Chương 11
Emilia’s parents had begun arguing in half-sentences since her return. Her mother wanted every new fact acknowledged. Daniel distrusted any fact that arrived through a Bellandi.
Their grief had once appeared united because they both remained inside the same house. Emilia now saw they had spent eight years walking opposite directions around the same absence.
A week later, investigators confirmed that paint samples preserved from Anna’s rental boat were consistent with the type used on the Livia’s rail. They could not establish a unique match without the original launch, which had been sold and dismantled years earlier.
The sale occurred six months after Anna’s death.
The buyer was a company controlled by Vittorio.
The company had since dissolved.
Each discovery created another argument instead of a conclusion.
Giulia warned Emilia that even a reopened investigation supported by testimony and documents might produce an outcome that felt incomplete.
“Time damages everything,” she said. “Evidence, memory, law, courage.”
“What remains?”
“Sometimes enough.”
Emilia returned to work part-time at the museum. Her first assignment involved a seventeenth-century tapestry damaged by water from a leaking pipe. The work required cleaning one small section at a time with cotton swabs and controlled suction.
She spent hours removing stains no visitor would notice.
Her colleagues avoided discussing the wedding until one afternoon when a junior conservator named Miles knocked over a tray and whispered, “At least no one here is secretly an Italian criminal.”
The room went silent.
Miles turned red. “I did not mean—”
Emilia began laughing.
She laughed until she had to sit down.
The others joined carefully, then helplessly. Miles apologized three times. The laughter did not heal anything, but it returned her to the room.
That evening, she found another message from Lucia.
This one contained no apology.
It said: I was driving.
Emilia stared at the words.
A second message arrived.
I have requested to speak with the prosecutor tomorrow. Vittorio does not know.
Then a third.
Matteo told me you gave a complete statement even where it harmed you. I have used my shame as if it were punishment. It was not.
Emilia forwarded the messages to Giulia.
She did not respond to Lucia.
The confession changed the investigation but did not resolve it immediately. Lucia’s attorneys insisted on negotiated conditions before a formal statement. Vittorio’s attorneys attempted to prevent her from speaking, arguing that medication and emotional instability affected her memory.
Lucia dismissed them.
She hired separate counsel and gave a recorded account lasting nearly six hours.
According to the portions later shared with Emilia, Lucia had attended a private dinner in Bellagio after arguing with Vittorio. She drank wine and took a sedative prescribed for anxiety. Embarrassed and angry, she refused the family driver and used the Livia to cross the lake alone.
She saw Anna’s rented boat too late.
The collision threw Anna into the water and injured her friend. Lucia heard shouting. She slowed but did not stop. She called Vittorio from the villa’s lower hall. He sent staff away, took Lucia’s wet clothes, and instructed Matteo to move the launch.
Lucia said she did not know anyone had died until the next afternoon.
Then she allowed Vittorio to tell her silence would protect their children.
“I believed him because I wanted to,” she said in the statement. “That is different from believing him.”
Vittorio continued denying her account.
He told investigators Lucia had become confused under public pressure and was constructing a memory from photographs, guilt, and family accusations. He claimed the damaged launch had struck an abandoned boat near the marina and that Matteo’s recollection had been contaminated by Emilia’s allegations.
For a time, the competing accounts worked.
News coverage shifted from the death of Anna Hart to the collapse of the Bellandi marriage, then to the psychological state of Lucia Bellandi, then to questions about Emilia’s original motives.
Vittorio’s representatives released excerpts from Emilia’s private notes.
He knows about Anna. I still did not tell him why I came.
Another entry read: If the Bellandis are involved, loving Matteo does not make them innocent. It only makes me weak.
The pages appeared online without context.
Emilia’s museum placed her on administrative leave after donors complained that her conduct at the villa might have violated professional ethics. She was not accused of damaging or stealing artifacts, but the institution opened a review into whether she had misrepresented her reasons for requesting the assignment.
Her supervisor, Margaret, called her into an office Emilia had entered dozens of times without fear.
“We are not deciding whether you are a good person,” Margaret said.
“That is generous.”
“We are deciding whether you used museum access for a private investigation.”
“I did.”
“You also completed exemplary conservation work.”
“Both are true.”
Margaret sighed. “You have become very attached to that sentence.”
“It is doing a lot of work.”
“This is not funny.”
“I know.”
Margaret removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “The board will ask whether you searched restricted areas.”
“I entered the library and public reception rooms during my first assignment. I did not enter Vittorio’s private study until the wedding night, when I was there as a guest and family member.”
“Family member?”
“Legally, briefly.”
Margaret put her glasses back on. “Do you hear how that sounds?”
“Yes.”
“Do you regret requesting the assignment?”
Emilia thought about the question.
“If I had not requested it, Anna’s death might never have been investigated again.”
“That does not answer whether it was ethical.”
“No.”
Margaret waited.
“Yes,” Emilia said. “I regret using the museum’s trust. I do not regret discovering what happened.”
The board suspended her for three months without pay.
Daniel wanted her to sue.
Giulia said the museum’s action appeared defensible.
May you like
Ruth organized a schedule of rent, insurance, and legal expenses because Emilia had begun ignoring unopened mail. She spread the papers across the Hart dining table and tapped figures into a calculator.
“You have enough savings for four months,” she said.
