The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

From Lucretia Grindle, author of Villa Triste, comes a novel of lives lost and found, as intricate and mysterious as the Italian streets where the story's secrets begin. When American student Kristin Carson enrolls in a study abroad program in Florence, she's sure it will be the best year of her life, a chance to explore art, poetry, and romance in the arms of her new Italian boyfriend. But days before her parents arrive in Florence to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, Kristin disappears. Senior Detective Alessandro Pallioti and his young protégé Enzo Saenz are called to investigate. At first they believe she's simply run off for a romantic weekend and forgotten to tell her parents. But when Kristin's step-mother, Anna, also goes missing, Pallioti and Saenz suspect something much more sinister has happened. As they deepen their investigation they discover that Anna Carson is not who she appears to be, and Kristin's new boyfriend isn't just another local Lothario, but one of the most infamous—and dangerous—men in Italy. To find Kristin, Pallioti and Saenz must first find Anna and uncover the secrets she's kept buried for a lifetime. To do so, they must wade through the past, revisiting times and places most Italians would rather forget, and walk in the footsteps of the dead.

Release date: June 23, 2015

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 480

Sample

Rome, 1978
Thursday, March 16


Oreste Leonardi shifted against the back wall of the church. The gun was digging into his hip. He did not believe. Not deep in his heart the way you were supposed to—not with the soul and fiber of his being. Still, he found it moving, this strange cannibalism. Eat of my body. Drink of my blood. Consume me, and you shall be saved.

He looked to the rear pew where his partner sat. Domenico Ricci glanced back and tapped his watch.

Their charge was up front, on his knees. Candlelight licked his back in its dark suit and caught the silvered hair of his bowed head. There was, Oreste thought, no question about Aldo Moro’s faith. He’d grown up with the pope, for Christ’s sake—pardon the pun, Father. They’d been little angels, boy servants of the Lord together half a century ago back on the hot white stones of the south. And now, who would have bet on it? One was the father of his church, the other father of his country.

Oreste had actually heard Moro called that yesterday, on the TV news, or the radio. By the end of today it would probably even be true. If they made him president. Which they would. Five times foreign minister, five times prime minister. What else were they going to do with him? He wondered if he would go to the Quirinale, too. If the family would even agree to move into the palace. Or if Moro would commute back and forth, pater patria by day, pater familias by night. Now, that really would be a security nightmare.

Even as he thought it, it struck Oreste again how strange it was, that he should be thinking about keeping the next president of Italy alive. Him. A nobody. Nothing but a policeman, an ordinary cop doing his job. Which was all he’d ever set out to be. All he’d ever wanted, really. The job, and what came with it. A little dignity. A good pension. And look where it had landed him. Thanks to what his mother would have called “an angels’ kiss.” “Angel’s wings,” she told him when he was boy. “Angels’ wings feather our lips.”

Domenico’s eyes met his. Oreste shrugged. Cèrto, they were tight on time. But so what? It wasn’t like communion was exactly something you could rush. Hurry it along, could you, Father, this redemption thing? We have an appointment at the Chigi Palace. And what were they going to do, anyway, all those black suits and Andreotti who looked like a gnome? Wait, that’s what. They’d hardly start swearing in the government without Moro. After all, he’d put the damn thing together. Jury-rigged it with goodwill and promises. It wasn’t exactly elegant, but he’d hauled the Communists out of the cold and, grace of God, lured them into bed with the Christian Democrats. Lo, the lambs shall lay down with the lions and the hand of peace shall be upon you. Oreste smiled at himself. For a man who didn’t believe, he’d come over all biblical. Must be the time of year. Easter was next week.


The tinny notes of a bell skittered down the aisle. Oreste watched as Moro stood and shook hands with the old woman in the pew behind him, exchanging the benediction. Holding her wrinkled paw in his, he smiled, his long horse face breaking into softness, an almost joy Oreste found himself envying. When was the last time he’d smiled like that, felt it glowing from the bottom of his belly? Maybe he should try harder. Maybe every now and then—on Sunday mornings, say, or Easter—he should forget the world, just for a minute, and make an effort to believe. The idea fluttered in his head, and left. Get thee behind me. Believing wasn’t his job.


