254. 🕰️ THE WATCH IN THE RABBIT

Chapter 01 - The Child on the Bench

The first time Damian Romano held my granddaughter, he had no idea she belonged to him in any way at all.

He was sitting beneath the old magnolia in his father's garden, wearing a black suit that cost more than my first car. A little girl in a pink cardigan had fallen asleep against his chest. Beyond the fountain, four armed guards stood as still as the marble women holding up the birdbath.

I watched from the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hands. I had worked in that house for twenty-nine years. I had seen a governor cry in the pantry, a bride leave by the servants' stairs, and Damian's father carried out in a coffin. Nothing had ever frightened me quite as much as the sight of that child.

Because I knew the rabbit in her arms.

It was a gray, lopsided thing, with one brown button eye and a crooked blue patch beneath the left ear. I had sewn that patch myself on a snowy afternoon when my daughter, Hannah, was eight. She had been furious with me for using blue instead of pink. We laughed about it for years.

We hadn't laughed together in four years now. We hadn't spoken in three.

Through the glass, I saw Damian notice the rabbit's torn belly. He tugged at a thread, gently enough not to wake the girl, and something silver slipped into his palm.

The kitchen door stood ajar. I heard him say, very quietly, “This watch was buried with my father.”

Damian didn't raise his voice. He never had to. The guards turned toward him anyway.

He opened the watch. Whatever he saw on its face emptied the color from his own. Luca Marino, his security chief, approached along the gravel path with his hand near his jacket.

“No guard saw her come in,” Luca said.

The child shifted. Her cheek made a soft crease against Damian's shirt.

“Mama said the rabbit keeps Grandpa's secret safe,” she murmured.

A moment later Damian said, “Wake every guard. Find her mother.”

I dropped the towel. It lay at my feet beside a cracked blue bowl, but I couldn't make myself bend to pick either one up.

Hannah had been twenty-nine when she left. She took two suitcases, the rabbit, and the small silver bracelet I'd given her at high school graduation. She did not tell me where she was going. The last time she called, she said, “Mom, please stop asking questions you already know the answers to.”

I had spent three years deciding whether that was cruel or deserved. Now a child with Hannah's rabbit was asleep in the Romano garden.

When I stepped outside, Damian was still holding her. He looked absurdly uncomfortable, one arm braced beneath her little knees, the other supporting her back. His expression softened when the child sighed. It was the only kindness I had seen in his face that morning.

“June,” he said, without looking up. “Get a blanket.”

My legs worked because they had spent nearly thirty years obeying orders in this place. I went to the linen closet and took the cream-colored wool throw reserved for guests who complained about the air-conditioning. I brought it back and laid it over the little girl's shoes.

Then the child opened her eyes.

They were gray-green, like Hannah's. Her curls had escaped the pink bow, and the bridge of her nose was sprinkled with freckles too small to count.

“Are you hungry, sweetheart?” I asked.

She studied me. “Mama says don't eat anything from strangers.”

“That's a very good rule.”

She looked at the blanket. “Can I have toast?”

Damian glanced up at me, and for a second I saw the bewildered boy who had once asked whether dead people could hear the church bells from their graves.

“I'll make toast,” I said. “Would you like strawberry jam?”

The child nodded. “Not the kind with the big pieces.”

Hannah had always hated pieces of fruit in jam. I remembered that with such terrible precision that I had to steady myself against the bench.

“What's your name?” Damian asked her.

“Mia.”

“And your last name?”

She gave him the patient look children reserve for adults who have failed a simple test. “Mia is enough.”

One of the guards coughed to hide a smile. Damian did not.

“Where's your mother, Mia?”

“Doing a brave thing.”

“What brave thing?”

Mia pulled the rabbit close and looked toward the gate. “She said she'd come when the yellow car leaves.”

There was a yellow car parked beyond the south wall. I'd seen it arrive before breakfast, a small maintenance van with a ladder strapped to its roof. I had thought the gardeners had ordered some kind of repair.

Damian's gaze moved to Luca. “What yellow car?”

Luca was already speaking into his radio. The reply came back in a burst of static. The van had left twenty minutes earlier. Nobody had recorded its plates.

Damian handed me the child at last. Mia came willingly, wrapping one warm arm around my neck. She smelled of baby shampoo and rain-damp wool. Her rabbit's cotton ear brushed my cheek.

And she whispered something I knew the others couldn't hear.

“Mama told me the lady with the flour on her apron would help.”

I had flour on my apron. I'd made biscuits before sunrise because Damian's aunt was coming to breakfast, and his aunt considered store-bought biscuits a personal insult.

“Your mama said that?” I asked.

Mia nodded and pressed one small finger against my mouth.

Across the garden, Damian shut the watch with a sharp click. I remembered seeing its twin against the black velvet inside Vittorio Romano's coffin. I remembered the funeral director letting Damian touch the lid before it was closed.

I remembered other things from that day, too. Things I'd worked hard not to remember.

Damian called for the house physician, then stopped himself when Mia began to whimper. He told a guard to fetch orange juice instead. For all the stories told about him, he was learning the ordinary difficulty of caring for a frightened child, and doing it in front of men who had never seen him uncertain.

I carried Mia toward the kitchen. She held on to my necklace, an inexpensive silver cross Hannah had bought me with her first paycheck. At the back door, she twisted around to look at the man on the bench.

“Mr. Damian?”

He lifted his eyes.

“Don't let the man with the nice teeth take my bunny.”

There were six men in the garden. Every one of them looked at Luca.

But Mia wasn't looking at Luca. She was looking past him, toward the open French doors, where the family lawyer, Anthony Sarto, had just arrived for breakfast. He gave us his familiar, polished smile.