Chapter 7 - Celeste's Confession
|
Celeste D'Amato asked to see me alone on the second night after the listening device was found.
She was being held under guard in the guesthouse at the edge of the estate, not in handcuffs and not free, in that strange in-between place Dominic's world created for people who were both prisoner and witness.
Detective Bennett said any meeting had to be recorded.
Dominic said I did not have to go.
Emma said I should not go at all.
I went anyway.
I went because Salvatore had spelled her name that morning and then spelled the word AFRAID.
I went because I had watched Celeste's hand shake every time she held that blue bottle.
Cruel people enjoy power.
Terrified people obey it.
I needed to know which woman had poisoned my patient.
Frank walked me to the guesthouse door and told me two guards would be right outside.
Celeste was sitting on the edge of the sofa when I entered.
Her makeup was gone.
Her hair was pulled back.
Without the diamonds and the red dresses she looked younger and far more exhausted than I had ever seen her at the dining table.
A paper cup of water sat untouched in front of her.
She looked up and tried to smile.
It failed.
"You came."
"You asked for me."
"I knew Dominic would send a lawyer if I asked for him."
She twisted a tissue between her fingers.
"I needed someone who saw Salvatore as a person before any of this."
That surprised me.
"You saw him as a person too, Celeste."
"No."
Her voice cracked.
"I saw him as an obstacle because that is what my father taught me to see."
There it was.
The first honest sentence she had ever spoken in my presence.
I sat across from her and placed the small recorder Detective Bennett had given me on the table between us.
"Everything you say can be used to protect you or to prosecute you."
"I understand."
"Then start with the man on the balcony."
Celeste closed her eyes.
"His name is Matteo Sartore."
"He is my cousin."
"He is not Adrian Romano and he never was."
My pen stopped above my notebook even though the recorder was running.
"Dominic buried his brother twelve years ago."
"Yes."
"Adrian died in the car bombing outside the church hall."
Celeste nodded and tears slid down her face without any performance in them.
"My father arranged that bombing."
The room seemed to tilt.
I have heard terrible confessions in hospital rooms.
Families confess neglect.
Patients confess fear.
People confess the things they did when they thought nobody would survive to repeat them.
This was different.
This was a daughter naming her own father as a murderer while guards stood outside the door.
"Say his name for the recording."
"Enzo D'Amato."
"My father killed Adrian Romano because Adrian discovered he was stealing from the Romano shipping routes and selling access to the ports."
"Dominic never proved it."
"Salvatore suspected it but grief shut down the investigation."
Celeste wiped her face with the tissue.
"Matteo was in a motorcycle accident three years ago."
"The scar was real before my father paid a surgeon to deepen it and reshape it."
"He coached Matteo for fourteen months."
"Photographs."
"Voice recordings of Adrian as a young man."
"Family stories stolen from old staff."
"He even taught him how Salvatore took his coffee and how Adrian used to stand behind Dominic at meetings."
"But he got things wrong," I said.
Celeste nodded quickly.
"He called Dominic Dom in front of everyone."
"The real Adrian called him Nicky since they were boys because Dominic hated it as a child."
"Matteo used the wrong hand for the scar story."
"He failed the lake house question because there was never a chess game the way my father described it."
"Adrian kept the broken knight as a joke, not as a trophy."
She looked down.
"Salvatore knew the second that man walked onto the balcony."
"A father knows."
"That is why he grabbed your hand."
I remembered Salvatore's fingers crushing mine with the little strength he had left.
That is not my son.
He had been trying to protect Dominic from a ghost built to destroy him.
"Why you?" I asked.
"Why did Enzo use his own daughter?"
Celeste laughed once and the sound was bitter and hollow.
"Because Dominic would never have let a stranger close enough to dose his father's medicine and his own wine every week."
"Because my father's company was drowning in debt and the Romano ports were worth billions if the voting shares moved."
"Because a wedding is the cleanest theft ever invented if everyone is drinking champagne."
She finally took a sip of water.
Her hand shook so badly the cup rattled against her teeth.
"The plan was for me to marry Dominic."
"Salvatore would be declared incompetent."
"His voting rights would transfer under the emergency family trust my father had Arthur Bell tricked into drafting."
"Dominic would sign the port consolidation after enough lost evenings made him doubt his own memory."
"Matteo would appear later as the returned brother to split what was left and frighten the board."
I leaned forward.
"And the blue bottle?"
"My father gave it to me the week I moved into this house."
"He said it was a calming supplement for Salvatore's agitation."
"For the first two weeks I believed him."
