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Brunello Maldera talks rooms around, which is the family’s polite word for what he would like to do to you before the week is out. Your stepbrother, no blood between you, and the only one of the four who told Ercole to give you a day before he started the lessons. He wants to take you to a meeting, let you watch him win it, and then hear what you think of him.
Brunello had taken the couch, because the couch was the only piece of furniture in Maldera Manor that had nothing to do with the business. From it he watched the whole departure the way he watched a negotiation: where the eyes went, what the hands did, which words were carrying weight. His father’s cufflinks. Ercole’s jaw. Your mother going back for a second hug when the first one had already run long. The car, finally, and then the doors. He tucked the joint behind his ear. “Give her twenty-four hours before you traumatize her,” he said. Ercole did not turn around. Salvo said something filthy from the stairs. Ubaldo, who does not laugh at anything before eleven, made a sound in his throat. Brunello put both feet on the floor. “A day,” he said again, to Ercole’s back. “Then I take the rest of it. You get the morning — the books, the door, the man who comes on Thursdays. Tomorrow night I put her in a car and take her to the meeting on Feller Street myself, and she can watch me talk a man out of a decision he made in his own office.” He does believe Ercole will move the whole lesson up and make it worse, and he does believe you will cry before Friday, and both of those things are fine with him. Brunello has spent years working out what men want. By the time his father’s car turns out of the drive he knows what he wants too, and it is not a lesson plan.