‘From Dad’s office. It’s every bit of hard copy paper he has about the wine and Nonno Emilio’s recipe.’
‘Who said you could go in there? Anyway, get dressed. We have a family meeting in fifteen minutes.’
‘My shower’s going to take at least twenty.’
He let out a huff. ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls yesterday?’
‘Because a man died.’
‘Ourlawyerdied.’ Tom glared. ‘Andyouare a lawyer.’
‘I’m on sabbatical.’
‘You’re on the case. Our family’s case.’ He said it like it was a terrible joke pulled from a cheap Christmas bonbon, but she was trying not to think of the angry promise she’d made to Matteo La Marca last night. If she didn’t take the case now, it had all just been empty words.
She couldn’t read him. When had her brother become completely illegible to her? Twelve hours ago he would have paid a street busker to be their lawyer over her and now he was talking like it was star-written fate the task would fall to her all along.
‘Plotting your escape plan?’ Tom asked as she pulled her hair out of its night-time braid.
‘Yep. This isn’t actually a scrunchie, once I wrap it twice around my wrist it obliterates everything within a ten-metre radius to dust.’
‘You don’t know your duty.’
She was more certain than ever that Tomaso had ripped their father’s soul from his corpse and swallowed it whole.
‘You want to abandon your family, Antonella?’ Tom continued. ‘Bene,you can leave, you can run away to Perth or Siberia or wherever you want and I won’t bother you ever again.’
‘And all I have to do’—Nella pulled her hair out of its elastic—‘is represent the family like a good little wind-up lawyer.’
‘You need towin.’ Tom strained against her insinuation of imperfection. ‘I need to know you did everything in your power to prove the recipe belongs to us.’
For the second time in forty-eight hours, Nella slammed the bathroom door against an intruder in her personal space. She showered under blistering water that boiled her skin until she looked like an unshelled lobster. Towelling her hair, she chose her outfit carefully from her closet suite, accessible through a second door to her bathroom, while Tom grumbled and lectured outside the other door, oblivious or unconcerned that she couldn’t hear a thing.
He was still muttering to himself when she reappeared with a face full of make-up and her hair straightened with a wet-to-dry automatic iron she’d forgotten she’d promised to review.
‘Is this your answer?’ Tom glared at her outfit – loose high-waisted pants (fuck Gen-Z for cancelling skinny jeans), a pastel pink sleeveless vest with a deep cleavage slit and her unanimous-jury-verdict Louis Vuitton stilettos (she would never, ever bow down to the new sneakers-at-the-office trend). She needed her armour. Her ice fortress was not enough on its own today. But it all felt wrong, like deep down she knew that Clarkson should be the one wearing his suit. He should be the one reading her father’s files. The one Tom was glaring at.
‘You never actually asked the question. You told me what was going to happen, just like Dad would have.’
‘This is not a joke, Antonella. I am still in charge here.’ He started smoothing her doona, then whipped it away again when he saw the crumpled sheets underneath.
‘Not of this,’ she said. ‘But you win. I’m taking the case.’
Tom sniffed as though trying to detect the scent of a lie. ‘What do you know about Lieu?’ he asked, now tucking in her bedsheets like an envelope. She’d never seen them that flat in her life – it was like he’d liposuctioned her doona.
‘I know he was killed in my office.’ She swallowed; it was like razors.
‘Was killed,’ Tom said, vigorously plumping the pillows like a housemaid fromDownton Abbey.‘Didn’tdie.’
‘You talked to Jett?’ She had the audacity to feel a twinge of annoyance that separate conversations had happened without her, although she knew of course they had, and had been going on for the past sixth months.
‘You think Lieu was murdered?’
‘I think he discovered something.’ The words felt stupid when she said them to Tom, different to when she’d said it to Jett. ‘Could have,’ she amended. There was no point freaking out the rest of the family now. Not until she knew more. Not until she’d found that green notebook.
Tom grunted. Whatever that meant. Nella had refused to learn to translate ‘surly adult male’.
‘Who convinced you to act like a human being and take your family’s case?’ Tom asked, lines of suspicion fighting against his own Botox (he’d never admitted it but Nella knew). They took the winding white marble stairs, their feet hitting each step at the same time, neither willing to break the pace or step out of pattern.
