The Number That Wasn't There
Chapter 01 - The Number That Wasn't There
Emma Reed had spent three months learning how to disappear in the Moretti house. It was a useful skill for a maid. She could lay a table for fourteen without making a sound, pass through a room during an argument, and tell from a man's shoes whether he intended to stay for coffee. Tonight, with the beef cooling on its silver platter and the candles leaning toward the draft, she was about to make herself impossible to ignore.
"Mrs. Moretti didn't answer Sophie's calls," she said. She had meant to whisper it to Rosa. Instead her voice carried across the dining room. "Because Vanessa did."
Luca Moretti stood at the end of the table, one hand on the back of a chair. He was thirty-three and had inherited more than his father's properties. People obeyed him before he spoke. In the old neighborhood they called him a boss, and the word was not entirely figurative. Tonight he wore an open black shirt under his jacket; the edge of a tattoo showed at his collar. Emma had never been less interested in his reputation.
Vanessa Bellini set down her wineglass. Her smile stayed where it was, carefully in place. "I don't think you understand what you're saying, Emma."
"I do." Emma glanced at the coffee pot in her hand. She put it down before she spilled it. "On Tuesday I heard Sophie calling from school. You picked up Mrs. Moretti's phone. You told her her grandmother was resting. Then you deleted the call."
Sophie, thirteen, lifted her face. She had been picking the rosemary needles off her potatoes. "You told me Grandma didn't want to talk."
"I was managing the household," Vanessa said. "Rosa was overwhelmed."
Rosa Moretti had once managed three kitchens, six children between relatives and stepchildren, and a husband who thought a woman should ask permission to open a checking account. At seventy-four she was slower on the stairs, but she still heard a lie before anyone else heard the end of the sentence.
"You deleted my granddaughter?" Rosa asked.
"I was organizing your phone. You know how confused you get with all those notifications."
Rosa stared at the little black rectangle beside her plate. "I called every week."
Sophie looked from one woman to the other. "I thought you stopped loving me."
Rosa pushed back her chair, but her knees would not allow her to rise quickly. Emma watched the girl make the first move. Sophie went around the table, stumbling against a chair leg, and Rosa opened her arms. They clung to each other so fiercely that Emma looked away. There were things servants should not see, even when everyone had already seen them.
Luca did not move. "Where's Sophie's number, Vanessa?"
"In her phone, presumably."
"In my mother's phone."
Vanessa took a breath. "You're doing this in front of the staff?"
Emma knew the implication. Luca's gaze flicked toward her. For a second she thought he would ask her to leave, and that everything would settle back into its familiar, polished order. Instead he pulled a chair out for Rosa and sat beside her. He checked the contact list himself. Sophie's name was gone. A number ending in 1842, once pinned as a favorite, was gone too. He knew the number; it was his daughter's.
"Who has the passcode?" he asked.
"Half the house, apparently," Vanessa said.
"Name them."
"Luca, please. This is humiliating."
Emma almost laughed. Humiliation was hearing a child ask whether she had done something wrong to make her grandmother stop calling. Humiliation was a seventy-four-year-old woman apologizing for memory problems she might not have. Vanessa's flushed cheeks hardly qualified.
Luca turned to Emma. "What else did you see?"
The coffee had begun to burn on the warming plate. Emma could smell it. "A folder," she said. "On the kitchen printer last Thursday. It had Mrs. Moretti's name and the words cognitive incapacity across the top."
Rosa's fingers went still on Sophie's shoulder. "I never signed anything like that."
"It wasn't signed," Emma said. "Not when I saw it."
Vanessa rose. "This conversation is over. I will not be accused by a girl who dusts shelves."
Luca's voice remained quiet. "Sit down."
For a moment no one breathed. Vanessa sat, smoothing the skirt of her red satin dress beneath the table as though she were arriving at a party rather than being detained at one.
"I want the folder," Luca said.
"What folder?"
"The one you had printed."
"I'm trying to keep your mother safe. A doctor recommended a capacity assessment."
"Which doctor?"
Vanessa's eyes shifted to Rosa, then to Sophie. Emma caught it: the look of someone calculating what her audience had heard.
Rosa spoke before Luca could repeat the question. "The doctor who came here on Friday said he was visiting about my arthritis. He asked me to draw a clock." She gave a small, incredulous laugh. "I told him I hadn't drawn a clock since grammar school."
Sophie pulled away just far enough to look at her father. "Vanessa said Grandma might have to go to a home. She said I shouldn't upset her."
Luca stood so abruptly that his chair scraped across the floor. Emma expected anger, a slammed fist, perhaps one of those clipped commands to the men who waited outside. He only said, "Soph, take your grandmother upstairs. I'll be there in a minute."
The girl hesitated. "You won't make her go?"
"No," he said. "Not because somebody tells me she's inconvenient."
When they had left, the dining room felt twice its size. Vanessa reached for her purse. Luca covered it with his hand, not touching her fingers. "Leave it," he said. "We have a conversation to finish."
Emma thought she was dismissed. She reached for the coffee pot again, needing one ordinary thing to do. From the doorway Rosa called her name. The older woman's voice had changed; it sounded like the woman who had once run kitchens.
"Emma. That folder you saw. Was there a second page with an address?"
"Yes, ma'am. Something on Waverly Street."
Rosa closed her eyes. Luca looked startled. Vanessa went so white that the candlelight seemed to pass through her.
"Mama," Luca asked, "what's on Waverly Street?"
May you like
Rosa looked straight at his fiancée. "The one thing your father left me that nobody was ever supposed to sell."
And in the silence that followed, Emma understood the deleted calls had never been the whole crime.
