Chương 6
“Who authorized it?”
She hesitated.
“Tell me.”
“Enzo Moretti.”
His father.
Alessandro looked away. Through the glass he saw Luca speaking with a nurse, both of them keeping their voices low. Emma slept beneath a man’s jacket worth more than Sophia earned in six months.
“A payroll notation does not prove murder,” he said.
“No.”
“What else?”
“My mother kept letters.”
“From my mother?”
Sophia nodded.
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said Vittorio asked what she left you.”
“She left me a locked sewing box. I never found the key until last month.”
Sophia lifted her hand. The brass key she had clutched at the cottage was gone.
“The nurses took it,” she said. “It should be in the drawer.”
Alessandro opened the bedside drawer and found the key in a plastic property bag.
“Where is the box?”
“In a bank.”
“Which bank?”
She shook her head.
“You expect me to protect you while you hide information.”
“I did not ask for protection.”
“Your wrist says otherwise.”
“My wrist says your uncle hurt me.”
The sentence carried no accusation beyond the truth itself. That made it worse.
“Why didn’t you open the box sooner?”
“My mother made me promise.”
“Promise what?”
“That I would wait until Maria Moretti’s son became a man who could hear something without ordering someone to disappear.”
Alessandro’s eyes returned to her face.
“And you decided I had become that man?”
“No.”
The answer was immediate.
Despite himself, he gave a short breath that was almost a laugh.
Sophia watched him carefully.
“I went into the archive because I wanted to know whether waiting had protected anyone,” she said. “My mother died waiting. I am thirty-one. I clean the house where my father was condemned as a traitor, because the cottage comes with the job and my daughter needs a roof. I thought perhaps promises made by frightened women should expire.”
“Why work for us at all?”
“Because people with choices enjoy asking that question.”
He looked down at the ring.
Sophia coughed into a tissue. When she finished, her hand shook.
“I applied to twelve hotels after Emma was born,” she said. “Four did not answer. Three wanted night shifts. Two wanted references from my previous employer, who was my husband’s family. One offered half the hours they advertised. Your household needed a laundress and did not ask why my surname was Rossi.”
“Your husband?”
“Dead.”
“How?”
“A construction accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t know him.”
“No.”
The honesty seemed to surprise her.
He placed the key bag on the table.
“What bank?”
Sophia shut her eyes.
“Banca Lombarda. Porta Venezia branch. Box 317.”
“Under your name?”
“My mother’s. The fees are paid from an account she left.”
“How do you access it?”
“There is a letter of authorization and her death certificate in my desk.”
“Will you open it?”
“Not tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I have pneumonia.”
Alessandro leaned back.
For the first time that day, the absurdity of his impatience embarrassed him.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “If I can stand.”
“I can retrieve the papers.”
“No.”
“I can bring a bank officer here.”
“No.”
“Sophia—”
“You asked whether I believed you had become a man who could hear without ordering someone to disappear.”
He stopped.
Her eyes opened.
“Listen.”
The nurse entered and announced that five minutes had become twelve.
Alessandro stood.
As he reached the door, Sophia spoke again.
“Mr. Moretti.”
He turned.
“Emma thinks work keeps people safe,” she said. “Please do not teach her she was right.”
He spent the night in the family room at the end of the corridor.
The furniture had been designed to discourage comfort. Alessandro sat in a vinyl chair while Emma slept on a narrow couch, one hand tucked beneath her cheek. At midnight she woke crying without sound. Her eyes opened, saw an unfamiliar ceiling, and filled before she seemed fully conscious.
“Mama?”
“Next door.”
She sat up. Alessandro’s jacket slid to the floor.
“Mama die?”
“No.”
“You promise?”
The word trapped him. He had promised many things in rooms with locked doors. Payments. Protection. Silence. Some promises had been kept because keeping them served him. Others had been broken for the same reason.
“The doctor is helping her,” he said. “She is better than she was.”
Emma frowned at the missing promise.
Alessandro picked up the jacket and placed it over her legs.
“Come,” he said.
He carried her to the glass wall outside Sophia’s room. The lights were dim. Sophia slept beneath the blankets, the monitor glowing beside her.
Emma pressed one gauze-wrapped hand to the glass.
“Mama sleep.”
“Yes.”
“Good sleep?”
“Better sleep.”
She leaned against his shoulder.
After a while, she began humming.
The nurse at the station looked up. Alessandro felt the corridor change around the melody. Not silence, exactly. Wheels still squeaked. A machine chimed in a distant room. Someone laughed behind a closed door, then apologized for laughing.
But the song separated itself from those sounds.
His mother had sung an extra verse. He had never heard it elsewhere. It had no proper words, only syllables shaped around the tune.
Emma reached that verse.
Alessandro’s grip tightened beneath her knees.
“Who taught your mother that part?”
“Nonna.”
“Did Nonna make it up?”
Emma considered. “Lady Maria sing.”
He looked at her profile.
“How do you know?”
“Picture.”
“What picture?”
“Nonna picture. Lady Maria hold Mama baby.”
“Sophia was a baby?”
Emma nodded impatiently, as though he were slow.
“Where is the picture?”
“Mama desk.”
The following morning, Luca brought Alessandro clean clothes and three folders.
He placed them on the table in the hospital family room while Emma ate yogurt with a plastic spoon.
“The first is household payroll,” Luca said. “The second is the west archive access log. The third is what remains of Teresa Rossi’s employment file.”
“What remains?”
“Several pages were removed.”
“When?”
“No record.”
May you like
Alessandro opened the payroll folder.
Sophia’s base wage was modest but legal. After deductions for cottage maintenance, laundry errors, meal charges, missed hours, uniform replacement, and something labeled household disruption, she had taken home less than nine hundred euros the previous month.
