Chapter 4 - Thursday
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The number on my phone had an Italian country code.
I answered it standing in my mother's bedroom doorway, still holding Sofia's wristband.
A woman's voice spoke careful English.
“Is this Emily Carter?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Dr. Giulia Conti.”
“I am a psychiatrist in Rome.”
“I believe your mother once helped a patient of mine.”
Behind me, my mother pushed herself higher against her pillows.
“Do not tell her anything yet,” I whispered to Dr. Conti.
“I do not know you.”
“That is wise.”
“I would not trust me either, if I were you.”
There was something steady in her voice.
It was not warm exactly.
It was the steadiness of a person who has carried bad news professionally for years.
“Sofia Ricci Moretti asked me to call this house if her return was ever threatened.”
“She memorized your mother's name.”
“She did not know whether Margaret Carter was alive.”
My mother heard her name.
She reached toward the phone with her strong hand.
I put the call on speaker and held it between us.
“Margaret?” Dr. Conti asked gently.
“I am here.”
My mother's words came slowly, but they came.
“You kept her wristband.”
“You do not know what that means to her.”
My mother closed her eyes.
“Is she safe?”
“She is safe tonight.”
“She is frightened, but she is safe, and she is determined.”
“She intends to come to Chicago tomorrow, to the family council at the Moretti house.”
“She intends to speak for herself.”
I watched relief and terror move across my mother's face in the same breath.
Relief that Sofia had survived the corridor.
Terror that the corridor was coming back for all of us.
Dr. Conti gave us a number to reach her through Alessandro Romano, and only through Alessandro.
She would not give us Sofia's location.
She would not give us a hotel, a flight, or a name.
“I have spent three years teaching Sofia to trust doors again,” she said.
“I will not hand her to a house full of people because one of them sounds kind at three in the morning.”
After she hung up, my mother did not let go of my hand for a long time.
Neither of us slept.
At dawn I made tea neither of us drank.
At seven, Rosa made oatmeal and pretended not to notice the locket on the kitchen table.
At eight, my phone rang again.
This time the number belonged to Luca Moretti.
“Emily, I need you at the house.”
His voice sounded like gravel.
“I have not slept either.”
“That is not why I am calling.”
“Enrico Bellini has moved the merger signing.”
My grip tightened on the phone.
“Moved it where?”
“To tonight.”
“Thursday night, at seven, in my own dining room.”
“He says the family council cannot wait for rumors.”
“He says a family should settle its future before outsiders poison it.”
I looked at the wristband lying beside my mother's untouched tea.
Enrico was not trying to settle the future.
He was trying to lock it before Friday could open its mouth.
“Luca, Sofia's doctor called us.”
The silence on the line changed completely.
“What did she say?”
“That Sofia is safe.”
“That she is coming tomorrow.”
“That she will speak for herself.”
I heard him exhale, a sound so raw that I turned away from my mother out of instinct, as if grief deserved privacy even over the phone.
“Then my father-in-law has one day to steal my life twice,” he said.
“Be here by ten.”
“Bring your mother if she is able.”
“She is not going anywhere near that house,” I said.
“Then I will send men to sit outside yours.”
He said it without threat, the way another man might offer an umbrella.
It reminded me that Luca Moretti's protection and Luca Moretti's power were the same weather.
You could freeze inside both if you were not careful.
I was at the mansion by ten.
The banquet room had been restored to perfection.
No broken glass remained.
No wine stain showed on the marble.
Wealthy houses are very good at erasing the evidence of ugly nights.
Vanessa stood by the windows with a lawyer I had never seen before.
She wore pale blue, the color of innocence in magazine photographs.
She had clearly chosen it for the audience.
“Enrico and I have discussed the staffing matter,” she said.
“Emily is dismissed, effective immediately.”
“She will be paid through the week.”
“She will leave the house quietly, and we will consider the matter closed.”
I set my bag down on a chair.
Nobody had offered me a chair the night before until Luca pulled one out.
This time I did not wait to be offered.
“I will not be dismissed by you,” I said.
Vanessa's lawyer cleared his throat.
“Miss Carter, your employment is at will.”
“Your conduct at a private family dinner—”
“My conduct,” Luca said from the doorway, “was translating Italian at my request.”