Pushing the church door open, Oreste Leonardi looked left then right, his eyes sweeping the street and the waiting car and the second car with the second group of bodyguards pulled up behind it. He felt Domenico slip past him, caught the signal from the escort and returned it as he heard the familiar intoning, Go in peace, go in peace, and looked back at the door in time to see Aldo Moro step from the shadow of God.


*  *  *

On Via Fani the forsythia had begun to open. And the pink stars of the oleander that had been Monica Ghirri’s favorite until she discovered how poisonous they were. She’d been just a little girl when a teacher had slapped her hand as she reached for the dusky spear of a leaf. At the time Monica thought it was anger in the woman’s voice. Now she understood it was fear.

That was what children did to you. The world looked ordinary, then you had them and it was filled with hazard. She wondered sometimes how any parent stayed sane, burdened with this love and its attendant terror. She could, for instance, perfectly well have let her son and daughter walk to school by themselves this morning. They were old enough, and it was all of three blocks, and what did she think was going to happen to them on a beautiful Thursday in the middle of Rome? It was one of the reasons they had moved to this neighborhood—bought the apartment she and Gio agreed they really couldn’t afford—because it was safe. Patrician. An ordered, secure place.

Monica glanced at the bus stop. Two old ladies sat wearing headscarves and, despite the sun, fur-collared coats, each with a small dog on her lap. Beside the bench, a group of Alitalia stewards stood chatting, their travel cases at their feet. One of them, a tall guy with glasses and a mustache—and wasn’t that a sign of the times, they’d be bearded next—checked his watch, then looked down the road and shrugged.

Furious honking erupted a few streets away. Something was niggling at Monica, like a stone in her shoe. She stopped, waiting to cross the street, and realized what it was. The flowers on the dining room table. They were wilting. She needed another bouquet, something cheerful, but the flower seller’s van wasn’t in its usual spot on the corner.

She was looking down the road, thinking he might have moved a block, when she heard the crunch of a fender. A white Fiat had thrown its brakes on, causing the car behind to ram it. Idiot, Monica Ghirri thought, they really ought to improve the driving test. Then the shooting started.


*  *  *

To be honest, Oreste Leonardi hadn’t been thinking about anything. His eyes scanned the familiar road, taking in the intersection ahead, the bus stop that seemed to be filled this morning with Alitalia crew, the woman who, he thought vaguely, was pretty in a too soft kind of way standing by the crosswalk, the opposite corner where— His brain clicked. Where the flower seller’s van was always parked.

But this morning, wasn’t.

He frowned, suddenly completely aware of Moro behind him, lost as usual in his sheaf of papers. They joked that the backseat was his flying office. The flower seller’s van. Not there.


Without even being aware of it, Oreste reached for the holster on his hip. He had opened his mouth to say something to Domenico—was just forming the words—when the car in front of them threw on its brakes and instead of speaking, Oreste thought This is it, and flung himself into the backseat.


Oreste Leonardi was looking into Aldo Moro’s startled face when the first shot hit him. He felt the impact, a sort of dull thud, and then the unexpected frailness of Moro’s body as he shoved him down, covering him as the rattle of semiautomatic fire and shatter of glass ripped the car.

The second shot hit Oreste in the back. Suddenly he was aware of words. They came whole, filling his head. Rising, white and perfect, from somewhere deep in memory, when, holding his mother’s hand in the shadow of another church, he had believed.

“Deus in adjutorium meum intendi.”


Oreste Leonardi didn’t know if he said it, or if Aldo Moro said it, or if, in the brief moment before his life ended, they said it together.

“Domine ad adjuvandum me festina.”


God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.


Florence, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, to Saturday, January 23


MOMMY!”


The word repeated in its high child’s voice. “Mommy! Mommy!” It stretched, wailing like a siren. Mom-mee! Mom—mee! Until it broke into pieces: Mom!Me! And became something else. Mom and me. Mom is me. Or nothing at all.


Kristin Carson rocked. Her hand closed over the little white bear, her fingers found the familiar grooves, the dents where his fur was worn completely away in places, exposing the hard nubbled linen of his stuffed-bear skin. Sometimes, when she let go of him, the siren stopped. Sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes it changed—blurring into the wind, or the rush of traffic, or the rhythmic swipe of a branch against a roof or windowsill. Tonight it kept pinging back, growing fainter as she surfaced out of sleep, but still there. Like the ping of sonar from something sinking, twelve years down into black water.

