"Your sister stopped by yesterday. Said she forgot something. " Julian didn't have a sister who forgot things at his apartment. He had a half-sister he hadn't spoken more than a dozen sentences to in 3 years. Not since the blow-up at his mother's memorial when Bianca had shown up on his father's arm like she belonged there. 26 years old and combative and furious at a dead woman for reasons Julian had never fully understood and had stopped trying to.
Bianca had a key. His father had given her one years ago back when Richard still held out some fantasy of a blended family that actually blended, and Julian had never bothered taking it back because he'd never expected her to use it. He sat with that fact for a long time before he picked up his phone and typed, then deleted, then typed again. "We need to talk today. " She didn't answer until almost noon. Nora spent the morning at a job site in Chelsea standing in a half-gutted kitchen arguing with a contractor about cabinet depth, grateful for something that required her full attention and left no room for replaying the night before.
It worked for about 2 hours. Then her phone buzzed with a text from Julian that read simply, "Can we talk? " Not a question, a request dressed up as a statement, The way he asked for things when he was too proud to actually ask. She almost didn't answer. She typed I'm working three separate times and deleted it three separate times and finally settled on 6:00 my place this time because if they were going to talk, she wasn't doing it standing in the same room as that sofa. He showed up at 6:00 with a paper bag from the noodle place on her corner, the one she'd mentioned exactly once back in October in passing and the fact that he remembered made her furious in a way that had nothing to do with logic.
"I'm not trying to buy my way out of this. " He said holding the bag up like a shield. "I just didn't want to show up empty-handed and make it worse. You could make it better by explaining what's going on. " He set the bag on her counter and didn't sit down like he needed to say this standing up. "I have a half-sister, Bianca, my father's daughter from an affair he had while my mother was still alive, which is its own whole ugly story I'm not going to get into tonight. She's 29.
We're not close. We've never been close. I didn't mention her because every time I do, I end up talking about my mother and I have exactly one setting for that conversation, which is not talking about it at all. " Nora leaned back against her own counter, arms crossed, waiting. "She has a key to the loft. My father gave it to her years ago.
I never took it back because I never thought she'd use it and honestly, I forgot she had it at all until the doorman mentioned she'd stopped by. " He rubbed the back of his neck. "I think she left it there. I don't know why and I don't know what she's playing at, but I know it wasn't some woman I brought home. Nora, I need you to believe that much even if you don't believe anything else I say tonight. " Something in his voice cracked on the last sentence, small and real. And Nora felt the anger in her chest shift into something more complicated, less clean, harder to hold on to.
"Why would she do that? " she asked. "Break in, leave something like that on purpose. That's not an accident. That's a message. " "I don't know. " "Yes, you do. You have a theory.
I can see you having it right now. " Julian was quiet for a second, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone lower, more careful, the voice he used when he was choosing every word like it might explode in his hand. "My father wants me married to Vivian Whitfield before the merger goes through. It's not subtle. He's been dropping her name at every dinner for 2 months. If our engagement fell apart right before the gala, right when the board's expecting to see a united front, that leaves a gap.
A gap my father would be more than happy to fill with someone else's daughter. You think your own father used your sister to break us up. " "I think my father has never once let family get in the way of a deal in his entire life. And I think Bianca has never once said no to him about anything because she spent her whole life trying to earn a seat at a table he keeps moving further away from her. " He said it flat, tired, like a fact he'd made peace with a long time ago and hated saying out loud anyway. Nora studied him for a long moment. It would have been easy, dangerously easy, to let the explanation be enough and move on, fold it into the growing pile of things about Julian Cole she chose not to look at too closely.
But something about the way he'd said I think twice, not I know, snagged on her. "You're guessing," she said. "I'm guessing with pretty good evidence. " "Then let's get better evidence. " The building's front desk kept a visitor log, a paper relic Enzo still filled out by hand because the new digital system had gone down twice in 1 week and management hadn't bothered fixing it since. Julian pulled rank the next afternoon, and Enzo, looking faintly guilty about the whole thing, walked them through it. Bianca Cole, 4:17 p.
M., the day of the pasta dinner, signed out at 4:26. 9 minutes. 9 minutes is enough time to leave something on a sofa and walk out. Nora said, reading the log over his shoulder. It's not enough time to have been doing anything else.
I know. So, it was deliberate. She came here specifically to plant it. Julian didn't answer right away. He was staring at his sister's signature, a fast, slanted scrawl that looked almost angry even on paper, and something in his face had gone somewhere far away.
There's something else, he said slowly. The night my father called four times. That was the same day. He wasn't calling about the merger, or not only about the merger. He asked me, out of nowhere, whether I'd thought any more about the Whitfield introduction.
Like he already knew something was about to change. Nora felt the floor of the conversation shift under her. You think he knew what she was going to do? I think Julian said that my father doesn't leave things to chance, and neither does Bianca, not when it comes to him. If she did this, she didn't do it for fun.
She did it because he asked her to, or because she thought it would earn her something. And either way, it means this whole thing wasn't a mistake between me and you. It means somebody wanted it to happen. He looked up from the logbook, and for the first time since the sofa, since the whole ugly scene of the night before, his eyes found hers and held them, steady, like he needed her to see he meant every word. I need to talk to her, he said.
I need to know what he told her, and what she thought she was doing before this whole thing blows up 9 days from now in front of 300 people in a merger my father's been circling like a shark. Then let's talk to her together, Nora. You said it yourself. This isn't between me and you anymore. It's bigger than that.
She closed the logbook, quiet and final. I'm not asking to be protected from this, Julian. I'm asking to be let in. He looked at her for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes that she couldn't quite name, and then he nodded once, like a decision he'd been circling had finally landed. Okay, he said.
Together. Bianca didn't answer her phone that night, or the next morning, or the one after that. By the fifth day, with the gala closing in and the silence from her stretching longer than either of them liked, Julian got a text from a number he didn't recognize. Four words long, no name attached. Stop looking.
You'll regret it. Bianca stared at the four words on her screen for 11 minutes before she hit send. And even after she did, her thumb hovered over the message like she could still call it back if she typed fast enough. She was sitting in her car outside her mother's building in Queens. Engine off.
Heater dying. The kind of cold that got into your bones if you sat with it long enough. Her mother's medication was in a paper bag on the passenger seat. $240 she didn't have. The kind of number that made her hands shake a little every time she handed over a card at the pharmacy counter and waited to see if it would go through. She hadn't wanted to walk into that penthouse.
She wanted that clear, even if there was no one left to say it to. She'd stood in the elevator with the lace thing in a shopping bag. Her father's voice still ringing in her ear from the call an hour before. This is the last time I help with her bills, Bianca, unless you can show me you're finally willing to be useful to this family. And she told herself it was a small thing.