Chapter 14: What I Take

I sent my family down the stairs one at a time.

"Go home," I told my father. "Say nothing to the boss and nothing to your men. I'll tell you when."

"Livia."

"You killed a man and kept his daughter in the next room. You don't get to say my name like that."

He went.

My mother stopped on the third step and looked back at Bianca, and Bianca looked at the floor.

Franco was last. He picked the picture frame up off the floor, put it back on the nail, and went out without a word.

When the SUV was gone I shut the door and turned around.

Bianca was sitting on the chair again. Nico hadn't moved from the window.

"All of it," I said. "Both of you. Now."

Bianca went first.

The folder in my father's safe held a photograph of her father on a concrete floor.

It held a page of figures and a note in the boss's handwriting with her father's name on it.

She was thirteen.

She thought about running to the police for a week.

She thought about telling my mother for a month.

Then she watched my father put a hand on her head at the dinner table and say grace.

"I decided that was the moment I'd stop being a child," she said. "So I got very good at it."

"At being a child?"

"At being the child they needed."

Every gift and every vow had been a payment she was collecting.

Every cry on cue was a receipt, from people who didn't know they owed it.

"And me?" I asked.

"You were never the debt." She looked up. "You were the audit."

I let that sit.

Then I turned to Nico.

He told it with his hands hanging between his knees.

He was eighteen and three weeks into the job.

My father told him to drive a man to Elizabeth and wait with the engine on.

He watched the man walk across the lot to my father's car.

Then he heard one sound.

"I thought it was a tire," Nico said.

"Then Carmine got in the back seat and told me to go home. I went home."

For nine years he told himself he was only the driver.

Then Bianca texted him a photograph of that gas station, and he understood.

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