Chapter 13: The Library

Cosimo's POV

Franklin McAlister opened his own front door in a cardigan.

He had a glass of scotch in one hand and reading glasses on a cord, and he looked at me without surprise.

"Cosimo Carraro," he said. "It's been a long time."

"Five years."

"You've done well for yourself."

"I had help getting out of your way," I said.

Lydia stood a step behind me on the porch.

Franklin saw her and his face softened into the warm one he kept for her.

She had spent thirty-three years believing in it.

"Sweetheart. You didn't need to bring a bodyguard."

"I didn't," Lydia said. "He came on his own."

Franklin stepped back and let us in.

I had been in that house once before, at thirty-one, to ask him for her hand.

He had poured me a drink in the library then too, and shaken my hand, and said he would think about it.

The library was the same.

Leather chairs, a fire laid and not lit, a desk the size of a car.

I did not sit.

"Eleven voicemails," I said. "Your voice, Collier's phone. You want to tell me they're fake, or do you want to save us the time?"

Franklin looked at his daughter.

Lydia had stopped in the doorway, with one hand on the frame, and she was watching him without a word.

That was worse for him than anything I could have said.

"I did what a father does," Franklin said at last.

"I protected my child from a bad choice."

"Me," I said.

"You were a smuggler's son with a gun in your glove box. She was twenty-eight and she wanted to run away with you in the night."

"I never owned a gun."

"Your uncle did."

"My uncle isn't the one you sent a forged note to."

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