If she lay very still, she could do it. She didn’t even have to be dreaming, she could will herself when she was wide awake, any time day or night. She could bounce on her toes like a diver on a board, and spread her arms, and lean farther and farther, until she fell. Down into the wound she was so officially, and so expensively, healed of. Go like a maggot to the cut. To the sacred place, where, under her bare feet she would feel not the striped cotton bedsheets, faintly damp with sweat and winter, but the basement steps, their grain soft and dusty and sweet with the smell of lumber, new and still pocked with the heads of silver nails.

Then, if she closed her eyes—and, actually, even if she didn’t—she would see her hand, tiny against the glossed red paint of the door, its fat worm fingers splayed as it lifted and banged and beat in time to the words: “Mom!Mee! Mom!Mee! Mom!Mee!”

Of course, she wasn’t supposed to. It was, officially, “bad for her” to go there. But she liked to. She liked to the same way she liked picking scabs. Pulling at the covering of dead skin her body worked so hard to produce. Peeling it back, then flaking away what was left with a fingernail. Digging until it bled. Sticks and stones. The singsong drifted, thin as a breeze. Sticks and stones may break my bones. But words will surely hurt me.


The memory of sugar swelled the back of her tongue. Her baby hand itched from the bristly fur of the little white bear that had been brand-new then, with not only the gold button in its ear, but the tag, too. “See?” Mommy had asked. “‘Forevermore.’ That’s what it says. Because he’ll always be your friend. He’ll always keep you company.” Then she’d closed the basement door.

 

Kristin sat up. She fumbled for the lamp. The room that swam into focus was pretty much a box. White walls broken by the wardrobe’s sliding mirrored door that seemed not to throw light, as it was surely intended to, but to swallow it. Suck in the shadows that streamed across the cheap white laminate bureau and matching desk and chair. Welcome to Italy, Kristin thought. Design Capital of the Universe, where they also have IKEA. The room’s single window looked onto a wall. Rain beat the glass. Somewhere near the San Frediano Gate a car alarm was going off.


Theirs was the only student apartment in this particular building, but all the places the program used were pretty much the same. A lot of the girls had made a big deal of fixing up their rooms. In the first few days after they’d arrived, even those who’d been stuck in the dorms had gotten together and gone on shopping expeditions. They’d flocked off like crows, sharing taxis out to the box stores near the airport and coming back with throw rugs and beanbags in bright, startling colors. And with those paper globes to go over lights that always ended up hanging sideways. And with glow-in-the-dark stars that stuck to the ceiling. And wall clocks in animal shapes—cat faces with whiskers for second hands and fish bones for the hours and tails that swung from their bodiless heads.

They’d bought curtains in geometric retro prints, interlocking lozenges of pink and orange, and framed posters from the Uffizi shop. How many fat kissy-faced angels with wings sticking out of their shoulders or stoned-looking naked ladies standing on giant clamshells could there be in one city? Lots, was the answer.

Kristin’s roommate, Mary Louise, whose last name was “Tennyson-Like-the-Poet,” had bought chains of little blinky lights, too. Not chili peppers or mini howling coyotes, but snowflakes. And instead of the angels or the potbellied shell lady, she’d gone for some sappy-faced Madonna, who, now that Kristin thought about it, looked a lot like her. Dark haired, chubby cheeked, and about as smart. The little white bear frowned. Mr. Ted was Kristin’s better half. He didn’t like it when she was mean.

“OK, OK.”

She kissed the top of his head. His black eyes winked in the lamplight. The tag was long gone, but the button in his ear was still there. She ought to buy him a new ribbon. The one around his neck was pretty ratty. Kristin laid Mr. Ted down beside her. She tucked the sheet around him carefully, pulling it under his little bear chin.

By now the dream had slushed away like dirty water. She could feel the slick of it though, as if she’d swum through oil. Sometimes the residue had a smell. It wasn’t tears, or snot, like you might expect. Or that sore-throaty smell from when you’ve been crying really hard. It was chocolaty. Not expensive chocolates from a box. But cheap. The smell of those supermarket cookies, the ones that came in plastic trays and had pink or green or sky-blue icing, and the smell had a sickly undertone of alcohol. Not gin, or whiskey, or beer, either. Vodka. People say you can’t smell it. But you can.

