Then Julian Duca collapsed in his brother’s arms.
For the first few seconds, Adrian did nothing.
He simply held him.
He held the man he had mourned through twelve Christmases.
The man whose death had moved him into a board seat he never wanted.
The man whose name Adrian still sometimes began typing into his phone when something ridiculous happened before remembering there would be no answer.
Julian’s head rested against Adrian’s shoulder.
He was warm.
Alive.
Impossible.
Mia’s voice broke the paralysis.
“Mr. Duca?”
Adrian looked toward her.
The baby had awakened and begun to whimper against Mia’s back.
Mia’s eyes were wet.
“Is he dead?”
Adrian looked down.
Julian was breathing.
Shallowly.
“No.”
The word nearly broke him.
“No.”
He pulled out his phone.
He called emergency services.
Then Grace.
He remembered Grace.
“Mia.”
She straightened.
“Where exactly is your mother?”
“Laundry room downstairs.”
“Is she awake?”
Mia’s face collapsed.
“She was.”
Adrian called the house manager first, then emergency dispatch again and told them there were two patients.
Within eleven minutes, the house that had been silent at 1:47 a.m. was full of footsteps, radios, medical bags, police officers, and questions nobody knew how to answer.
Grace Harper was found unconscious on a narrow employee sofa in the basement laundry room.
Her fever was above 103.
One paramedic said she had likely been working through pneumonia for at least two days.
Her blood pressure was dangerously low.
Mia stood against the wall clutching Lily while strangers moved around her mother.
Adrian crouched several feet away.
“Mia.”
She looked at him.
“Am I in trouble?”
His chest tightened.
“No.”
“Mama?”
“No.”
“Miss Kettering said—”
“I don’t care what Miss Kettering said.”
Mia’s lower lip trembled.
Adrian stopped himself.
Wrong tone.
He lowered his voice.
“Your mother is not being fired.”
“She didn’t finish the rooms.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t finish either.”
“You were never supposed to.”
Mia looked confused.
Adrian continued.
“Listen to me.”
“Nothing that happened tonight is your fault.”
She glanced at the baby.
“We need somewhere to stay.”
There it was.
Six years old.
Not scared of punishment.
Scared of housing.
Adrian felt anger settle inside him in a colder form.
Not explosive.
Useful.
“You have somewhere to stay.”
“How?”
“We’ll figure it out with your aunt.”
Mia blinked.
“You know Aunt Denise?”
“I do now.”
Grace’s employee emergency file listed her older sister.
Adrian had already called.
Denise Harper arrived twenty minutes later wearing pajama pants beneath a winter coat and an expression that suggested any billionaire who tried to interfere with her nieces would regret it.
She did not thank Adrian.
He liked her immediately.
She took Lily from Mia, wrapped one arm around the child’s shoulders, and followed the ambulance.
Before Mia left, she looked toward the second stretcher.
Julian lay beneath blankets, oxygen mask over his face.
She whispered, “Is he your brother?”
Adrian held the signet ring.
“Yes.”
Then he corrected himself.
“I think so.”
Mia looked at him with the unnerving seriousness children sometimes possess when adults’ certainties have failed.
“You should ask him when he wakes up.”
Adrian almost laughed.
Instead he nodded.
“I will.”
He rode to Massachusetts General in the ambulance with Julian.
He spent the entire trip staring at his brother’s face.
Every few seconds, some logical part of his mind demanded alternatives.
A cousin.
A con artist.
A man surgically altered.
A hallucination produced by exhaustion.
Then Julian would turn his head.
Or his hand would move.
Or Adrian would see the crescent-shaped scar beneath his chin from when Julian fell off a bicycle at nine.
Too many details.