Chương 3
“They were prepared for my signature.”
“Prepared, yes.”
“With false dates.”
“A clerical convention.”
Paolo laughed once. “That isn’t a thing.”
Filippo closed the salon doors, shutting out the guests. The murmur beyond them swelled, then softened.
Livia turned on him. “Who told you to close those?”
“No one needs an audience for this.”
“We already have one,” Elena said. “That was the point.”
Carlo sank into a gilded chair.
He looked older than he had during the ceremony. Not sadder. Smaller.
Sofia stood beside him without touching him.
“Elena,” Carlo said, “you don’t understand the contracts.”
“I understand my name.”
“You understand drawings. Stone. Regulations. You don’t understand financing.”
“I understand a false date.”
“You understand nothing about keeping thirty-four people employed through winter.”
There it was. The defense he had used for years whenever Elena questioned an invoice, a supplier, a project taken at a loss. Thirty-four people. Their children. Their mortgages. The welder whose wife had cancer. The apprentice with the stutter. Carlo carried them all into every argument and arranged them around himself like witnesses.
Elena had once admired it.
Now she saw how useful they were.
“What did you sign?” Paolo asked.
Carlo did not look at him.
Livia answered.
“Your father made practical adjustments during several complex restoration projects. Adjustments that could be misunderstood by people with no knowledge of the circumstances.”
“Misunderstood as what?” Paolo said.
“Paolo,” Carlo warned.
“No. She just played a recording at my sister’s wedding saying our family was threatened. I think I’m allowed one question.”
Matteo pulled a phone from his pocket. Notifications covered the screen. He silenced it without reading them.
“Elena,” he said, “come upstairs with me. Five minutes. Just us.”
Mara moved closer to her.
“No,” Elena said.
“I need you to listen.”
“I listened this morning.”
“You heard my mother at her worst.”
Livia’s head turned slowly.
Matteo corrected himself. “Under pressure.”
“You were there,” Elena said.
“I was trying to calm her.”
“You told me marrying you was the only way to protect my father.”
“That was not a threat.”
“What was it?”
“The truth.”
The words landed more quietly than the recording had.
Matteo seemed to recognize this. He looked toward Carlo, perhaps expecting support.
Carlo stared at the floor.
Sofia sat down beside him.
“What did you do?” she asked her husband.
He pressed his lips together.
Livia stepped forward.
“This conversation is over. Carlo, take your family home. Elena will remain here until she understands the severity of distributing stolen private material.”
Mara whispered, “Stolen?”
Elena removed the recorder from beneath the ribbon.
The flowers loosened slightly. One pale rose tilted against a peony.
She placed the device in her palm.
“It belongs to me.”
“The voices on it do not.”
“You came into my room.”
“It is my house.”
“You told me what would happen to my family if I walked out.”
“I explained consequences.”
“You locked the door.”
Livia’s composure did not break, but Carlo shut his eyes.
Matteo said, “Mother.”
“I did not lock anything. The latch fell when the door closed.”
Elena could still hear the small metallic click.
She had watched Livia slip the key onto the desk beside the wedding contracts. Matteo stood by the window, one hand in his pocket, looking at the lake. When Elena tried to pass him, he had stopped her. The faint mark around her wrist was the only visible remnant of that room, and Elena refused to turn it into a performance for people who would debate whether the color was red enough.
Sofia rose.
“We are leaving.”
Livia looked at her with faint surprise.
“You should hear what your husband has risked before you make decisions.”
“I have been married to Carlo for thirty-one years. I know what he risks. It is usually everyone else.”
Carlo flinched.
It was the cruelest thing Sofia had ever said in public.
It was also true.
Mara handed Elena the overnight bag. Paolo took off his jacket and draped it around his sister’s shoulders, covering the lace sleeves and the mark beneath one cuff.
Matteo watched him do it.
“Elena, where will you go?”
“Somewhere you don’t own.”
His face changed then, not with anger but injury.
Villa Bellandi was his house. The hotel where most guests were staying belonged to the Bellandi group. The restoration firm that employed Carlo depended on Bellandi contracts. Elena’s apartment in Milan had been purchased through a company Matteo controlled, though he had called it an engagement gift. Her position at the foundation came with a car, a phone, and health insurance paid by Bellandi entities.
For three years, Matteo had solved every inconvenience in her life.
She had mistaken solutions for love.
“You can’t walk out and pretend none of this concerns you,” he said.
“I know.”
“What do you think happens tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.”
For the first time that evening, Elena saw something like genuine fear in him.
He had expected tears, accusations, perhaps a postponed wedding. He had not expected uncertainty. Uncertainty could not be negotiated because it did not yet know its price.
Elena handed the recorder to Mara.
“Put this in your bag.”
Livia’s gaze followed it.
Filippo moved toward the door.
“I’ll have the car brought around.”
“No Bellandi car,” Elena said.
Mara nodded. “Mine is by the service gate.”
The two of them had arranged it the night before in a message disguised as a complaint about shoes. Elena had not known whether she would use the recorder. She had not known whether she would have the courage to walk into the hall. She had known only that Mara’s old blue Fiat would be parked beyond the kitchens with a full tank and Elena’s passport beneath the passenger seat.
As they reached the salon doors, Matteo spoke behind her.
“I love you.”
Elena stopped.
The sentence hurt because it was not entirely false.
May you like
She turned.
His hair was still neatly parted. His shirt collar remained crisp. He looked like the man who brought her coffee during site inspections, who remembered that she hated the smell of lilies, who had sat on a hospital floor beside Paolo after a cycling accident because there were no chairs left in the emergency department.