She sat up, swinging her legs over the bed. The floor was tile, and cold. Rain splatted the window. Wind ruckussed between the buildings, shimmering the bricks next door that were close enough to touch. Kristin knew because her first day here, before she’d unpacked even, she’d pried up the frame and leaned out and held her palm against them, feeling the next-door house, warm as an animal skin.

By November the bricks had been lined with frost. She’d woken up one morning to see them rimmed dirty white, like gums in those ads about what will happen to your teeth if you don’t floss. For the last three weeks they’d been silvered with rain. It would freeze, if the wind ever stopped blowing. Which it didn’t. There were whitecaps on the Arno. Welcome to Florence, where nobody tells you how fucking freezing it is.

Kristin tapped her phone. Two-oh-five a.m. She listened for a minute. The alarm had stopped. Either the car had been stolen or somebody had made the trek down and out into the street in their bathrobe or with an overcoat over their pajamas to turn the thing off. A shutter was banging. Creak, thud, creak. Too far away to be one of theirs, it must be on another floor or across the street. She got up, crossed to the desk, slid open a drawer, and pulled out the Swiss Army knife Santa Claus had left last year in her stocking.


The little computer’s screen throbbed as it booted up, making it look almost alive. Like something from outer space, or a heart. Kristin checked the mute button. Her room was at the end of the hall, with the bathroom in the middle, so the bing-bong wasn’t going to wake Little Miss Perfect. Tennyson-Like-the Poet slept like a rock. She snored sometimes, too, in short purr, snort, purrs that wandered down the hall. Kristin waited for the screen to be fully lit, then typed in the password and the Hotmail address.


The computer was the first present he sent her. Back then, before she’d heard his voice, she’d imagined it, speaking through the screen. Coming like the sound of the ocean when you held a shell to your ear. She’d suggested Skype a bunch of times. But he’d always said no. Dante, he’d said, wrote to Beatrice.

Kristin clicked on the mailbox. Sure enough, there it was. He had promised she would love the sound of his voice, and she had. He had promised she wouldn’t be disappointed when she met him, and she wasn’t. He had promised he would know what she was thinking, and would know what she needed, and he did. Always.

She’d told him once that it was magic, the way he made her feel. That it was like she could lean back, and back, and know that she would fall, and that he would catch her. When she’d said that, he’d smiled. And then he’d said, “No, Cara, that isn’t magic. That is love.”

The mail had been sent just minutes before, at one fifty-seven a.m. Kristin felt a surge run through her. She had a feeling, an almost certainty, that if she opened the door of her room, if right now she stepped out into the hall and looked out of the little window down into the street, she would see him. Standing there. Looking up at her.

That was the miracle of it. No matter what he said, that was magic. The fact that, somehow, in all the world, he had found her. And that now, out there—under one of those red-tiled roofs, while the nightmare unwound, while she banged her baby palm and screamed, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy”—he’d heard her.

Carina, the message read. It is late or early and the rain is like stars and I am awake and dreaming of my Beatrice.


 

Mary Louise Tennyson sat at the pine table in the main room of the apartment and tried very hard not to be pissed off. Anger, her mom always said, was in you, not in the person you thought provoked you. Only you could make you angry, not them.

Well, maybe. But then again her mom hadn’t met Kristin.

What did I do? Mary Louise wondered. Karma. That had to be it. She must have way seriously screwed up in some former life.


Mary Louise had been looking forward to this year in Italy for just about, well, ever. Her mom had promised it to her back when she was a freshman in high school. The deal was, if she got into one of her top three colleges, Smith, Vassar, or Bryn Mawr, on early decision, she could take a year off and her mom would pay. For any study-abroad course she wanted.

Talk about motivation. Mary Louise had never been out of Georgia, never mind across the Atlantic. She’d busted her sweet little tush, and Vassar had come through, and she’d been almost as excited about going on this program as getting in. Who wouldn’t want to spend nine months in Florence? Mary Louise was already pretty sure she wanted to major in Renaissance studies, and, apart from anything else, this would give her advance credits. With her AP courses, she’d be sailing come September. Her mom was going to come over, too, at the end, in May, and they were going to travel together, for all of June and July. Go to Venice, Rome, all the way down to Sicily. Sweet. Then she got landed with Kristin.

Well, no. Not quite landed. She’d volunteered. Which kind of made it worse—the knowledge that she didn’t actually have to get stuck doing this. That she’d put on her goodness and flapped her fairy wings right into this mess all by herself.

