Campbell rose from his swivel chair and looked at the two of them, his eyebrows raised. “How about leaving us to get on with our work now? And there seems to be plenty that you two want to discuss.”
Reluctantly, Rosa stopped staring at Alessandro and left the control room.
“Keep me up to date,” she heard him say behind her, and then she hurried over the gangplank to the Gaia and waited for him to join her on the upper deck.
“You knew!” she cried into the wind. “As soon as I told you about the party in the Village, you knew!”
She was standing by the rail, both hands clutching the cool iron, staring out at the horizon. Where the sky and the sea met, she could see the blur of a brownish-gray line. Sicily.
The wind tasted salty on her lips and stung her eyes. But she didn’t want to turn around. He was standing behind her on the deck, and had listened in silence as she told him everything, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She wished she could be somewhere else. Alone with her anger and grief and her unanswered questions.
“I wanted to find out the truth,” he said gloomily. “Until you told me on the phone, I had no idea it had happened at that party. You have to believe me. And after that…right after that I began asking questions. There are people very close to Michele who owe me. I get information from them.” He added, more quietly, “About that, too.”
“And when were you planning to tell me the truth? That it was Tano? And Michele.”
He said nothing for some time, and she heard him take a step toward her. Maybe he was thinking of touching her, but then he stopped. “Michele will pay for that,” he said. “He won’t get away this time.”
She closed her eyes, blinking the tears away. “I only wanted to know. To hear the truth. You should have left the way I went about it up to me.” She slowly shook her head, got swirling strands of hair in her mouth, and brushed them back from her face. “All I wanted was for you to be honest with me.”
He moved closer; she could feel him now, but she tried to suppress the feverish tingling that he set off when he came near her. Not now.
“I didn’t want to keep it secret from you,” he defended. “But what did you expect? For me to call you in New York and tell you over the phone that it was Tano, of all people—” His voice was hoarse; he paused, then went on hesitantly. “That it was that bastard and Michele…that they were behind it?”
She thought again how exhausted and drained he looked. Maybe discussions until late into the night weren’t the only reason for that.
Slowly, she turned to him. “I have to be able to trust you. Trust you entirely and forever. I don’t want any secrets between us, or at least no secrets that have to do with both of us.”
He didn’t avoid her eyes, but she could see from looking at him that he would have liked to. “I wondered how to tell you. And when the best time would be. But there’s never a good moment to say: By the way, the bastard who raped you was my cousin.”
She gently touched his cheek with her hand, ran it over his unruly hair. “So now Michele simply gets away with it.”
“Michele is going to be sorry he ever set eyes on you,” he told her. “And Tano is dead.”
“But not because of that,” she said. “Only because he wanted to do it again. Because he was a perverted asshole…” This would have been the time to rage and scream or do something else dramatic. But she didn’t feel like any of that. She still didn’t remember anything much of that night, not even pain—those hours might have been deleted from her mind. Now, though, she wondered whether the way she blacked them out was really blindness. Weakness. A failing in her.
“Tano is dead,” she said, repeating his words. “So now I can’t even wish for him to die. Or suffer. He was dead before he even knew what was happening to him. And maybe you think it’s terrible for me to say that I’d have liked it to take a long time and hurt him. Hurt him badly. Because he deserved it. Because even in his fucking grave