Chapter 34: The Cost of Trust
The lake was grey and still.
Adriano stood at the hotel window with his phone pressed against his ear and looked at it — the flat pewter surface of Lake Lugano in the early morning, entirely indifferent to the conversation happening twelve floors above it — and he listened.
Matteo talked.
He talked the way a man talks when he has been rehearsing something for four years and has finally accepted that the rehearsal period is over — not fluently, not with the performed smoothness of a prepared statement, but with the particular halting honesty of someone who is finding the shape of the truth in real time, feeling for it in the dark, saying the next thing only when he is certain it is accurate.
