“This looks great,” Matthew said.
“It’s not much, but we’ve been missing meals a bit,” Jane said. “Nina’s only been home, what, twice this week?” She winked at me, then looked knowingly at Matthew. “My theory is that she’s seeing someone on the sly. She was gone with Olivia for ten days on Long Island, and then all this week, she kept sneaking out.”
“Is that so?” Matthew asked. “Who’s the lucky guy, huh?”
I stared resolutely at my plate, knowing that if I looked at him, I’d lose my battle against the rising flush in my face. “No one,” I muttered and took a drink of wine.
Eric, who was a bigger fan of privacy than all of us, just shook his head at Jane.
“You should come for dinner this weekend, Zola,” he said instead. “We’re having a couple of investors over. One of them is Karl Kramer.”
“We’ve met before. In court.” Matthew didn’t look as if he had enjoyed the experience.
“Who is Karl Kramer?” Jane asked.
“He’s one of the top defense attorneys in the city,” Eric said before taking a bit of chicken breast. By the look on his face, it seemed Jane was correct—it was overcooked. He chewed it anyway.
“And one of the biggest scumbags too,” Matthew said.
“Yeah, well. Contacts are contacts, aren’t they?”
I nudged him on the shoulder. “Perhaps it might be good for you to meet him in this kind of setting.”
Matthew put his fork and knife down on his plate and turned. “Is that what you think I should do?”
I sighed. “Given the circumstances—”
“What circumstances?” asked Jane. “What’s going on?”
Matthew grimaced at me, then took a long drink of wine before speaking. “As I told Nina downstairs, I was fired today. The DA found out about my trip to Italy with Nina, and he viewed it as a pretty bad conflict of interest. They made my leave permanent. I am no longer an assistant district attorney for the Brooklyn DA, and probably won’t be for any other DA in New York.”
“Are you serious?” Eric demanded. “After the check I just wrote?”
Matthew frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” Jane said. “Just that he thought this might happen and tried to encourage the DA to keep you on with a fat campaign contribution.”
Matthew’s face turned white. “Oh, fuck. Eric, you didn’t.” He rubbed a heavy hand over his face. “Shit, no wonder he was suspicious. Ruggeri’s call was just the nail in the coffin.”
“Petri dish, you’re getting corrupt in your old age,” Jane said sadly. “Not everyone can be bought.” She turned to Matthew sympathetically. “That really, really sucks, Zola. I’m so sorry.”
“Shit, man,” Eric said. “I’m sorry too.” He looked at him more carefully. “But look. Since we’re at least partly responsible here, the least we could do is hook you up with contacts for a new job. I heard Kramer’s firm bills a lot. Hell, I’m sure there’s a spot in the DVS legal team if you want to work for me.”
“Associates start at five hundred an hour at Kramer,” Matthew confirmed, not terribly enthusiastically. I noticed he didn’t even reply to the offer of working for DVS. “But I didn’t get into law to make money, per se. A little coin is nice, but I wanted to get these guys off the streets, not work for them. Like I told Nina, I wanted to do some good.” He shook his head. “After seven years with the DA, I can’t really see myself just switching sides like that, Eric.”
But it was me he looked to with regret. Like he thought he was disappointing me or something.
“Nor should you,” I said. “Ever.”
I was dying to touch his shoulder, his knee—anything to demonstrate that I cared. He didn’t actually need to work anywhere he didn’t want to. At some point, he and his family would want for nothing, once I was unraveled from this terrible mess. Didn’t he know that?
The sharp green look that flashed my way told me he did know that. Very well. And did not particularly appreciate the insinuation.
I kept my hand in my lap. Matthew sighed.
Eric cleared his throat as Jane raised her eyebrows at him over her wineglass.
“That reminds me, Nina,” Eric said. “With the trial and everything, I forgot to ask you how it went with Liv. How did she take the news?”
Every eye in the room turned on me. Beside me, Matthew’s entire body tensed. He already knew this story, of course, and had offered to be with me when I told her. He thought it might make things easier, given the fact that she liked him and that he could support my story as someone who had been in Italy with me.
But this was a matter between Olivia and me. Matthew couldn’t save me from that, no matter how much he would have liked.
I had chosen to wait until her April break to tell Olivia the news of her true parentage. February had been too soon—for one, her sisters in Florence were still reticent when it came to talking to me, and when Olivia begged to go with her friends on a ski trip to Vermont for the week, I had acceded. I wanted my darling girl to have as much happiness as she could these days. I didn’t like the shadows I had seen under her eyes too often when she was home.
The week before the trial, I had chosen to take Olivia to Southampton for a week of riding and vacation instead of staying with Eric and Jane in the city. By way of helicopter directly to and from Boston, we had managed to escape the local press entirely, and so it was in the warm, hay-filled barn, after a day of riding our horses on the beach, that I had told my daughter the truth of where she had come from.
Olivia sat down on one of the worn wooden stools in the tack room and pulled a felt rag tight between her hands.
“Does this mean