At first, to be fair, it hadn’t seemed so bad. Kristin had been a little weird—kind of hyper—on the plane on the way over. But then again, they’d all been kind of hyper on the plane on the way over. Twenty girls going to Italy for a year were pretty much bound to be at least kind of hyper, if only because it was the first time a lot of them had been to Europe, or lived anywhere other than with their parents or at school. Quite a few of them already knew each other. Sherbrooke College, the school that ran the course, gave its students first dibs on places. Only seven of the twenty who’d assembled at Dulles airport on the evening of last September 6 hadn’t gone there, Mary Louise and Kristin among them.

So it seemed like they had something in common, at first. And they were the youngest, too. The only seventeen-year-olds. Mary Louise, because she’d skipped a grade in high school. Kristin, she suspected—no, check that, she knew, because Kristin had told, like, anyone who would listen—because she was a total fuck-up and had gotten thrown out of so many places that she needed these credits before she could even apply to college.

Kristin’s father was a famous surgeon. He’d operated on football players, and some guy who’d won Wimbledon. She’d told everyone that, too. And about how he’d paid a fucking fortune, i.e., bribe, to get Sherbrooke to give her a spot on the Florence course. Which was, like, the only place she’d ever even think about going. “I mean, what sort of loser wants to go to Lisbon?” she’d asked, screwing up her nose as if she could smell the salt cod from here, and Mary Louise had thought, Probably one who wants to learn to speak Portuguese.


But she hadn’t said anything. She’d kind of started to catch on by that time, anyway. She’d seen Kristin’s stomach once, just for a second, right after they moved in when she opened the bathroom door by mistake as Kristin was getting out of the shower, before Kristin put the lock on—which she went out the next morning and bought and screwed in herself, presumably in case Mary Louise was really into that kind of thing, or something, and wanted to look, which she wasn’t and didn’t. Actually it kind of grossed her out. Anyway she’d figured out by then Kristin wasn’t stupid. Far from it. She just acted stupid most of the time, like she was about six. Which made it harder—if you were going to in the first place—to feel sorry for her.

Most of the time, it was almost impossible to believe that Kristin was about to be eighteen. Except she wouldn’t let you forget it. The Big Day was less than two weeks away. Countdown to February 5! Kristin was having a party at some really fancy restaurant. They’d all been invited. Everybody on the course got a printed invitation and the whole deal, which was kind of silly considering they were in class together basically every day. Ms. Hines, the program director, had made it way clear, in case anybody was tempted to, like, have a lobotomy scheduled, that they were all going.


Kristin’s parents were even coming over. Or rather, her father and stepmother. She made a big deal of the fact that it was her stepmother because her mother had died when she was little. Although when Mary Louise thought about it—which she didn’t often, to be honest—she realized that, while Kristin made, like, a huge thing of it, she didn’t ever actually say what had happened, or even talk all that much about her mom. She just referred to “the accident,” like you were supposed to ask, but no one did. And she didn’t call her mother Mommy, or Mom, or anything like that. She called her Karen. Her stepmother she called the Bitch. Which was nice.

Some of the girls thought the whole thing was garbage. Just a story about having this wicked stepmother. Mary Louise didn’t believe that, exactly. She was pretty sure Kristin’s real mother was dead. She remembered the lines—just the glimpse of that broken belt, pink and puckered around Kristin’s waist. She knew what that was. She’d seen it before. Anyone who’d gone to a girl’s school had seen it. Cutters always thought they were different, but they were pretty much the same as everybody else—they just picked up a razor to make life bleed, which Mary Louise actually always thought showed kind of a lack of imagination. Most people figured out, at least by the time they were in high school, the best way to screw themselves was with their own head. Who needed a piece of metal? It was kind of pathetic, actually. But since she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be in the world without her own mom, she’d tried, at first anyway, to be Kristin’s friend.

Which had turned out, of course, to be A Big Fat Mistake. Because, basically, the nicer you tried to be to people like Kristin Carson, the more people like Kristin Carson hated you.

If Mary Louise Tennyson had been asked to draw a picture, or to describe it, she would have said her good feelings about Kristin Carson were like a piece of pie—peach, and not that huge to start with. And that every time Kristin did something obnoxious, it was like a rat came along and took another bite out of it.

