"He's distracted," she said.
A pause.
"By a mistress."
"You can handle that," David said simply. The way he said most things — stripped of everything except the essential content. He always believed problems had straightforward solutions and the primary question was simply which one to apply.
"I cannot. He claimed her as famiglia."
To claim someone as famiglia was to place them under a particular kind of protection, any physical harm taken against that person was treason.
"Makes no difference to me," David said. "You want her gone, she is gone."
And the thing was — she believed him. Completely and without reservation. David had always existed in the rare category of people whose words and capacity existed in perfect alignment. He said what he could do and he could do what he said and there was no gap between those two things.
Which was precisely why she couldn't use him that way.
