Chapter 2 - The Man Who Came Back From the Dead
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Nobody moved after Salvatore said those four words.
The man on the balcony did not flinch.
He smiled like a son who had been waiting twelve years to be believed.
Dominic stared up at him with a face I had never seen before.
For the first time since I came to this house, Dominic Romano looked lost.
The string quartet had stopped mid-note when Dominic raised his hand.
Crystal glasses trembled on the table where Salvatore had struck it.
Celeste stood frozen with tears still wet on her cheeks.
The stranger came down the wide staircase one slow step at a time.
He wore a dark suit that fit him like it had been tailored that morning.
A thin scar cut through his left eyebrow and disappeared into his hairline.
Salvatore had described that scar to me once with his good hand.
He had traced it in the air while we played chess.
His oldest boy had gotten it falling from a dock when he was nine.
Now the man wearing that scar stopped ten feet from our table.
He looked only at Salvatore.
Then he looked at Dominic.
It is me, he said.
I am Adrian.
A woman in the back of the room gasped out loud.
Someone whispered that it was impossible.
Someone else made the sign of the cross.
Dominic did not sit down.
He did not reach for the man.
He did not call him brother.
Where have you been, Dominic asked.
The man let out a breath that sounded almost like relief.
Alive when everyone needed me dead, he said.
That answer made the guards shift toward the doors.
Frank Deluca, Dominic's head of security, put his hand near his jacket.
Frank had been with this family for fifteen years.
If Frank was nervous, everyone should have been nervous.
Adrian, or the man claiming to be Adrian, raised both hands.
I am not here to hurt anyone, he said.
I came home because my little brother is about to marry into the family that tried to kill me.
Celeste made a small sound in her throat.
Dominic turned his head toward her so fast she stepped back.
You knew he was here, Dominic said.
It was not a question.
She shook her head too quickly.
He contacted me three weeks ago, she whispered.
He said if I did not help him get into this house, people would die.
And you believed a ghost over me, Dominic said.
I believed he would kill my father if I said no, she cried.
That was the first honest fear I had ever seen on Celeste D'Amato.
It did not make me trust her.
It made me watch her hands.
Salvatore grabbed the edge of the table and tried to stand.
I caught his arm before his knees gave out.
Easy, Mr. Romano, I said.
He would not sit.
He pointed at the stranger and shook his head hard enough to frighten me.
Not, he forced out.
Not son.
His voice cracked on the last word.
The stranger's smile finally faded.
Papa, he said softly.
Please look at me.
That was the first wrong thing.
I felt it before I understood it.
Salvatore went completely still under my hand.
In six months of mornings and chess games and newspaper headlines, Salvatore had told me stories in fragments.
Adrian Romano had never called his father Papa in a room full of people.
Not as a child.
Not as a grown man.
In this house, in public, it was always Sir.
Salvatore had been proud of that discipline and sad about it at the same time.
He had tapped the chessboard once and whispered Sir, always Sir.
Now this man was calling him Papa like a boy in a kitchen.
Dominic had not noticed yet.
He was too busy staring at a face that looked like his own blood.
Tell them how you survived, Dominic said.
The man nodded as if he had prepared for that question.
He told us the car bomb on the Hutchinson River Parkway had not killed him instantly.
He said a retired fisherman and his son pulled him from the water below the bridge.
He said he woke up in a private clinic outside Palermo with no name and no memory.
He said nuns cared for him while his face healed.
He said a priest kept his gold cross because he had no money to pay for medicine.
He said his memory returned in pieces over nine years.
A song on a radio.
The smell of diesel on a dock.
A boy calling his brother in a market in Sicily.
It was a beautiful story.
It was the kind of story desperate people want to believe.
Half the guests were crying by the time he finished.
Dominic's mother had been dead for ten years, but an older aunt crossed herself and whispered his name.
Even Dr. Harris lowered his eyes.
Only Salvatore kept shaking his head.
Only Salvatore kept trying to speak.
The man turned to Dominic again.
You were always the stubborn one, Dom, he said.
You never cried at our father's table, not even when you were seven.
There it was.
The second wrong thing.
It hit me like cold water.
Salvatore had once laughed, a real laugh, while he showed me a photograph of his boys at the lake house.
Dominic was missing a front tooth and holding a fishing rod too big for him.
Salvatore had pointed at the older boy in the photo and then at Dominic.
Nicky, he had said.
He calls him Nicky.
He had repeated it until I understood.
Adrian had called his little brother Nicky from childhood.
Not Dom.
Not Dominic.
Nicky, even in arguments.
Nicky, even at their mother's funeral, according to the housekeeper who had told me later.
This man had called him Dom twice in five minutes.
Strangers call him Dom.
Brothers do not.
I looked at Dominic and prayed he had heard it too.
He had not.
Or if he had, grief was louder than reason.
You expect me to believe my brother hid in Sicily for twelve years, Dominic said.
I expect you to look at me, the man answered.
I expect you to remember who taught you to tie your shoes before our father taught you to tie a tie.
Several guests nodded like that proved something.