Take this morning, for instance. They’d made a deal—they each did the dishes every other day. Your turn, my turn. As a concept, it wasn’t exactly hard. Mary Louise did the washing up one day, Kris did it the next day. Except she didn’t. Not anymore. In fact for the last month or so, she didn’t do anything. Except whisper into her cell phone to her supposed boyfriend—whom nobody had, like, ever even seen—then disappear at sunset and come back way late without even trying to be quiet and sleep. Sometimes all day. It was like living with a vampire. One who never took out the garbage, or bought food, or even tried not to hog all the hot water every time she took a bath. She’d used Mary Louise’s soap, too. The expensive one she bought at the Farmacia Novella. And left it in, like, an inch of water in the soap dish so it rotted to mush. Fifteen euros down the drain. Mary Louise kept her bath oil and her shampoo and even her toothpaste in her room now, which she kept locked.

Maybe she should start keeping her food in there, too. Except then they’d probably get rats. You never knew in these old buildings. She glanced at the sink. It was full of basically every dish and cup and bowl they had.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered, “what does she think I am, the maid?” No. Don’t even go there.

Mary Louise Tennyson sighed and got up. She walked across the room, opened the cupboard under the sink, and pulled out the rubber gloves.

*  *  *

Kristin stood on the steps of the church. The wind whipped her dress around her knees. It was freezing. She should have worn an overcoat. But she didn’t have one—just the big poofy parka thing the Bitch had bought her for Christmas.

Mr. Ted wasn’t with her, but she felt the pang anyway, as if he could read her thoughts. She shouldn’t call Anna the Bitch. She knew there was nothing wrong with Anna, except that she got in the way. And tried too hard. Just like Mary Louise. What the fuck was it? Why was it she always got saddled with these people—the ones who wanted to “care”? Who glommed on, and made you feel like you couldn’t fucking breathe, and then, when you tried, when you pushed them away just so you could suck some air into your lungs, looked at you with their big hurt eyes, as though you’d done something really horrible. As though every bad thing that had ever happened to them was your fault.

It made her chest tight just thinking about it. Made her feel like an overinflated balloon, so stuffed with all their caring that she was about to pop and the only thing she could do was cut herself open. Gash, and let some of that shit out so she could breathe.

Wind gusted, rushing up the steps, lifting the hem of her dress and snatching at the flower in her hand. The petals were furled tight and safe, but Kristin cradled the bud anyway, shielding it the way you shield a guttering flame. Which meant she had to let go of the front of her jacket, which blew open as she craned, getting up on tiptoes so she could see the red wink-wink of taillights as his car glided across the piazza.

It made her feel like Cinderella, every time, watching him go. Not the part where the Fairy Godmother waves her wand and Cinders looks down and, voilà! she’s dressed for the ball, but the other part. The one where all of a sudden the dress is just a ratty old dress and the little white mice are nothing but little white mice. And there was always the feeling inside—the tightening and the bang-bang, like a thud on a drum—no matter how many times he reassured her, that of course he would be back. Of course he would email her tonight. Of course she would see him again, tomorrow. Carina, I love you, my little Beatrice. The bud had no scent, but Kristin raised it to her face anyway, and let the velvet edge of the petals feather her cheek as the black shape winked one last time before sliding back into the city.


The piazza was empty now. Frost glittered the roofs of the parked cars. He always left her here, at the Carmine. It was only a couple of blocks to the apartment, but he said it was more complicated to drive back that way because of the one-way system or something. Which was bullshit. She’d started to say so once, when it was raining and he’d pulled over to let her out. But something had stopped her. It had been the light in his face, a white arc that swept the windshield as another car swung out of its parking place. Her mouth had been open, forming the protest, then the headlights swept across him and he’d looked as if he wasn’t in color, wasn’t flesh at all, but was black and white, a photograph—something one-dimensional she could put her hand through—and she’d stopped, saying nothing. Not even “I love you,” or “Good night.” She’d just kissed him, harder than usual, and gotten out, and climbed the steps and watched him slide away.

The high heels she was wearing were open-toed. She’d bought them to go with the dress because he’d said tonight was a special dinner. At least it wasn’t raining. Her feet were frozen, but her shoes wouldn’t get ruined walking back. And even if it had been pouring and they did, even if every single one of her toes got frostbite, who cared? Because soon it wouldn’t matter. In ten days, actually. In ten days everything would be different. A fizz of excitement ran through her. Kristin forgot the cold, and the wind, and picked her way down the steps, holding the ros