Chapter 2 - The Highway to Boston
Inside the car, Josephine sat with her back straight and both hands arranged neatly in her lap. She had not even removed her apron. The bow pressed against the seat and forced her slightly forward.
“I'm sorry.” They had barely passed the gates. “You didn't have to do this.”
Raphael said nothing.
A few minutes later: “I'm sorry I went up to the third floor. I was going to knock on Mrs. Roz's door, but then I—” She stopped herself. “It won't happen again.”
Raphael continued driving.
By the time they passed the toll plaza, she apologized again. “I know you have things tomorrow. Mrs. Roz said you had an appointment. If you want to turn around, you can leave me anywhere there's a station and I'll—”
“Miss Hartley.” Raphael did not raise his voice. He almost never did.
Josephine stopped immediately.
“Not tonight.”
She pressed her lips together and turned toward the windshield.
After a while, Raphael glanced across. Her shoulders were trembling almost imperceptibly. He turned the heater up one notch.
“I'm not cold.”
“You're afraid.”
She watched darkness move backward beyond the window. Eventually she answered. “Both.”
Raphael pressed the accelerator slightly farther.
For approximately twenty minutes, neither spoke.
At a red light outside Providence, Josephine suddenly said: “I had two hours off this afternoon.”
Raphael kept his eyes forward.
“Mrs. Roz told me to go. My evening shift started at 6:00. I could have gone to my aunt's house and sat with Wyatt for a little while.” She swallowed. “But I stayed here and cleaned the dining-room chandelier because you're having guests next week.”
She had not sat down for a meal with her brother in three months.
“If I'd gone today, I would have been there when he collapsed.”
The traffic light changed. Raphael drove.
After approximately ten seconds, he spoke. “I had a younger sister.”
Josephine turned.
“Dileia.” She had been eleven years younger than Raphael. Josephine had never heard anyone in the Orsini house speak that name.
“When she was twenty-two, she called me one night.” Raphael's phone had been lying face down during a meeting. He saw the screen light up. He intended to call her after the meeting. “She called at 12:43.”
Josephine said nothing.
“The meeting ended close to 2:00. I went upstairs, saw the missed call, and thought she was probably sleeping.” He had decided to wait until morning. “By morning, it was too late.”
Josephine lifted one hand toward her mouth. She did not ask how Dileia died. The finality in Raphael's voice closed that door.
“I thought about that meeting for years.” It had been an ordinary meeting. Raphael had not committed some obvious act of cruelty. He had made the kind of decision an ordinary person could make on an ordinary night. “I thought I'd call her in the morning.”
He looked ahead. “But guilt has a talent for changing ordinary decisions after something terrible happens.” It could turn an afternoon spent cleaning a chandelier into the reason a brother was lying on an operating table. “You didn't put Wyatt there.”
The valve had been damaged before the boy was born. It had chosen that evening to fail.
“Don't let tonight rewrite your afternoon.”
Josephine did not thank him. She did not nod. She simply reached across the space between them. Her hand settled over the back of Raphael's where it rested on the gearshift. Cold. Trembling. Calloused near the base of her index finger.
May you like
Raphael looked down for exactly one second. He did not pull away. He moved his left hand higher on the steering wheel and drove one-handed for the rest of the journey.
Neither spoke. But both understood that something had changed. It was the first time in two years that anyone had touched Raphael Orsini without asking permission.
