Chapter 2 - The Woman Wearing My Face
“What happens to the real Claire?”
My voice came through the tablet again.
Not my voice. Hers.
That was the first thing I had to understand. A woman who looked like me had stood in this store yesterday, wearing my coat, holding my mother's jewelry, asking my fiancé what would happen to me.
And Nico had answered her.
“That's not your concern,” he said on the recording. “Just do what we agreed.”
The camera caught his profile. He didn't look frightened. He looked annoyed, the way he did when a waiter brought the wrong wine.
The woman touched his sleeve.
“You said nobody gets hurt.”
“I said you would get paid.”
Adrian stopped the video.
I stared at the black screen. I hadn't asked him to stop. But I understood why he had. Nico was already moving toward me.
“Claire, come outside.”
I took a step behind the counter.
“Did you bring her to my apartment?”
“Lower your voice.”
“Did you let her wear my clothes?”
His expression tightened. In eight months, I'd seen him frighten bankers, politicians, and men twice his size. I'd never seen him struggle to decide which face to put on.
“Someone's setting us up,” he said.
“Then you won't mind me calling the police.”
I pulled out my phone.
His hand shot forward.
Adrian moved between us before Nico reached me. There was no dramatic shove. No raised fist. Just a tall man in rolled sleeves standing where Nico wanted to be.
“Don't touch her,” Adrian said.
Nico laughed once. “You have no idea who you're talking to.”
“I know exactly who you are.”
That did something to the room. Julian stopped breathing through his nose. Nico looked at Adrian's face, then at Julian, as if an old door had opened in a wall he'd thought was solid.
“I know your father's business,” Nico said.
“Then you know why this showroom has cameras.”
My phone was still in my hand. I dialed 911.
Nico turned toward me. “You'll regret this.”
I'd expected him to say I love you. Or trust me. Or at least wait.
Instead, he made a promise I believed.
The dispatcher answered. I told her my name. I told her someone had used my identity to sell stolen property. I gave the address. I said the man responsible was standing six feet away.
Nico didn't interrupt. He simply opened his flip phone, pressed a number, and said, “Problem. Now.”
Adrian heard him.
“So do we,” he told Julian.
The old jeweler reached beneath the counter and pressed a silent alarm.
Nico's face changed. He hadn't expected that, either.
“Claire,” he said softly. “I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
He looked at Adrian instead of answering.
That was answer enough.
Two uniformed officers arrived twelve minutes later. By then the recording had been copied to a sealed drive. Julian showed them the consignment paperwork. I signed a statement saying the signature was forged.
Nico stood perfectly still and told the officers the entire matter was a misunderstanding between an engaged couple.
One officer seemed ready to believe him.
The other, a woman with a tired face and clear eyes, asked me whether I wanted to leave with Nico.
“No,” I said.
I watched surprise flicker across his face. Not because I was leaving. Because I'd said it in front of witnesses.
“We can discuss this at home,” he said.
“I don't think I have a home anymore.”
His gaze went hard.
“You have everything because of me.”
My throat hurt, but I kept looking at him.
“My mother bought that brooch before she ever knew your name.”
Julian placed the gold swallow in an evidence envelope. Its uneven pearls glinted beneath the plastic.
Nico's eyes followed it.
I noticed that. I filed it away.
Before the officers finished, one asked whether I'd ever given Nico written permission to manage my jewelry. I wanted to say no immediately. Then I remembered a stack of papers signed in his kitchen, a glass of champagne beside my hand, and his promise that he was simplifying my life. I had signed without reading them.
“I don't know,” I admitted. “I need an attorney to review what I signed.”
Nico was close enough to hear. He smiled for the first time since Julian had taken the brooch away.
That smile frightened me more than his threats.
The female officer wrote down my answer without judgment. She asked if anyone had pressured me to sign, whether I had access to copies, and whether I could name a person outside Nico's household who knew where I was. I gave her my oldest friend's number, then felt ashamed that I had to search my memory for it.
