Chapter 4: The Man Who Asks No Questions
Lumina called at seven to tell me not to come in.
Not because of my back.
Because the manager, a thin careful man named Gerald who had worked at Lumina for eleven years and survived three ownership changes by never saying anything memorable to anyone, had received a phone call that morning instructing him that Hannah Mercer was on paid medical leave effective immediately and that her position would be held.
Gerald told me this in the tone of a man reading from a document he did not fully understand.
"Who called?" I asked.
"The instruction came through the ownership office," Gerald said.
"Lumina has an ownership office?"
A pause.
"It does now, apparently."
I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone against my ear and thought about Matteo De Luca, who had told me in an elevator that he would cover my wages, whom I had told no, and who had apparently decided that no was a starting position rather than an answer.
I called the number he had written on the hospital discharge paperwork.
He answered on the second ring.
"You called my manager," I said.
"Good morning, Hannah."
"You called my manager and told him I was on leave."
"You have three stitched cuts across your back and you were planning to carry trays."
"That is my decision to make."
"It is," he said.
"And I made a different one."
I stood up.
Sitting felt too passive for this conversation.
"Mr.
De Luca.
I told you I didn't want your money.
I told you I didn't want your help.
I was very clear."
"You were."
"Then why — "
"Because Leo asked me this morning whether the lady who flew was going to be all right." A beat.
"I told him yes.
I prefer not to lie to my son."
The anger in my chest shifted slightly, which I resented.
"That is not a reason to override my choices."
"No," he agreed.
"It isn't.
I overrode them anyway." Another pause, and when he spoke again the careful formality dropped just slightly.
"Come to lunch.
Not as a favor.
Not as payment.
Come because I would like to speak with you properly, and because Leo has been asking to return Rocco in person and I would rather not disappoint him twice in one week."
I looked at Rocco on the nightstand.
"I have conditions," I said.
"I expected you would."
"No more calls to my manager.
No more decisions made on my behalf without asking.
No money that I haven't agreed to."
"Agreed."
"And if I decide I want to go back to work tomorrow, that is the end of the conversation."
"Understood."
I picked up Rocco.
His plastic left arm was slightly chewed, the way toys get when a child has carried them everywhere for years.
"Where?"
He gave me an address on the Upper East Side.
Not a restaurant.
A private residence.
I noted that distinction and decided to address it when I arrived.
The car came at noon.
A different driver this time, older, who opened the door without speaking and closed it with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been doing this for a very long time.
The address turned out to be a townhouse on a street where the buildings had the particular kind of stillness that comes from serious money — not the loud money of new construction, but the settled, unremarkable money of people who had stopped needing to prove anything.
A woman answered the door.
Late fifties, silver hair pulled back, wearing the expression of someone who assessed threats for a living and had provisionally decided I wasn't one.
"Miss Mercer," she said.
"I'm Rosa.
I manage the household."
"Is Leo here?"
Something in her face softened by about three percent.
"He's been ready since ten o'clock."
Leo appeared at the top of the stairs before I had finished stepping inside.
He was wearing a shirt with a dinosaur on it — a different dinosaur, a stegosaurus, green — and he came down the stairs holding the banister with both hands the way children do when they are trying very hard to walk and not run.
"You came," he said.
"I came."
"Papa said you might not."
"Your papa was being careful." I held out Rocco.
"I brought your guard back.
He did a good job."
Leo took Rocco and immediately tucked him under his arm.
Then he looked up at me with the direct, unfiltered seriousness that six-year-olds deploy when they have decided something is important.
"Does your back still hurt?"
"A little."
"Papa's back has scars too," he said.
"He says they're just maps of where you've been."
I didn't have an answer for that.
Leo seemed to understand, because he took my hand and led me toward the back of the house as though we had already agreed on where we were going.
Matteo was in a room that looked like a library had been interrupted by a working office — books on three walls, a desk with two open laptops, papers in ordered stacks.
He was on the phone when we entered.
He looked up, said two words into the phone that I didn't catch, and ended the call.
"You came," he said.
"You sound surprised."
"I told Leo there was a reasonable chance you wouldn't."
"You were right to warn him." I sat down across from the desk because Leo had released my hand and gone to a low shelf where a basket of toys waited.
"I want to talk about David Carr."
Matteo's expression didn't change.
But he set his phone face-down on the desk.
"Tell me."
I told him about the photograph.
The four words.
The phone call at 4:17 in the morning.
I told him in the same order it had happened, without editorializing, watching his face the entire time.
He listened without interrupting.
When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.
"How long were you together?"
"Two years."
"And the debt he left."
"Eleven thousand.
I've paid back about four."
"He knows where you work," Matteo said.
It wasn't a question.
"He's known for a while, apparently."
"He saw you get into my car."
"Yes."
Matteo looked at his phone, then back at me.
"He called someone last night after he spoke to you."
My spine straightened.
"How do you know that?"
"Because the person he called works for a man I have been watching for eight months." He said it the way someone states a fact about weather.
Calm.
Certain.
Already past the point of surprise.
"David Carr is not simply an ex-boyfriend who wants you back, Hannah.
He has been useful to people who pay for useful things.
And last night, he told those people that you had been seen with me."
The room was very quiet.
Leo made a small roaring sound from the corner, moving two dinosaurs through some private battle.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
Matteo looked at me for a long moment.
May you like
Then he said the thing I had not been prepared for.
"It means that whatever danger you were in before last night just became considerably larger."