My stomach turned.
"When did you stop believing him?"
"When Salvatore knew my name perfectly at breakfast and could not find the bathroom twenty minutes after his evening drops."
"I am not a nurse, Grace, but I am not blind."
"I called the private doctor my father claimed had prescribed it."
"The number was disconnected."
She pressed the tissue to her mouth.
"I asked my father and he showed me a photograph on his phone."
My heart began to race.
"What photograph?"
"My sister Lucia."
Celeste's composure finally broke.
Lucia D'Amato was twenty-two.
I had heard her name once at a fitting, spoken like a delicate secret.
She studied art restoration in Florence.
She sent Celeste postcards with pressed flowers taped inside.
In the photograph Celeste described, Lucia sat in a bare room holding a newspaper, alive and terrified and trying not to cry for the camera.
Enzo had taken her off a train platform with men who worked for a private security firm he owned.
He was holding his youngest daughter like a deposit in a bank vault.
If Celeste stopped, Lucia disappeared.
If Celeste went to the police, Lucia disappeared.
If Celeste told Dominic, Lucia disappeared before anyone could reach Italy.
"I started using smaller doses," Celeste whispered.
"I know how that sounds."
"I know smaller poison is still poison."
"I would pour part of it into a napkin when nobody was looking."
"Some nights I gave Salvatore almost nothing and lied on the family check-in call."
"Other nights my father's man watched me and I had no choice."
She looked straight at me.
"I am not asking you to call me innocent."
"I drugged an old man who trusted the people around his table."
"I drugged the man I was supposed to marry until he signed pages he cannot remember and woke up ashamed of gaps I had created."
"I will carry that for the rest of my life."
I believed her tears.
Believing her tears did not erase Salvatore's lost months.
It did not erase Dominic standing in his own study asking me if a signature was really his.
Compassion and accountability can live in the same room.
I learned that in the emergency department.
"You have to testify," I said.
"I know."
"Not the edited version your father expects if this leaks."
"All of it."
"Your doses."
"Your father's orders."
"Matteo."
"Lucia."
Celeste nodded.
"I will testify to everything if Dominic gets Lucia out first."
"If I speak before she is safe, my father will kill her and call it an accident on an Italian road."
"That is not a threat he makes twice."
Detective Bennett had warned me Celeste might bargain.
This did not feel like a bargain.
It felt like a woman standing on the edge of a roof naming the one person she loved more than her own freedom.
"Do you know where she is?"
"Not exactly."
"My father moves her."
"But Matteo bragged once when he was drunk."
"He said the villa with the blue shutters near the lemon groves is not a holiday house anymore."
"He said Lucia hates the bells because they ring every hour and she counts them to stay sane."
"Bells and lemon groves and blue shutters is not an address, Celeste."
"It is more than we had this morning."
She reached slowly into the lining of her sweater and I stiffened.
The guard outside shifted at the door.
Celeste produced only a folded postcard.
The edges were worn soft.
On the front was a painted church tower above terracotta roofs.
On the back Lucia's handwriting looped in blue ink.
Celeste turned it over so I could read the last line Lucia had written before she vanished.
She said the bells at San Vito woke her at six and the lemons smelled sweet even in winter and she missed home.
"San Vito is a village," Celeste said.
"There cannot be many villas with blue shutters near a church tower there that my father's companies own or rent through shells."
"Give this to Nora."
"Give this to Dominic."
"Tell him I will sign any statement he wants the hour Lucia is safe."
I took the postcard carefully by its corner.
Before I could stand, Celeste caught my sleeve.
"Grace."
"I need you to tell Salvatore something for me."
"You can tell him yourself when this is over."
"If I do not get that chance, he needs to hear it from someone he trusts."
She swallowed hard.
"Tell him I counted his clear mornings."
"Tell him I tried to leave him as many as I could."
I did not promise forgiveness I had no right to give.
I promised I would deliver the message exactly as she said it.
That was the truth and she deserved at least one person in this house who dealt in truth.
I was halfway to the door when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
Detective Bennett had sent a single urgent message.
I read it twice because the words did not make sense the first time.
The guesthouse guard behind me spoke into his radio at the same moment.
Celeste saw my face change.
"What is it?"
The lights in the guesthouse flickered once.
Then the radio crackled with a voice I recognized as Frank, sharp and fast.
It said the guesthouse perimeter had been breached on the garden side.
It said an unidentified car had just rammed the service gate.
Celeste stood so quickly the water cup overturned across the table.
May you like
She whispered one word with absolute certainty.
"Father."
