Chương 3
Emilia unlocked her phone.
There were no usable photographs.
The first image showed only the edge of the ledger and a blur of dark wood. The second was black. The third captured part of the note, but not the date or the reference to the launch.
Vittorio watched her face.
“You have nothing,” he said.
She lifted the phone to call anyway.
Matteo spoke before she touched the screen.
“I moved the boat.”
Emilia’s hand stopped.
Lucia turned slowly toward him.
Matteo remained beside the bed, tall and rigid in his open-collared shirt. He looked younger without his jacket, younger and more exhausted, like the man Emilia had once found asleep at her kitchen table with tax documents beneath his cheek. She had loved that version of him because he worked too late, apologized to furniture when he bumped into it, and never seemed embarrassed by tenderness.
Now she wondered how much of tenderness could coexist with cowardice before it became another method of concealment.
“What did you say?” Lucia asked.
Matteo stared at the floor.
“I moved the Livia from the marina before dawn.”
Vittorio crossed the room in two strides. “Enough.”
Matteo looked at his father. “She was going to find out.”
“She has found an old paper and constructed a fantasy around it.”
“I saw the damage.”
Lucia sat down on the nearest chair as if the backs of her knees had given way.
Emilia could hear her own breath, shallow and uneven.
Matteo continued in a low voice. “The starboard side was cracked. There was blue paint along the rail. My father called me at three twenty. He said the launch had hit a mooring post and needed to be taken to the private shed before the marina staff arrived.”
“Matteo,” Vittorio said.
“I did it.”
“You were twenty-three.”
“I knew it was wrong.”
“You knew nothing.”
“I knew enough to ask why there was blood on the deck.”
Lucia made a sound that seemed to come from very far away.
Emilia’s phone slipped in her damp hand. She caught it against her gown.
Vittorio looked at his wife.
That look revealed more than Matteo’s words had.
Lucia stood again, but she did so slowly, one palm pressed to the chair. “Blood?”
“There was very little,” Vittorio said.
Emilia stared at him.
He seemed to hear himself. His mouth closed.
The music downstairs stopped. This time it did not begin again.
Matteo walked to the window. He did not touch the curtains or look at the lake. He stood with his back to the room, breathing through his nose.
“When did you learn someone died?” Emilia asked.
He answered without turning. “The next afternoon.”
“And you said nothing.”
“My father said the police had already identified another vessel.”
“They had not.”
“I know that now.”
“You knew it then.”
“I knew there were rumors.”
“My family waited eleven days.”
“I know.”
“You do not know.”
He nodded once, accepting the correction.
Emilia crossed the room before realizing she had moved. Her bare feet made no sound on the marble. When she reached the middle of the room, Matteo turned.
She stopped several feet from him.
“Did you know who I was when we met?”
His face tightened.
Lucia whispered, “Matteo.”
He looked at Emilia. “Not at first.”
“How long?”
“Emilia—”
“How long did you know?”
“After Boston.”
She saw the apartment as clearly as if its small kitchen had opened behind him: the cheap gray cabinets, the radiator knocking, the chipped blue glass Anna had bought at a flea market. Matteo sitting beside Emilia on the floor while she spoke about the lake. His thumb moving over the back of her hand. His voice saying, You don’t have to tell me the rest tonight.
He had known before he said it.
“You stayed until morning,” she said.
“I was afraid to leave you alone.”
“You were afraid to tell me.”
“Yes.”
Lucia covered her mouth.
Vittorio stepped between them, not close enough to touch either of them. “This conversation has become irrational. Emilia is injured and distressed. Matteo has been drinking. We will call attorneys in the morning.”
“I had one glass of champagne,” Matteo said.
“You are confused.”
“I am not.”
“You have spent years exaggerating your guilt about a task you were asked to perform when you were barely an adult.”
“I moved a damaged boat after a woman disappeared.”
“You did not know that at the time.”
“He knew the next day,” Emilia said.
Vittorio turned to her. “And what did you know when you accepted work at this villa?”
The room seemed to contract around the question.
Lucia looked from Vittorio to Emilia.
Matteo closed his eyes.
There it was—the rest of the truth he had threatened her with.
Emilia felt the impulse to deny it. The denial formed with alarming ease. She could say she had applied for the conservation project by coincidence. She could say she had not recognized the Bellandi name until after she met Matteo. She could protect the cleanest version of herself and let the room divide into guilty men and an innocent woman.
Anna had hated clean stories.
When they were teenagers, she used to pause crime shows to complain whenever a character became too obviously good or bad. Nobody wakes up and decides to be the lesson, she would say, usually with popcorn stuck to her sweatshirt.
Emilia lowered her phone.
“I knew the family name,” she said.
Lucia stared at her.
“I had seen it in the investigation file. A witness remembered a dark launch near the eastern shore. He thought it carried a blue-and-silver pennant. The police never considered that enough to identify anyone. Years later, I found an old photograph on Anna’s cloud account. The Livia was in the background at a marina café the evening she died.”
May you like
Matteo looked at her as though he had not heard this part before.
Emilia continued. “When the Bellandi foundation hired the museum to evaluate the villa’s textiles, I asked for the assignment.”