He crossed the room with a folder in his hand and a man I recognized as his attorney behind him.
“Emily Carter is under my protection in this house.”
“Anyone who removes her removes her over me.”
Vanessa's smile thinned.
“You are embarrassing yourself over a maid, Luca.”
“I embarrassed myself for five years by believing you.”
“That ends on a schedule I choose.”
He placed the folder on the table and opened it.
Inside lay a copy of his divorce decree.
His attorney, a gray woman named Ms. Adler, pointed to Sofia's signature with one manicured finger.
“I had the questioned signature compared this morning against Sofia Moretti's bank records, her passport application, and her marriage license.”
“The comparison is not close.”
“The divorce signature was written by a right-handed person imitating a left-handed woman.”
My eyes moved to Vanessa.
Vanessa was right-handed.
So were most people, and I told myself not to build a gallows out of one fact.
Ms. Adler did not need my help.
“She also signed with a pen stroke Sofia Moretti never used in any document we hold.”
“In my professional opinion, this divorce was never validly executed.”
Luca's next words were quiet enough to stop every other sound in the room.
“Then I am still married.”
“Yes, Mr. Moretti.”
“You are still married to Sofia Ricci Moretti.”
Vanessa laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle.
“A lawyer's opinion is not a court.”
“No,” Ms. Adler agreed.
“It is, however, enough to make tonight's engagement legally grotesque and tomorrow's signing a fraud risk no bank counsel will touch.”
“Enrico knows that,” Luca said, watching Vanessa.
“That is why he moved the signing to tonight.”
“He wants signatures before Sofia walks into this house and makes every man at that table choose between a merger and a kidnapping.”
Vanessa gathered her pale blue skirts and walked out without another word.
Her lawyer followed her, already dialing his phone.
An hour later, Alessandro arrived with a leather case and the expression of a man who had spent the morning arguing with Italy.
“My colleague reached the clinic's archive through counsel.”
He laid a certified copy on Luca's desk in the study.
“Anna Ricci.”
“Admitted five years ago.”
“Held under a private psychiatric order signed by Dr. Victor Hale.”
“Discharged eleven months ago into outpatient care.”
“The outpatient therapist of record is Dr. Giulia Conti.”
I closed my eyes.
The wristband, the clinic record, and the phone call made a chain.
Each link was small.
Together they could hold weight.
Alessandro continued.
“Dr. Conti helped Sofia reach Michael six months ago.”
“Michael has been moving money through a legal defense fund in Milan to pay for her protection.”
“That is how Vanessa kept him obedient and desperate at the same time.”
“He was paying to bring her home with debts she herself had created for him.”
Luca sat down slowly behind his father's old desk.
“So my brother was being blackmailed with the money he was using to free my wife.”
“Yes.”
“And the Bellinis knew every payment because their banks held his loans.”
“Yes.”
Luca looked at me.
“Emily, your mother kept the wristband.”
“Your father hid it.”
“Michael paid for her protection.”
“Alessandro kept her father's friendship.”
His voice roughened.
“Every decent person in this story did something while I believed a lie and planned a wedding.”
“You were lied to by professionals,” I said.
“That is not a defense you would accept from anyone else.”
“No.”
“It is not.”
He stood and walked to the window, where the Chicago sky was the color of wet steel.
“Then I will accept work instead.”
“Tonight Enrico will try to sign the merger.”
“Tomorrow Sofia will walk into this house.”
“Between those two things, nobody touches your mother.”
I believed him.
That was the terrible part.
I believed Luca Moretti completely, and my mother was still alone in a little house with a part-time aide and a porch that sloped a quarter inch to the left.
Rosa called at four that afternoon.
I knew her voice so well that I heard the terror before I heard the words.
“Emily, there is a man across the street.”
“He has been there since lunch.”
“Now there is a second car.”
“Your mother is asking for you.”
“Rosa, lock the doors.”
“I did.”
“Lock the back door too.”
“I did, Emily.”
Her breath was coming too fast.
“Someone just tried the side gate.”
I was already running.
I remember Luca's hand closing around my wrist in the hallway, not to stop me, but to keep me from falling down the stairs.
I remember him saying my name twice.
May you like
I remember answering with the only words I had.
“They are at my mother's house.”
