are telling me that in the middle of all of that, your first instinct was to go home and run a search on the man who did it?"
"I was scared. I wanted to know who"
"Nobody does that," I said. "Nobody's hands are steady enough to type a name into a search engine thirty minutes after watching someone get shot at their niece's wedding. Not unless they already knew where to look." I paused. "Not unless they already knew the name."
The silence this time was longer.
"You're being paranoid," she said. But her voice had lost its authority. It was thinner now. Careful.
"I've been thinking about something since the car yesterday," I said. "I keep coming back to it and I cannot make it mean anything other than what it looks like. When that man walked into the church when Dante walked in you were behind me. I felt you stop moving. Not flinch, not grab me, not pull me toward the floor the way a person does when a gun comes out in a room full of people." I gripped the balcony railing. "You stopped. You went completely still. And when I looked back from the car window you were standing on those steps watching us leave and you looked like someone watching a plan go exactly right."
"Mia"
"You didn't look surprised, Gloria." My voice came out quieter than I expected. Quiet was worse than loud, I had learned that from watching Dante. Quiet meant certain. "You knew someone was going to stop that wedding."
The silence that followed was the longest one yet.
It stretched out so long I thought for a moment the call had dropped. I pulled the phone from my ear to check still connected, timer still running. I put it back.
"Come home," Gloria said finally. Her voice was completely different now. Flat. Empty. Like she had taken everything out of it so I could not read her anymore. "Come home and we will talk about this in person."
"Tell me now."
"Come home, Mia."
"Tell me what you know about that night."
Click.
She was gone.
I stood on the balcony holding the phone and looking at the ended call screen until it went dark. The ocean moved below me, slow and indifferent, and the night air was warm and smelled like salt and the white flowers Renata had put in my room, and I stood in all of it and tried to organize what I knew into something I could think clearly about.
My aunt had known Dante's name before she searched it. My aunt had not been surprised when he walked into that church. My aunt had watched the car pull away with the expression of someone watching an expected outcome. My aunt had just refused to tell me anything and hung up rather than answer one direct question.
My aunt knew something about that night.
The question that followed that one was the one I did not want to look at directly. It was too big and too ugly and it changed too many things if it was true.
Did my aunt know about the night at the hotel?
Had she known for two months had she known while she pushed me toward Harold Finch, while she told me I was a disgrace, while she arranged a marriage designed to bury the whole situation as fast as possible had she known all along what had actually happened to me?
I stayed on the balcony until my hands stopped shaking.
Then I went to find Luca.
His room was two hallways from mine. I had noted the door that morning on my walk. I knocked three times, firm, not hesitant. He opened it after about twenty seconds in a t-shirt and with a tablet in his hand, which told me he had been working, not sleeping.
He looked at my face. His easy expression shifted into something more focused immediately.
"What happened?" he said.
"My aunt just called." I kept my voice steady. "She told me to come home and not tell you anything. She knew Dante's name before she could have looked it up. She wasn't surprised at the church when he walked in." I watched him. "I think my family knew something about that night. Not just about the pregnancy about the night itself. About what was done to me."
Luca was very still.
It was a specific kind of stillness not the stillness of someone processing new information. The stillness of someone hearing out loud a thing they had already been thinking privately. His jaw shifted slightly. His eyes, which were usually warm and easy, went somewhere more careful.
"Your family knew," I said. Not a question anymore.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he stepped back from the door and held it open.
"Come in," he said.
I walked in. His room was half office a desk covered in papers and two screens running, files open, strings of numbers that meant nothing to me. He moved to the desk and picked up a printed document and held it without giving it to me yet.
He looked at me with the kind of expression people wear when they are deciding how much truth a person can handle.
I looked back at him and hoped my face said what I meant it to say. That I was not fragile. That I needed the whole truth, not the managed version. That I had already survived enough today to handle whatever was on that paper.
He must have seen it, because he took a slow breath and said:
"Mia, I need to show you something." He held out the document. "And I need you to stay calm when you see it."
My hand was completely steady when I reached out and took it.
My heart was not.