What a Mother Can Admit
Chapter 08 - What a Mother Can Admit
Hannah was thinner than I remembered, but I noticed her hands first. There was a small burn on one wrist and a cracked fingernail on the other. My daughter had always bitten at her nails when she was worried. She'd stopped at seventeen, proud of herself, and apparently begun again.
She stood beneath the service light as though she hadn't decided whether she was allowed to come inside.
“I'm glad you're alive,” I said.
“That's a start.”
I did hug her then, because she was standing within reach and I was not willing to make another sensible decision about when a mother should hold her child. She remained stiff for a moment. Then her forehead rested against my shoulder.
“I'm so angry with you,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Not just about the trust.”
“I know that too.”
She pulled away and asked for water. I filled a glass at the sink. Her fingers shook so badly that I steadied it without comment.
Hannah told me she'd gone to work for a housing nonprofit four years earlier. A woman there asked her to investigate a pattern of strange maintenance charges and sudden liens on homes along Saint Agnes Row. Hannah recognized the Romano name and tried to get information from the trust. At first she thought the bookkeeping was sloppy. Then she found the payments to Briar Holdings.
She went to Anthony for help. He offered her a job reviewing the accounts, then gave her limited access to the files. She discovered fake resident votes, vanished repair funds, and invoices submitted by contractors who no longer existed.
“Why did you leave me?” I asked.
“Because when I showed you the first file, you told me not to embarrass the family.”
“I was scared you'd lose your job.”
“I wasn't working for them. I was trying to stop them.”
I had no answer.
She took a folded document from her coat pocket. It was the packet I had signed years earlier. She'd found it in Anthony's discarded files. A sheet had been attached at the back, authorizing amendments to the trust's voting rules. My genuine signature was there, but the page above it referred to a different matter.
“They switched the pages,” she said. “You signed for a winter heating program. Then they made it look as though you'd approved reducing the residents' voting rights.”
I stared at the staple marks. Two holes had been made in one corner, four in the other. Even I could see the pages hadn't spent their lives together.
“That's what you meant when you said I signed something.”
“Yes. I need the original so Rebecca can have it examined. But I also need you to admit you trusted him for a long time.”
“I did.”
She studied me. Perhaps she was waiting for an excuse. I didn't offer one.
“My whole life, I thought if I made myself useful enough in that house, nobody could hurt us,” I told her. “When you began asking questions, it sounded to me like you were putting everything at risk. I was wrong. I chose keeping my position over listening to you.”
She blinked rapidly and looked away. “I needed you to say that years ago.”
“I should have.”
Hannah told me about the night Mia had a fever in their tiny apartment. The doctor had said it was a routine virus, but the thermometer kept climbing, and Hannah had sat awake holding her daughter until dawn. She'd looked up my number twice, then put the phone down because she couldn't face explaining where she'd been.
“I would have come,” I said.
“I know that now. I didn't know it then.”
It was more difficult to hear than a direct accusation. There was no one else to blame for the uncertainty between us, only all the times we'd turned away instead of asking the next question.
For a while we sat in the quiet kitchen. Rosa's laundry turned slowly in the dryer. Outside, the lawn sprinklers clicked, though it had rained enough that week to drown the roses. Somebody had forgotten to change the timer.
Hannah asked whether Mia was safe. I told her about the pancakes and the rabbit and the way Mia had tried to feed a crust of toast to the old kitchen clock. My daughter covered her mouth with one hand and laughed, the sound breaking into tears at the end.
“She's not frightened of Damian?”
“She's frightened of Anthony. Damian makes a reasonable jungle gym.”
Hannah wiped her cheeks. “I told her the tall man in the garden was family. I didn't know whether he'd remember how to be.”
“He's trying,” I said.
We told Damian the truth in the small library, where his mother used to read murder mysteries with her shoes off. Hannah stood beside the fireplace. He stayed near the door, neither approaching nor retreating.
“My father was your father,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Did you know about me?”
“Of course. I saw your school photographs in the paper. Mom worked here.”
He shook his head. “I didn't know about you.”
“I know that too.”
There was more sorrow than blame in her voice. Damian looked as though he'd prepared for anger and found himself with nothing useful to do.
Hannah explained that she'd found Vittorio in Maine after noticing repeated payments to a clock-repair shop. She confronted him at his apartment. He told her about the fake funeral and offered money. She refused it, then returned a month later because she wanted answers about the trust.
“He was sick,” she said. “I kept telling myself if I could get him home, he'd tell everybody. He always had another reason he couldn't.”
Damian sat down. “Did he ever ask about me?”
“Yes. Every time.”
He looked at her with wounded astonishment. “Then why didn't he call?”
“Because asking was easier than doing something.”
It was the cruelest accurate sentence I'd heard all week.
A door banged upstairs. We all turned. Rosa came running down the stairs, breathless.
“June, don't panic. I moved Mia.”
“Moved her where?” Hannah demanded.
“Two men came to the servants' door saying they were child protection officers. They wouldn't show identification. I took her out through the old conservatory passage.”
Luca was already checking the gate cameras. The two men had left as soon as Rosa asked for badges. One drove a white SUV registered to a rental company linked to Briar Holdings.
“Where is Mia now?” I asked.
Rosa's expression softened. “With a woman who knows what it means to have someone taken away and never brought home.”
May you like
She opened her purse and laid a photograph on the table. It showed a younger Rosa beside another woman at a backyard birthday party. Between them stood a smiling man in a blue work shirt.
“John Weaver,” Rosa said. “His wife has been waiting eighteen years for somebody to tell her where he went.”
