Chương 9
The documents were real.
They were also incomplete.
Elena’s report described structural conditions at a villa near Varese. It did not approve costs. The leaked version had been placed beside an invoice she had never seen.
Online, the distinction vanished.
Within hours, the story changed. Elena was no longer only the frightened bride. She was the daughter of a contractor under suspicion, a foundation employee, a possible participant, a woman who might have used a wedding spectacle to protect herself.
The lifestyle presenter who had called her eerily calm now called her calculating.
Two guests publicly defended Matteo.
A third said Elena had seemed happy throughout the engagement.
Someone posted photographs of her on Bellandi yachts, at hotels, beside Matteo in Paris.
Each image proved that she had once smiled.
At Giulia’s apartment, Paolo threw his phone onto the sofa.
“They leaked Papa’s documents.”
“Likely,” Giulia said.
“Likely?”
“We prove what we can prove.”
“Who else had them?”
“Your father. Accountants. Subcontractors. Municipal offices. Insurers.”
“Livia did it.”
“Probably.”
“So say it.”
“Law is not a family dinner, Paolo.”
He kicked the leg of a chair.
Giulia looked at him.
“If you break that, I will send your sister an invoice.”
Elena sat at the table with the leaked report in front of her.
She remembered the day she wrote it. Rain against the site-office windows. Matteo arriving with sandwiches because she had forgotten lunch. He had read over her shoulder and asked why she described every crack.
“Because cracks travel,” she told him.
He had kissed the top of her head.
Now she saw a handwritten note beside the document number in Carlo’s files: Attach to revised conservation cost summary per M.B.
Matteo Bellandi.
The initials were not proof. They were a clue.
“Who wrote this?” she asked.
Carlo leaned over the page.
“Marta, probably.”
Marta Conti had handled Rinaldi Restauri’s bookkeeping for seventeen years before retiring the previous spring. She kept peppermint candies in every drawer and distrusted online banking. Elena remembered her arguing with Matteo during a foundation audit.
“What happened when she retired?” Elena asked.
“She was sixty-eight.”
“She said she would work until she died because retirement was a government plot.”
Carlo looked uncomfortable.
“She had health problems.”
“What problems?”
“I don’t know.”
Elena stared at him.
He corrected himself.
“She disagreed with some accounting instructions.”
“From whom?”
“Livia’s finance office.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because she left with a pension and a settlement.”
Giulia sat upright.
“A settlement?”
“Confidential.”
“Did you sign it?”
“I witnessed it.”
Marta lived in a small town above the lake, in an apartment filled with lace curtains and porcelain birds. She refused to let Elena enter.
“I saw the television,” she said through the chain on the door.
“I need to ask about the Bellandi invoices.”
“No.”
“My report was leaked.”
“I know.”
“Did you write ‘per M.B.’ on a cost summary?”
Marta’s eyes moved along the corridor.
“You should leave.”
“Did Matteo instruct you?”
“Elena.”
“Please.”
Marta’s expression softened, then closed again.
“You are like your father. You ask for courage when it belongs to someone else.”
The door shut.
Elena stood in the corridor with Mara, listening to the chain slide into place.
“That went well,” Mara said.
“She is afraid.”
“She is also right.”
They walked down four flights because the elevator was broken. On the second landing, Elena stopped beside a window overlooking tiled roofs and a narrow glimpse of the lake.
“What if I’m doing the same thing?” she asked.
“Asking other people to destroy their lives so mine makes sense?”
Mara sat on the step.
“Yes.”
Elena looked at her.
“You wanted honesty.”
“I wanted you to say no.”
“No.”
Mara picked at a loose thread on her sleeve.
“You’re asking Marta to break a settlement. You’re asking workers to survive without wages. You’re asking your father to confess. You’re asking Paolo to accept damage from something he didn’t do.”
“So I should take Matteo’s offer?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What are you saying?”
“That the right decision can hurt people who don’t deserve it. You don’t get to call the hurt imaginary because the decision is right.”
Elena sat beside her.
A child was practicing scales on a piano in one of the apartments. The same passage repeated badly, paused, and began again.
“I hate you,” Elena said.
“I brought you jeans.”
“I hate you less than most people.”
They sat until the child reached the end of the scale.
That evening, Matteo sent a handwritten letter through Giulia’s office.
Elena recognized the paper from his study. Heavy cream stock, his initials pressed into the corner.
He asked to meet.
Giulia advised against it.
Elena went anyway.
They chose a hotel café in Milan where neither family had business interests. Matteo arrived first and selected a table visible from the street. He wore a charcoal suit and no tie. There were shadows beneath his eyes.
Elena sat opposite him.
For several seconds, they looked at one another like people meeting after a much longer separation.
“You cut your hair,” he said.
“I removed forty-three pins.”
“It looks shorter.”
“It isn’t.”
A waiter approached. Matteo ordered espresso. Elena asked for tea, then changed her mind and ordered coffee.
The waiter left.
“How is your wrist?” Matteo asked.
“Normal.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked toward the window.
Outside, a delivery cyclist argued with a taxi driver. Pedestrians moved around them without noticing.
“What are you sorry for?” she asked.
“I should not have stopped you.”
“That is carefully phrased.”
“I should not have touched you.”
“Better.”
“I was frightened.”
“So was I.”
“I know.”
“No. You know now.”
The waiter brought their coffee.
Matteo added half a packet of sugar, as he always did, then folded the empty paper into smaller and smaller squares.
“My mother leaked the invoices,” he said.
Elena had expected denial. The admission made her suspicious.
“Why are you telling me?”
May you like
“Because she is making this impossible to contain.”
“You mean impossible to control.”
