Chương 5
Some called Elena brave.
Some called her manipulative.
Several asked what her family had done.
One person had found Rinaldi Restauri’s website and posted screenshots of its Bellandi projects.
Carlo arrived twenty minutes later.
He had removed his bow tie. His shirt collar was open. He looked as though he had aged during the drive.
“Livia froze the payments,” he said before the door closed.
Sofia laughed, a short, exhausted sound. “Of course she did.”
“We have wages due Friday.”
“You have a daughter standing in a wedding dress.”
“I can see her.”
“Can you?”
Giulia put herself between them.
“Carlo, sit down.”
“I don’t need a lawyer.”
“You came to a lawyer’s apartment.”
“I came for my family.”
“Then start by telling them the truth.”
He looked at Elena.
She expected denial. She wanted denial, perhaps. Denial would give her someone simple to fight.
Instead he sat at the dining table and covered his face with both hands.
“The Bellandi contracts kept us alive,” he said.
No one answered.
He lowered his hands.
“After the flood damage at San Vittore, we lost three projects. Insurance took eighteen months. The bank reduced our credit. I had thirty-four people and nothing for them to do.”
Paolo leaned against the wall. “You told us the foundation advanced money.”
“They did.”
“For what?”
“Future work. Materials. Retainers.”
Giulia pulled out a notebook.
Carlo glared at it. “I am not giving a statement.”
“You are explaining why your daughter was threatened on her wedding day.”
“I was not in that room.”
“No,” Elena said. “You only gave them the weapon.”
He looked at her with open hurt.
It was unfair. She knew that immediately.
She did not take it back.
Carlo began with the invoices.
The Bellandi Preservation Foundation restored churches, villas, libraries, and civic buildings throughout northern Italy. Wealthy donors liked to place their names on plaques. Municipalities liked private money. Contractors liked regular work.
Rinaldi Restauri had completed stone and wood conservation for the foundation for twelve years.
Four years earlier, after the flood, Livia offered Carlo an arrangement. The foundation would advance funds and guarantee new projects. In return, Carlo would accept material substitutions chosen by Bellandi suppliers and certify certain costs as conservation expenses.
At first, the substitutions were legitimate. Different quarry, similar limestone. Local timber instead of imported oak. Then the invoices stopped matching the materials. Storage fees appeared for warehouses Carlo had never seen. Specialized labor was billed at rates his workers never received.
“You signed them?” Sofia asked.
Carlo rubbed his thumb against a scratch in Giulia’s table.
“Some.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know.”
“Eleven. Maybe thirteen.”
Paolo looked away.
Elena sat very still.
She remembered an invoice she had questioned two years earlier at a chapel outside Bergamo. The document listed hand-carved replacement capitals. Elena had seen them arrive from a machine shop, too smooth and identical. Carlo told her the final carving would be completed on site.
It never was.
She had signed the installation report because the stone itself was sound.
“Were my reports used?” she asked.
Carlo hesitated.
That was enough.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop saying that.”
“I don’t know what they attached them to after submission.”
Matteo had praised her reports. Precise, he called them. Professional. Useful.
Elena stood so quickly the chair struck the wall.
She walked into Giulia’s bathroom and closed the door.
The wedding dress barely fit between the sink and the tub. The skirt gathered around her like spilled cream. She looked at herself in the mirror.
One tear had dried on her cheek. Her makeup remained almost perfect. The two soft strands beside her face had come loose from the bridal bun. The lace veil was gone. The faint red pressure mark still circled her wrist.
She turned on the tap and held her fingers beneath cold water.
For weeks, she had imagined courage as a single clean act. Press the ribbon. Play the sentence. Refuse the marriage. Walk away.
She had not imagined payroll.
She had not imagined her own signature.
She had not imagined her father sitting barefoot in a lawyer’s apartment, admitting that he had traded small pieces of honesty for time until the pieces became a system.
A knock sounded.
“Elena,” Sofia said. “May I come in?”
“There isn’t room.”
“I’m your mother. I can become smaller.”
Elena opened the door.
Sofia slipped inside and closed it behind her. She stood beside the bathtub, still wearing the deep blue dress Elena had chosen for her.
“Your father is a fool,” Sofia said.
Elena stared at her.
“He is not only a fool. That would be easier. He is proud and frightened and very good at convincing himself that the next compromise will repair the last one.”
“You knew?”
“I knew the company was in trouble. I knew Livia helped. I did not know about false invoices.”
“Did you ask?”
“Not enough.”
Sofia adjusted the lace at Elena’s wrist, covering the mark.
“What happened here?”
Elena looked at the closed door.
“Matteo stopped me when I tried to leave the library.”
“Did he hurt you?”
The answer did not fit neatly into yes or no.
“He let go when Livia told him to.”
Sofia’s face tightened.
“He apologized,” Elena added.
Her mother gave her a tired look.
“That is not the useful detail you think it is.”
“I know.”
Sofia touched the edge of the satin sleeve.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
The word came without hesitation, which embarrassed Elena more than uncertainty would have.
Sofia nodded.
“All right.”
“That’s all?”
“What do you want me to say? Love does not become imaginary because someone behaves badly. It becomes dangerous.”
Elena looked at herself in the mirror again.
“What happens to Papa?”
“I don’t know.”
“The company?”
“I don’t know.”
“Paolo?”
“He will complain. He has always been talented at it.”
Despite herself, Elena smiled.
May you like
Sofia leaned against the sink.
“When you were nine, your father bought a broken espresso machine from a restaurant that was closing. He spent six Sundays repairing it. The cost of parts was twice what a new machine would have cost. I told him this every Sunday.”
