“Where do you need to be right now, la mia rosa?”
“With you.” She gives me a shy smile. “But I’m supposed to be spending the night at Dani’s house…so I guess there?”
I squeeze her hand. “I’ll get you to Dani’s. We can walk to Kings Point Park and get a cab there, maybe.”
“Thank you. If you’re sure it’s okay.”
“Of course.” Dad doesn’t care when I come home. Not that he knows what time it is after five o’clock anyway.
We walk through the trees, over the damp grass, toward the lamp-lit road, which is a little two-lane lined with ostentatious houses, leading to a larger two-lane that leads to a parkway that would eventually lead to Throgs Neck Bridge. I looked it all up after school, from a café computer, just in case I couldn’t get home on the chopper.
“I really like it here,” I hear myself tell her. “It’s quiet.”
She nods. “We have a place upstate—a bigger kind of place that’s on a lake, but it has these two little cabins on the property. One time my mom let my friends and me stay in one for a night. It was so quiet. I felt like you could hear the leaves falling.”
“That sounds pretty cool.”
I can feel her hesitate a moment as we near the curb that marks the lawn’s edge. Her hand in mine tenses.
“What’s the matter?”
I notice the car at the moment I ask. There’s this dark car parked by the curb, with one door open. She stops walking, lets my hand go. My eyes focus, and I realize a man is standing by the car—someone tall, wearing dark clothes.
Elise makes a little gasp sound. “Oh shit. That’s my dad.”Chapter NineElise“We’re going to have a conversation, Elise. Sit down.” My father pats a wing-backed chair in his study, and again when I don’t immediately follow instructions.
I clamp my minty gum between my molars and sit, waiting while he steps behind his large oak desk and settles in his high-backed leather chair. He tugs the pull cord on a Tiffany lamp, splashing amber light over the papers on his desk and lighting his face. It looks pitted with shadows from the angle of the light.
“This won’t take long,” he says slowly. “But I need to make you understand.”
I rub my tongue over the bumpy piece of gum. During the car ride home—which took around two hours—my dad didn’t speak. Not one word about how he found out where I was or why he showed up. Or about who I was with. Zip, nada, zilch.
I nod now, fixing my gaze on his face because I know if I don’t, he’ll think I’m a liar. That’s the way my father’s mind works.
“Do you know why I came to get you?” There’s a pause so I can guess. I don’t, and he says, “Your sister had two severe seizures.”
“What?”
“She’s in the PICU. Your mother is there with her.”
“Oh my God.” Something cool slips through me—terror. “How is she?”
He shakes his head, pressing his lips flat. My eyes well and my throat aches awfully. Please don’t let this be the night…
“First, we’re going to talk about this insubordination.” His eyes are hard on mine as he asks, “Why were you at the Banetti home?”
My stomach sinks like a stone in water. When your father is a cutthroat lawyer and the questions start, you know you’re in trouble. I tell myself I’ll keep it casual; don’t act defensive.
“Everyone went there after the game.” As soon as I say it, my jaw drops—because I wasn’t supposed to be at the game! “We weren’t going to go to the game,” I add, “but we did at the last minute. Dani had to work concessions.”
“Concessions,” he says, frowning like the word is foreign to him. “Why is that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Some club she’s involved in.” My heart beats harder.
“So you were there with Dani, at the game. And the boy—what was his name?—was he playing?”
“No. I mean, well, yes. But that’s not why we went.”
“I didn’t imply that it was, Elise. But maybe it was, since you offered that it wasn’t.” My father looks down at his hand, curled in a half fist on his desk. My throat aches again as I think about the times I used to sit in that chair, playing with his briefcase, calling myself Elise O’Hara, Esquire. Before Becca got worse and he…changed.
His flat, hard gaze returns to mine. “Did you go so you could watch him?”
“No way. Of course not. I don’t even know him.” Liar. “Not well.”
“You were never a good liar, were you? That comes from your mother. She’s not good at hiding her feelings, either.”
She just disappears, I want to say—but I don’t. Because my dad would never stand for that, no matter what a coward she is.