Part 8
“What time did it resume?”
“It did not resume until this morning.”
“So the camera failed less than twenty minutes before Elena was injured and remained failed through the police request.”
“That is correct.”
“Was the off-site mirror active?”
Tomas glanced toward the attorney.
Paolo answered. “No usable footage exists.”
Matteo kept his attention on Tomas. “That was not my question.”
“The mirror account was suspended during a system migration,” Tomas said.
“When?”
“Last week.”
“Who authorized it?”
“The migration was planned.”
“Who authorized it?”
Tomas’s jaw moved.
Paolo folded his hands. “I did.”
“Why?”
“Because the annual cost was absurd and the insurer accepted an alternative.”
“Show me the acceptance.”
The room remained silent.
Matteo looked around the table. Men who had known him since childhood avoided his eyes.
He understood then that something had happened even if he did not yet know what. Not because anyone confessed, and not because the evidence was obvious. Because the room had been arranged to make every answer pass through Paolo.
“What did the camera capture before sixteen forty-two?” he asked.
Tomas looked at Paolo again.
Matteo stood. “You are employed by the estate company. I am a director of that company.”
“Matteo,” Paolo said.
“Answer me.”
Tomas spoke carefully. “The local files for that day are unavailable.”
“Unavailable or deleted?”
“We are investigating.”
“Did you delete them?”
“No.”
“Did anyone ask you to?”
Tomas’s silence lasted only a second.
It was enough.
Matteo moved toward him, then stopped. He felt everyone in the room notice the movement. His hands opened at his sides.
“I am not going to touch you,” he said.
Tomas’s face reddened.
Matteo looked at his father. “I want the servers preserved. No one enters the security room without an independent technician and police approval.”
Paolo rose. “You are allowing guilt over Mara to turn into paranoia.”
“Elena says you held her wrist.”
“I prevented her from leaving with confidential papers.”
“So you did touch her.”
“She was hysterical.”
The word changed the room.
Matteo heard Elena’s voice from the hospital: You keep repeating his reasons.
“She was not hysterical,” he said.
“You were not there.”
“Neither were you, according to your first version.”
Paolo’s eyes hardened. “Be careful how you speak to me.”
Matteo almost laughed. The warning sounded childish now, a phrase left over from a time when Paolo controlled the doorways and car keys and every adult explanation.
“Or what?”
Paolo glanced at the others.
Matteo understood the answer before it was spoken. The company. The board. The trust. Access to the life he had inherited but never fully owned.
Paolo lowered his voice. “Do not destroy your family because you are ashamed of one mistake.”
Matteo looked at the security director, the attorneys, the printed articles, and the dark fireplace no one had lit.
“The mistake did not begin when I struck Mara.”
He walked out.
Elena moved into the serviced apartment under another name. The rooms were clean and impersonal, with beige furniture and a kitchenette containing four identical glasses. A nurse visited twice a day. The hospital arranged transportation for appointments.
Matteo paid for the apartment but did not stay there.
He came each morning with groceries and waited in the corridor until Elena allowed him inside. Sometimes she let him make coffee. Sometimes she spoke through the closed door and told him she was tired.
On the fourth day, she allowed him to sit in the living room while she rested on the sofa.
The baby had begun moving normally again. Elena kept one hand on her abdomen without seeming aware of it.
“I went to the police,” Matteo said.
“I know.”
“They told you?”
“It was online.”
He looked down at the coffee in his hands. “I admitted what I did.”
“You did do it.”
“Yes.”
The refrigerator clicked off. Traffic moved faintly below the window.
“I want to apologize to Mara,” he said.
“You want her to make you feel less monstrous.”
He flinched.
Elena watched him over the edge of the blanket. “That was cruel.”
“It was true.”
“Both can happen.”
He set the cup on the table.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you need?”
“I need you not to make me responsible for deciding how you become better.”
He looked toward the narrow balcony. Two towels hung from a neighboring railing, one blue and one yellow.
After a while, he said, “My father lied about the recordings.”
Elena’s face became still.
“He says they failed. The security director will not answer directly. I asked for an independent examination.”
“Will Paolo allow it?”
“I don’t need his permission.”
“You have spent your whole life needing his permission and pretending you didn’t.”
Matteo looked at her.
She turned her face toward the sofa cushion.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m tired.”
“No. Don’t apologize.”
“I wasn’t apologizing for the truth. I was apologizing because I enjoyed saying it.”
A small, unwilling smile touched his mouth and disappeared.
Elena saw it. For a moment, they were themselves again—two people capable of being unkind and honest in the same breath.
Then she remembered Mara holding her cheek.
The moment closed.
Mara returned to work remotely after a week. The restoration company had removed her from the Villa Serafina project “pending resolution of the ongoing dispute,” but three other clients still expected drawings, budgets, and answers about stone suppliers.
She spent one morning arguing with a contractor over a bathroom wall that had been built twelve centimeters too far east. The ordinariness of the disagreement comforted her until he asked whether she was “the woman from the Rinaldi situation.”
She ended the call early.
At noon, Elena sent a message.
May I come see you?
Mara stared at the words.
Her first impulse was to say no. Her second was to say yes too quickly. She placed the phone face down and made herself eat half a piece of toast before replying.
May you like
Tomorrow. One hour.
Elena arrived in a hospital-arranged car wearing a gray coat over a loose blue dress. Her hair was tied back badly, as though she had done it without a mirror. The driver carried a small bag upstairs and left after confirming the return time.
