Reckless Vows

She spent thirty one years telling the truth at a table where nobody wrote it down.

Gia Moretti manages her family's buildings. She is thirty one, she is very good at it, and her name is on absolutely nothing, because the Morettis are a crime family four years into a federal monitorship and a Moretti daughter is something you keep safe.

Then Luca Ferraro takes a folded receipt out of his wallet at a christening party and reads her own words back to her in her own handwriting, and tells her that somebody in Washington pulled her family's compliance file at four in the morning on a Sunday.

Luca has worked for her father for nine years. He has done things nobody in that house will say out loud, and he has written down every single one of them in a notebook nobody knows exists, because he decided a long time ago that he did not want to be a man that nothing happened to.

The government wants a name on the next quarterly certification. A natural person, swearing under penalty of perjury that every line of the file is true. They want Gia's.

She signs it. But first she makes them print the whole thing, four thousand one hundred and nine pages, on paper, in that room, with a court reporter initialling every page as it comes off, because a monitor once told her that the question is never whether they are lying to you. It is whether you can prove afterward what was true on the day.

Two weeks later, one line in the file is different. One digit. Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars becomes a hundred and eighteen thousand four hundred, in an entry Gia has already sworn to, and the only proof it ever said anything else is sitting in a bank vault under Cermak Road.

Somewhere in a federal building there is a woman who has spent thirty one years deciding what gets kept. She has never signed anything. She has never been in a room where a decision was recorded. She has no name in any file in the United States government, and that is not an accident, and it is the entire reason she has never lost.

Gia Moretti is going to make her exist.

Reckless Vows is the final book of The Moretti Vows: a woman who has never had her name on anything against an institution that has made a career out of not existing, and the man who has kept the record all along. Intimacy is on the page in this one, sensual rather than explicit. Book Three of three, and the end of the Morettis.