It proved nothing except that someone had taught him good lines.
Salvatore suddenly lunged for the chess set on the side table.
I understood before anyone else did.
He knocked the board with his left hand and sent pieces across the marble.
The black king rolled under a chair.
The white queen cracked against a table leg.
Salvatore snatched one piece and held it up with his shaking right hand.
It was a black knight.
One ear of the horse was chipped off.
He thrust it toward the stranger.
His whole arm trembled with the effort.
The man looked at the knight and smiled politely.
You still play, Sir, he said.
He did not take it.
He did not react at all.
My heart dropped straight through the floor.
Salvatore had shown me that knight on my third day in this house.
He had held it longer than any other piece.
Adrian had chipped it the summer he turned twelve by throwing it at a lake house door.
Salvatore had never repaired it on purpose.
He said a perfect set belonged to men with perfect sons, and he preferred the truth.
That knight was a family wound and a family joke at the same time.
The real Adrian would have laughed or looked ashamed.
The real Adrian would have known.
This man saw only a chess piece.
Salvatore made a sound I never want to hear again.
It was grief and rage trapped behind a stroke.
Not son, he said again, louder.
Not son.
Dominic finally looked at me.
Grace, he said.
You see something.
It was not permission to accuse a dead man of lying.
It was Dominic Romano asking the nurse because everyone else in the room wanted a miracle.
I chose my words like I was stepping through glass.
Adrian called you Nicky, I said.
And he called your father Sir in public.
And that knight meant something to him.
The stranger's eyes moved to me for the first time.
There was nothing warm in them.
There was only calculation.
Memory is a fragile thing, he said.
Trauma changes details.
You just told us trauma gave you back every detail, I said.
The room went silent again.
Celeste seized that moment.
She always knew when attention was shifting away from her.
This is what she does, Celeste shouted at me.
She fills his head with stories while he is vulnerable.
She has been turning Salvatore against this family for months.
Dominic did not look at her.
Shut the doors, he ordered.
Frank moved instantly.
No one leaves, Dominic said.
No phones.
No calls.
No one goes to the bathroom without a guard.
The guests erupted in frightened protest.
Dominic raised his voice only slightly.
My father was poisoned in my house, he said.
My wine was poisoned in my house.
A dead man walked onto my balcony at my engagement dinner.
Anyone who wants to leave can explain that to the police when they arrive.
The word police changed the temperature in the room.
Men who feared Dominic realized they feared questions even more.
Celeste's father stood up from his table.
Dominic, this is a family matter, he said.
Dominic looked at him with absolute calm.
Then sit down and act like family, Mr. D'Amato.
Enzo D'Amato smiled thinly and sat.
I had only met him twice before that night.
Both times he had looked at this house like a man measuring curtains in a home he planned to steal.
Dominic turned back to the stranger.
If you are my brother, you will not mind proving it, he said.
I mind nothing, the man said.
Then you will give Dr. Harris blood tonight, Dominic said.
You will give fingerprints.
You will answer questions until I am satisfied.
And if I am who I say I am, the man asked.
Dominic stepped closer.
Then I will ask why my brother let me bury an empty casket and mourn him for twelve years.
That landed.
For one second, the man's confidence cracked.
He glanced toward Celeste.
It was fast, but I saw it.
She gave the smallest shake of her head.
It was not a lover's signal.
It was a warning.
Salvatore saw it too.
He slammed his palm on the table again and pointed at the blue bottle in Dr. Harris's hand.
Then he pointed at the stranger.
Then he pointed at Celeste.
Three points.
One line.
Even confused, Salvatore was trying to draw us a map.
Dominic ordered Frank to take the man to the library and keep two guards inside the room with him.
He ordered Celeste to her suite with a guard outside her door.
She protested that she was the future Mrs. Romano.
Dominic looked at the ruined engagement table.
There is no wedding until my father can say the word safe, he said.
The guests were moved into the ballroom under guard to give statements to Dominic's private security team.
It was not legal and everyone knew it.
No one argued.
Dr. Harris sealed the blue bottle in an evidence bag from his medical case.
He told Dominic the lab would need twenty-four hours if he used his private contact.
Make it twelve, Dominic said.
I helped Salvatore into his wheelchair.
His hand would not release my wrist.
He kept looking toward the library doors as if the stranger might vanish and take the truth with him.
As we passed the side table, Salvatore reached again for the fallen chess pieces.
I bent to pick them up for him.
His fingers closed around the chipped knight and pressed it into my palm.
Hide, he whispered.
I stared at him.
He nodded toward the library with desperate eyes.
Then he used every bit of strength he had left to say one more word.
Grave.
Before I could ask what he meant, the library door opened.
The man claiming to be Adrian stood between two guards with a calm smile restored to his face.
He looked directly at the knight in my hand.
And he said the one thing that made Dominic freeze in the hallway behind me.
Nicky always hated losing that knight, he said.
He had been listening.
May you like
He had corrected himself.
And now I no longer knew whether Dominic would believe his father, his nurse, or the dead man who was learning how to be Adrian in real time.
