St. Agnes Keeps Poor Womenâs Secrets
Chapter 04 - St. Agnes Keeps Poor Womenâs Secrets
St. Agnes sat between a boarded bakery and a laundromat with blue plastic chairs. It was not the kind of church men like Matteo De Luca visited unless there was a funeral, a wedding, or a debt owed to God. The stone steps were cracked. The brass handles were cold. Inside, the air smelled of wax, dust, and old women who had prayed longer than anyone had listened.
Elena walked ahead of Matteo because she could not bear the feeling of his men behind her. Nico and another guard stayed near the doors, respectful but alert. Matteo removed his coat in the vestibule, folded it over his arm, and for a moment he looked less like a king than a son who had forgotten how to come home.
An elderly nun named Sister Beatrice recognized Elena at once. She touched Elena's cheek with papery fingers and said, "You have your mother's tired eyes. She had them even when she was young."
Elena almost broke then, not because the words were sad, but because they were intimate. The world had taken Isabella and left Elena with official papers, a cheap urn, and recipes. To hear someone remember the weight in her mother's eyes felt like a small resurrection.
Father Benedetti was dead. Sister Beatrice told them this in the sacristy while rain tapped against the high windows. But before his stroke, the priest had left certain envelopes in the church safe, each marked with a name and a warning. Some were confessions. Some were debts. Some were, as Sister Beatrice put it, "the kind of truth men delay until the dead can no longer argue."
She returned with a gray envelope. Matteo's name was not on it. Elena's was.
Her hands turned cold.
"My mother wrote to me?"
"She wrote to the woman she hoped you would become," Sister Beatrice said.
Inside was not a letter at first, but a birth certificate. Elena read her own name, her mother's, the date, the hospital. The space for the father had been struck through in old ink and rewritten by hand.
Matteo De Luca.
The church seemed to tilt. Elena gripped the edge of the table. Matteo did not move at all, and that stillness frightened her because she could not tell whether it was shock, grief, or refusal.
"Did you know?" she asked.
His voice came rough. "No."
"Did you suspect?"
"When I saw your face tonight, yes. When I heard your mother's name, God help me, yes."
Elena stepped away from him. She had imagined many things about the man who had given her half her blood. A sailor, a coward, a deadbeat, a married man, someone her mother loved and outgrew. She had not imagined this: a man whose name made rooms quiet, a man who could order doors opened, a man her mother had hidden her from with the precision of fear.
Sister Beatrice opened the second sheet. "Isabella asked that this be read after the certificate."
Elena took it before Matteo could. The handwriting swam, then steadied.
My Elena,
If you are reading this, then the lemon pasta found its way back to the man I once loved. That means the past did not stay buried, and maybe that is mercy.
Matteo is your father. He did not abandon you. I left before I could become the chain around his throat or the weapon in his enemies' hands.
Elena swallowed hard, eyes burning.
The last line on the page was shorter, darker.
But if Aldo Rinaldi is still beside him, do not give Matteo your trust too quickly.
Matteo's face turned to stone.
Elena looked up. "Who's Aldo Rinaldi?"
Nico, standing in the doorway, answered before Matteo could.
The sacristy clock ticked with a sound too ordinary for what lay on the table. Elena thought of the birthdays her mother had stretched from almost nothing: a cupcake split in half, a candle reused three years in a row, a paper crown Isabella had colored with borrowed markers. How many of those nights had her father been across the city, rich enough to buy streets, poor enough not to know she existed?
She did not want to pity him. Pity felt like betrayal. The child she had been deserved someone to be angry on her behalf, and the woman she was had no intention of surrendering that anger just because Matteo looked devastated in a church.
"If this is true," she said, tapping the birth certificate, "then you don't get to step into my life and behave like finding me makes you a father."
Matteo accepted the blow with a small nod. "No. It makes me a man who has been given the chance to stop being absent. That is smaller. It will have to be enough for today."
Sister Beatrice's eyes softened, but she wisely said nothing. Old women who had heard confessions knew when silence could do more work than advice.
Sister Beatrice poured weak tea into chipped cups and slid one toward Elena. "Your mother used to sit right there after closing," she said, pointing to a chair near the radiator. "She would wait until everyone left, then ask if God disliked stubborn women."
"What did you tell her?" Elena asked.
"That if He did, He had made a terrible administrative error filling the world with them."
May you like
Despite herself, Elena smiled. Then the smile broke. Her mother had not been only frightened. She had been funny, difficult, faithful in her own sideways way. The more Elena learned, the more Isabella stopped being a saint or a victim and became a woman again.
"The man who raised him after his father died."
