The Man in the Glass

Elena did not sleep.

Mia lay sideways across the bed in Lorenzo’s shirt, one foot resting on Elena’s stomach. Outside, the estate settled into its nighttime sounds: a distant door, wheels over gravel, rain beginning against the little window.

At dawn, Elena opened the bottom drawer.

The silver bracelet lay inside a sock.

She had sold almost everything else Lorenzo had given her. Earrings had paid for a deposit. A handbag had become a pram. This she had kept, though once she had carried it all the way to a pawnshop and stood outside for twenty minutes.

She put it in her pocket.

When she brought Mia down to breakfast, Lorenzo was already waiting.

He had a child's cup beside his coffee.

“Rosa said this one doesn’t leak,” he explained.

Mia immediately turned it upside down to test the claim.

It leaked onto his hand.

Rosa stopped in the doorway.

“I may have given you the wrong lid.”

Lorenzo looked at the water running over his cuff.

Mia patted his wrist. “You can borrow my towel.”

Elena laughed before she could stop herself.

He looked at her, and she remembered how dangerous it had always been to make him smile.

After breakfast, Rosa took Mia to choose books from the nursery cupboards. Elena remained at the table while Lorenzo closed the dining-room door.

“It was Sofia Bellini,” she said before he could ask.

The name removed every trace of softness from his face.

“She came to see me the afternoon I left.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That people close to you became leverage. She knew about the apartment in Verona and the restaurant by the harbor. She knew where you kept my letters.”

He drew out the chair opposite hers.

“She had photographs of a warehouse raid,” Elena continued. “She said the last woman someone used against your family had not survived.”

“There was no woman killed in that raid.”

“I know that now.”

“Did you know it then?”

“I believed what she told me.”

He leaned forward. “Did she threaten you directly?”

Elena thought of the quiet café, the photographs, Sofia's immaculate nails against her cup.

“She showed me a picture of myself outside the clinic. Then she asked whether I wanted my baby to have guards instead of friends.”

Lorenzo went utterly still.

“She knew you were pregnant.”

“She had followed me.”

He stood so abruptly that Elena flinched.

This time, he noticed and stayed where he was.

“I’m not angry with you for telling me,” he said.

“I know you’re angry with me for plenty of other things.”

“Yes, I am.”

She appreciated the honesty more than she would have appreciated reassurance.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“You had stopped answering.”

His expression shifted.

“For a few days,” he said. “My father was in the hospital.”

“For weeks, Lorenzo. You canceled dinner, then you sent a driver when I wanted to see you. Every time I asked what was happening, you told me not to worry.”

“I was trying to keep it away from you.”

“You kept me away from you.”

He looked down at the chair back beneath his hands.

Elena could hear Mia laughing somewhere beyond the door.

“I should have come to you,” she said. “I know that. But I was frightened, and Sofia knew exactly what to put in front of me.”

“She expected to marry me.”

Elena’s stomach tightened even now.

“Were you going to?”

“I had no intention of marrying her.”

“Did she know that?”

“I had told her. I had told my father.”

“Then why could she walk into your study and find my letters?”

He did not answer immediately.

That silence told her more than another denial could have.

“My father still believed he could change my mind,” he said at last.

Elena put a hand over the bracelet in her pocket.

Lorenzo watched the movement.

“What happened after you left?” he asked.

“I went south first. Then north. I changed my number.”

“I called the old one forty-three times.”

She closed her eyes.

“I know.”

“I went to your apartment. I found your landlord clearing it.”

“I thought you would stop looking.”

“I never stopped.”

She looked up.

There was no softness in his expression now, but there was hurt she could not dismiss.

“Marco followed addresses that didn’t exist,” he said. “A job in Florence. A room in Rome. Every time we were close, something changed.”

“I never lived in either city.”

“I know that now.”

A coldness spread through her.

“Someone was giving you false information.”

“Someone interfered every time we got close.”

He opened the door and called for Marco.

Elena remembered him from years earlier, a man who had once driven her home when Lorenzo’s meeting ran late. He entered carrying a phone and a folder, then stopped at the sight of them together.

“I assume the resemblance has been discussed,” he said.

“Mia is my daughter,” Lorenzo told him.

Marco’s face softened before he controlled it.

“I am happy for you.”

The simplicity of the word caught Elena unprepared.

Lorenzo looked briefly toward the corridor.

“Find Sofia,” he said. “And reopen the search files. Somebody knew where Elena was when we didn’t.”

Marco nodded, but his fingers tightened around the folder.

Elena might not have noticed if she had not been watching so carefully.

“She was believed to be in France,” he said.

“Then begin there.”

He left.

Lorenzo turned back to Elena. “You won’t need to clean the guest wing today.”

“I’m still being paid to work.”

“I’ll settle it with the agency.”

“I don’t want you buying your way into every decision.”

His gaze dropped to the frayed edge of her cuff.

“I would have paid that rent,” he said.

She understood what he meant.

“I know.”

“You never had to sell anything.”

Elena went still.

He glanced at her bare ears, then away.

“I noticed what was missing.”

She wanted to tell him about the bracelet. Instead, she said, “We managed.”

“I can see that you did.”

His voice held no accusation, which made it harder to bear.

That afternoon, he sat on the carpet while Mia built a castle. Elena watched from a chair, mending the seam of her daughter's cardigan.

Mia placed two blocks together.

“This is Mommy’s room. This is Daddy’s room.”

“Where is yours?” Lorenzo asked.

“Mine is in the middle.”

He looked at Elena over the child’s curls.

She pricked her finger.

Before she could hide it, he was beside her with a napkin. He took her hand, pressed the cloth against the tiny bead of blood, and held it there.

She remembered him doing exactly that after she had broken a glass in his kitchen.

His thumb moved once across her knuckle.

Then he released her.

Marco appeared in the doorway.

“We found something from the day Elena came for her interview.”

Lorenzo rose.

On the security-office monitor, Mia stood outside the garden gate beside Elena’s neighbor. A fair-haired woman crouched in front of her, holding a photograph.

“Sofia,” Elena whispered.

Marco advanced the footage.

Mia pointed at the photograph and smiled.

Lorenzo leaned closer.

“Stop there.”

In the glass of the gatehouse window, behind Sofia’s reflected shoulder, a man stood watching.

Elena saw dark hair and the shape of a familiar face.

Lorenzo gripped the desk.

“My brother was here,” he said.

She looked at him.

“But Matteo is dead.”

Lorenzo did not take his eyes off the screen.

“I stood beside his coffin.”