Chapter 29 Summons

Chapter 29 Summons
The subpoena was on the kitchen table when she came downstairs.

Not slid under the door. Not delivered by a federal marshal with a badge and a clipboard and the professional neutrality of someone whose job required them not to react to the rooms they walked into. Delivered by Maria… who had signed for it at the door at seven fourteen in the morning and placed it on the kitchen table beside a cup of coffee and gone back to the counter without a word, because Maria understood that some things needed to be present before they needed to be explained.

Gia looked at it.

United States District Court, Central District of California.

In the matter of United States v. Benedetto Caruso.

You are hereby commanded to appear.

She picked up the coffee first.

Drank half of it standing at the table looking at the document the way she had learned to look at dangerous things… directly, without flinching, without giving anything away that she did not choose to give.

Then she picked up the subpoena.

The testimony date was in three weeks. The subject matter — her connection to the Elena Russo platform, the submission made six months before the investigation, the nature of her relationship with Caruso's operation.

Three weeks.

She looked at the calendar on the wall.

The Paris extension of the Milan collection opened in four weeks.

One week between federal testimony and the most important professional moment of her life.

Marco found her still standing at the table twenty minutes later.

He read the situation before he read the document — the quality of her stillness, the coffee cup held in both hands, the way she was looking at something that was not in the room. He crossed to the table. Picked up the subpoena. Read it once.

Set it down.

Said nothing.

She looked at him.

"Three weeks," she said.

"I know."

"The Paris show is four weeks."

"I know."

He looked at the table for a moment. Not at the subpoena — at the table itself, the kitchen table that had held everything this family had ever needed to survive and was being asked now to hold something new.

The kitchen was very quiet.

She called Reyes at nine.

Reyes picked up on the second ring in the way of someone who had been expecting the call and had been watching the clock.

"You received it," Reyes said.

"This morning."

"I wanted to call you first," Reyes said. "The prosecution's timeline moved. Caruso's defence filed a motion last week to accelerate — they want the trial concluded before certain financial records become available to the prosecution in the discovery process. The judge granted partial acceleration." A pause. "Three weeks is the earliest they could give you."

Gia looked out the kitchen window at the garden. At the east corridor window on the far side of the house catching the morning light the way it always had.

"What does the prosecution need from me?" she said.

"Your testimony establishes the fraud component of the case independent of the trafficking charges," Reyes said. "Caruso's acceptance of the Elena Russo submission — deliberately, as leverage — is the cleanest evidence of intent in the entire prosecution. It does not require the jury to understand the trafficking architecture. A man accepted a submission he had no commercial interest in because it gave him leverage over a Lombardi." A beat. "Your testimony is the most accessible part of the prosecution's case. It is also the part Caruso's defence will hit hardest."

"Why?"

"Because you are the don's daughter," Reyes said. "And Caruso's defence is going to argue that your submission was not an innocent act. That Elena Russo was not an escape plan. That it was a deliberate move by a Lombardi family member to establish a covert identity for purposes connected to the family's illegal operations."

The garden was very still outside the window.

"They are going to try to make me the criminal," Gia said.

"They are going to try," Reyes said. "We are going to make sure they do not succeed."

She went to the studio after the call. To sit in the room that had always known how to hold serious things quietly and think.

Ivy had built Elena Russo.

That was the truth. The complete truth. Fully documented — the account architecture, the submission history, the timestamps that proved the infrastructure predated Gia's involvement by three years.

But the defence did not need the complete truth.

They needed thirty minutes of doubt in a jury's mind.

She sat at the worktable with her hands flat on either side of Ivy's portfolio — the same position she had stood in when she read her mother's letter in Baja for the first time — and thought about what it meant to make Ivy Vasquez real in a federal courtroom.

A person. A history. A woman who had built something to protect someone she loved and had died before she could tell anyone about it.

The defence was going to make Ivy's creation look like a crime.

Gia was going to make it look like what it was.

Love.

She sat with that for a moment.

Her phone rang.

The fashion house. The assistant — precise, professional, efficient.

"Ms. Lombardi. We have received a formal legal notice. A designer named Céleste Arnaud is claiming intellectual property rights over three pieces in the Elena Russo collection — including the asymmetric hem piece. She alleges they were developed from design work she submitted to the Elena Russo platform eighteen months ago. The creative director needs this resolved within ten days or Paris may need to be postponed."

Gia's hand tightened on the phone.

Ten days.

The Caruso subpoena sat on the kitchen table downstairs. The Paris show was in four weeks. And now a designer named Céleste Arnaud — a name Gia had never heard, a name that had not existed in the story of Elena Russo until this morning — was claiming that the asymmetric hem, the piece that had started as a mistake and announced itself as the point of everything, was not Gia's.

Was not Ivy's.

Was hers.

Gia looked at the portfolio on the corner of the worktable.

At the handwriting in the margins.

You are so much better than you let them see.

"Tell the creative director," Gia said, her voice completely level, "that Elena Russo will not be postponing Paris."

She ended the call.

Looked at the portfolio.

Looked at the door.

Marco was standing in it.

"Who is Céleste Arnaud?" she said.

He looked at her for a long moment.

"I don't know yet," he said.

Yet was its own answer.