Chapter 7 - Dinner With the Man Who Smiled
|
The family dinner was Lorenzo Caruso's idea and he arrived acting like he owned the invitation and the house.
He came through the front hall with flowers for the table and a warm smile for every guard.
He kissed the air beside my cheek and called me his dear niece by marriage.
Alessandro sat at the head of the long table and watched his uncle without blinking.
Dante stood near the door with two men outside in the hall.
Aunt Marie was not at the table because Dr. Elena Rosini had ordered her to rest upstairs.
I wore a dark dress Alessandro's housekeeper had laid out for me that afternoon.
Lorenzo noticed the dress and praised Alessandro for finally taking proper care of me.
The praise sounded sweet and it landed like an insult meant for us both.
Lorenzo talked about shipping routes and old family stories and summers in Italy.
He said Michael Chen had been the bravest honest man he had ever known.
I held my spoon so tightly that my stitched palm began to ache.
Alessandro's jaw tightened but he let Lorenzo keep talking.
Lorenzo asked about my hand with such tender concern that the guests at the table softened.
He said a young woman alone in the world was a target for cruel men.
He said the shooting at the bakery proved how urgent my protection had become.
He said eleven days was a long time for accidents to happen to an unguarded heir.
The words were almost the same words he had used to frighten Aunt Marie on the phone.
I remembered Marie confessing that warning through tears in this same house.
Lorenzo lifted his wineglass and wished me health and a long and peaceful life.
Then Lorenzo set down his glass and reached into his jacket with a sorrowful sigh.
He produced a slim document folder and laid it beside my untouched plate.
He said his lawyers had prepared a simple safeguard for the dangerous days ahead.
He called it a temporary protective proxy and he said the title three times for the witnesses.
The proxy would transfer my trust voting rights to him only until after my birthday.
He said he would guard those rights like a father and return them without question.
He said my safety required a strong name standing between me and the port men.
A polished pen appeared in his hand as if he had practiced the movement.
He placed the pen on the document and slid both toward me across the linen.
Every face at the table turned toward me in the candlelight.
I could feel what he wanted the room to believe about this moment.
He wanted them to see a frightened girl rescued by a loving uncle.
Alessandro did not speak for me even though his hand curled hard around his glass.
I understood in that silence that he was giving me something Lorenzo never would.
He was giving me my own voice in front of the people who had stolen it.
My heart hammered so loudly that I was sure Lorenzo could hear it.
I looked at the proxy and read my legal name printed in black ink.
The name on the page was Sophia M. Chen in Lorenzo's careful paperwork.
I thought of Whitaker warning me to sign nothing no matter how harmless it looked.
I thought of dockworkers and drivers whose jobs hung on Terminal 4.
I thought of my father writing that I should trust no Caruso except Alessandro.
Then I pushed the document back across the table with my uninjured hand.
I said I would not sign the proxy tonight or on any other night.
My voice shook on the first word and grew steadier with every word after it.
I said my father had left the trust to me and not to a guardian chosen by fear.
I said if Lorenzo truly wanted me safe he could protect me without owning my vote.
Lorenzo smiled as if I had told a charming joke at a family party.
He said exhaustion and pain were making me suspicious of people who loved me.
He said we would speak again when I had rested and reasoned more clearly.
He picked up the pen but he left the folder on the table between us.
Alessandro finally spoke and he spoke only to the servants clearing the soup bowls.
He did not rescue me from the moment because I had already rescued myself.
After dinner Lorenzo kissed my hand and wished me sweet dreams like a grandfather.
I stood in the hall long after his car had vanished down the drive.
My knees gave out only when Dante closed and locked the front door.
Alessandro caught my elbow but he released me as soon as I stood straight.
He asked if I had noticed anything about the proxy besides its terms.
I opened the folder he had carried in from the dining room.
Lorenzo had already signed his part at the bottom of the last page.
I stared at the capital A in his signature until my skin went cold.
The letter rose too high and bent inward at the top like a broken hook.
I had seen that same malformed capital A on the forged annulment papers.
Alessandro had shown me those papers when the forged separation was first exposed.
The same hand had written both signatures in different years for different thefts.
I whispered that Lorenzo had forged the annulment himself or held the pen that did.
Alessandro said Whitaker would want the proxy preserved exactly as it was.
Dante took the folder with gloves and sealed it inside a clear evidence sleeve.
An hour later Dante returned to the study holding my old bakery bag.
He said his men had searched it because Lorenzo's visit made every object suspect.
He turned the bag inside out and showed me a thin black disc sewn into the lining.
The tracker had been stitched beneath the fabric with thread that matched the bag.
Someone had planted it before the shooting at Moretti's Bakery.
Someone had known my shifts and my route and the table I would serve that morning.
Lorenzo had never needed to search for me the way Alessandro had searched.
He had been watching my movements while I believed I was hidden and forgotten.
I sat down slowly as the whole bakery morning rearranged itself in my mind.
The gunshots had shattered glass and thrown Alessandro over my body in the street.
Yet Dante's men had found no attempt to follow us with a killing shot after we escaped.
The attack had been loud and terrifying and precise in its real purpose.
Lorenzo had not sent those men to kill me in front of witnesses that day.
He had sent them to frighten me into running straight to a signature for safety.
I looked at the unsigned proxy sealed in its sleeve on the desk.
Fear had almost become the pen in my hand tonight at his table.
I understood the attack had failed only because I had refused to be frightened correctly.
Alessandro said Lorenzo would try another kind of pressure before my birthday.
I believed him because eleven days still stretched ahead of us like a dark road.
May you like
And a man who could smile while he threatened me would not stop at one refusal.
Not yet.