I'd stopped calling Melissa because Nico disliked her questions. At first, he'd said she was jealous. Then he'd said she was using me. Eventually, I had stopped inviting her to dinner because it was easier than defending a friendship.
The officer didn't ask why I'd allowed that to happen.
She asked whether I wanted the number written on the incident report.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
The officers couldn't arrest him based solely on the video. He claimed the woman was an authorized representative and that the argument on the recording had been taken out of context. A detective would need to investigate.
He left with an attorney already waiting in a black SUV.
Before getting in, he turned toward the showroom window.
I had the horrible feeling he wasn't checking whether I was watching.
He was checking whether I was still there.
“You shouldn't go to your apartment,” Adrian said when the police left.
I almost laughed. “You mean Nico's apartment.”
“Whose name is on the lease?”
“His.”
“Then yes.”
He showed me an elevator that led to the store's private office. Julian followed with tea I couldn't drink. On the wall hung photographs of people receiving engagement rings. Smiling women. Happy men. A hundred promises someone had wanted to make permanent.
I couldn't bear them.
“Why did you offer me your son?” I asked Julian.
The old man looked embarrassed.
“I was angry with the way Bellandi spoke for you. I thought if he saw a man who would actually listen, he might feel ashamed. I was careless. I made a spectacle of you, too.”
“That isn't the same as asking what I wanted.”
“No.” His gaze settled on his hands. “It isn't. I'm sorry.”
Adrian leaned against the doorway. “My father has an unfortunate habit of saying exactly what other people are afraid to say.”
Julian didn't smile.
“We recognized the brooch,” he said. “My wife once repaired that hinge for your mother.”
I felt the room tilt.
“You knew my mother?”
“Eleanor Whitmore came here for years. She stopped after your father died.”
“My father died in a car accident.”
Julian looked at Adrian.
“I remember,” he said carefully.
A fresh coldness moved through me. I knew that careful voice. Nico used it whenever he was deciding how much truth I deserved.
“Don't do that,” I said. “Not you, too.”
Julian lowered his eyes.
Adrian spoke. “We have doubts about the collection's paperwork. That's why I asked you to see the surveillance video. My father should have called you sooner.”
“Yes,” Julian said. “I should have.”
He didn't pretend otherwise. The admission made me want to cry more than an excuse would have.
I asked for the rest of the recording.
Adrian played it from the beginning. The woman entered at four eighteen. The camera followed her to a second angle above the door. She lifted the blue raincoat's hood. For one frame, I saw the edge of something pale near her jaw.
“A prosthetic?” I asked.
“Possibly,” Adrian said.
He enlarged the image without making promises. The picture blurred.
She moved like me. She tilted her head when she listened. She touched the small silver locket at her throat.
I didn't own that locket.
But I had seen it before.
At the wedding planner's office, a woman had passed me in the hallway. She'd worn sunglasses inside and carried a garment bag. The locket had flashed as she turned.
I'd thought she was another bride.
“I saw her yesterday,” I whispered.
Adrian straightened. “Where?”
I told him. He asked for the planner's name, wrote it down, and didn't ask me to be brave.
My phone buzzed.
A message from Nico.
COME HOME. WE CAN FIX THIS.
Another arrived seconds later.
THE VALE FAMILY IS NOT WHO YOU THINK THEY ARE.
Then a third.
YOUR MOTHER TRUSTED ME WITH HER SECRETS. ASK YOUR NEW FRIEND WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS SISTER.
I turned the screen toward Adrian.
His face emptied.
For the first time, I recognized the same sudden fear I'd seen in Nico's eyes.
“What happened to your sister?” I asked.
Adrian looked past me toward the photographs on the wall.
“She died,” he said.
“When?”
“Three years ago.”
“Did Nico have something to do with it?”
Adrian met my eyes.
“I've been trying to prove that for three years.”
The office phone rang.
Julian answered. Listened. Went white.
“What is it?” Adrian asked.
His father covered the receiver.
“Someone's downstairs,” he whispered. “A woman asking for Claire.”
I thought of the face on the video. The locket. The blue coat.
May you like
Then Julian finished.
“She says she's her sister.”
