Nothing about this adds up. “Maria Rosa left her sick daughter home to go have a picnic in the meadow? Does that make sense to you?”
“Daniela had cramps. She wasn’t bedridden with a fever.”
“Did Manuel tell you that?”
She glares at me. “Do you actually think Manuel talked to me about his daughter’s menstrual cramps? He was much too old-fashioned and proper for that. Isabel, Daniela’s governess, told me. And yes, for your information, it makes sense to me that she would steal an afternoon alone. It doesn’t make sense to you, because you’ve never been a woman who isn’t permitted to come and go as she pleases. He wasn’t anything like your father, but even in Manuel’s house there were rules.”
I want to know more about Isabel, but I’ve already asked too many questions. She’ll get suspicious.
I nod. “Everyone lives by rules. It’s the life we were born into. But I agree. It’s infinitely worse for women.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that. But things will never change for women until powerful men like you sayenough. Until then, every girl born into that world is vulnerable to the nightmare I lived. You have the power to make it right, Antonio.”
“You have an inflated sense of my power. More than me, even,” I tease, before catching her eye for a more serious discussion. “I hope you don’t think I’ll treat Daniela the way Hugo treated you.”
The words give me pause when they reach my ears. In many ways, I’ve already behaved a lot like Hugo Huntsman.
“You’re not your father.”
I used to think that, too, but I’m not so sure anymore.
60
Antonio
Lightning delayed my flight home for several hours last night, and when the phone vibrates on the nightstand before dawn, I groan.Cristiano. Not a name I want to see on the screen at 5:37.
“Yeah.”
“We have a situation with your car.”
My car.Today is the camellia race. I can’t afford a problem with my car. I’m wide awake now, sitting up in bed. “What kind of situation?”
“When Roberto got to the track this morning, he noticed that the workbench where he keeps his equipment was moved, and some of the tools were not as he left them. The lock doesn’t appear to have been tampered with, but we have a guy looking at it.”
Roberto has been the head of the pit crew since right after I started racing. He’s meticulous about the car and his tools. It’s almost an obsession. If he says something is out of place, it is.
“The entire crew has been with me a long time.”
“I don’t suspect them either. But I’m talking to everyone, just to be sure—including the guard, Joaquim, who was on duty last night.”
He’s been around forever too. “What about the cameras inside the place?”
“They were hacked. Entire segments have disappeared.”
Fuck.We don’t have any of our own surveillance inside the track. It would violate the rules, and we’d be disqualified from today’s race, and I’d be banned from ever entering another. We comply with the rules because I’m not ready to say goodbye to racing yet.
“So we’ve got nothing.”
“Not exactly. Lucas and his team are combing through the feeds we set up outside the track. But we might not have a solid lead until after the race. You might want to consider sitting this one out.”
“Like hell. I’m not a fucking coward.”
“We don’t know if the car was tampered with—or the track, for that matter.”
“Roberto will figure it out. The race doesn’t start for four hours.” I don’t mention a possible sabotage of the track, because that’s largely out of our control.
“I have great faith in Roberto too. But he doesn’t have much time to determine whether there’s a problem. Getting behind that wheel today, without a clearer picture of what happened, is a big risk for someone with your kind of responsibilities.”