What a Mother Keeps
Chapter 03 - What a Mother Keeps
Celeste Moretti had been a widow for twenty-one years. In that time she had learned that grief did not improve people. It merely revealed their habits. Her own was to take charge of whatever remained.
On the morning after the canceled wedding, she sat at her dressing table removing the diamond earrings. She had worn them on the day her husband was buried, because he had liked them and because nobody would dare accuse her of disrespect. Now their weight made her ears ache. She put them in their velvet box and thought about the sight of Nora's wedding dress, laid out like a body waiting to be identified.
Dominic entered without knocking. His tie was gone, his sleeves rolled above the tattoos on his wrists. He looked as he had at seventeen, on the night he learned his father had lied about the money in the family business: less angry than wounded by the fact of the lie.
"Tell me why you let Vivienne in," he said.
"I told you. She had information."
"Then why send her through the private elevator after midnight?"
Celeste closed the jewelry box. "Because I knew you would refuse to see her if Nora were awake."
"So you made a decision about my home without asking me."
"Your home? Dominic, the apartment is held in a family trust."
"You know what I mean."
She did. She had known all along. But confessing to one betrayal often invited questions about the others, and she had spent too many years learning to live with them.
Vivienne Bellini had been twenty-three when Dominic broke their engagement. Her family and the Morettis had done business together for decades. Their marriage was meant to bind the companies and settle an old hostility. Dominic had loved her, or believed he had, until he began to understand what such an arrangement demanded. When his older brother Adrian died in the Harbor Point pier fire, Dominic broke with half the men who had called themselves family. Vivienne went away soon after.
Then, seventeen years later, she returned with a photograph of a dark-haired teenage girl and an unsigned claim for support. She said Rose deserved to know who her father was. Celeste had felt something turn cold in her stomach. She knew the child existed. She knew more about Rose than Dominic did.
"Is she mine?" Dominic asked now.
Celeste kept her gaze on the mirror. "There hasn't been a test."
"That wasn't my question."
"I never saw a birth certificate."
He moved closer. "You have paid Vivienne for fifteen years. I saw the transfers. Were you protecting Rose, or were you paying Vivienne to stay away?"
"Both, at first."
He let the words settle. "You knew there was a child. And you let me propose to Nora without telling me."
"I thought it would never concern you."
"People aren't invoices, Mother. They don't disappear because you've settled an account."
For a moment she wanted to slap him, not because he was wrong but because he sounded like Nora. She had liked Nora. That was the worst part. Nora had listened when Celeste spoke, had brought her soup after cataract surgery, had mended the lace on a tablecloth without announcing the favor. But affection was not the same as permission to enter the heart of a family that had survived by keeping its doors closed.
Once, during a snowstorm, Nora had stayed the night in Celeste's guestroom. In the morning she made scrambled eggs and asked why the kitchen clock had stopped. Celeste said it had stopped the day her husband died and she hadn't had the heart to repair it. Two weeks later Nora returned with the clock ticking quietly in a cardboard box. She never mentioned the favor again. Celeste had thanked her, then carried the clock to a back room. She could not bear the cheerful sound, or the thought that a stranger to the family had understood how to mend something she had chosen to keep broken.
Dominic placed the visitor slip on the dressing table. "You told Nora you didn't know where Vivienne was that night."
"I was trying to prevent a scandal."
"And you caused one."
His phone lit up with a message from Lydia Chen, the attorney who represented Nora's studio. She had sent a notice demanding access to the rented premises and an explanation for an attempted lockout. The signatory on the property's papers was Rafe Moretti.
Dominic swore quietly. The name changed everything. His uncle had run the company's real estate division for twenty-six years. Dominic had been trying to remove him since a series of suspicious transactions appeared on an internal audit. Rafe always had an explanation that sounded reasonable until someone asked for documents.
"Did you tell him to buy Nora's building?" Dominic asked.
Celeste frowned. "What building?"
He turned the screen toward her. She read the message twice. Her face, which had remained composed throughout the morning, lost its color.
"He promised he would leave her business alone," she said.
"Promised in exchange for what?"
Celeste stood too quickly and gripped the edge of the dressing table. Her knee had troubled her for years; she would rather fall than mention it. Dominic moved toward her, then stopped at the look in her eyes.
"Adrian left something," she said. "Before he died. I thought I could keep it buried until Rafe retired."
"What did Adrian leave?"
"Records. About the pier. About the inspections." She swallowed. "Rafe believes Nora has them."
Dominic thought of Nora's father, Elias Mercer, a carpenter who had worked on historic waterfront buildings. Elias had been blamed for falsifying a safety report after the pier fire. His name had never quite recovered. Nora rarely discussed it, except to say that people preferred a dead man's signature to an uncomfortable question.
"Why would Nora have Adrian's records?" he asked.
"Because Elias kept a duplicate of the repair drawings. Adrian gave them to him three days before the fire."
"You knew her father?"
Celeste looked away.
In the hall, someone knocked. The house manager opened the door a fraction and announced that a young girl was waiting downstairs. She said her name was Rose Bellini. She had arrived alone and refused to leave a message.
Dominic started toward the hall, but Celeste caught his sleeve.
May you like
"Before you speak to her," she whispered, "there is something you must understand. Whatever Vivienne told you, Rose is not the daughter of the man you think she is."
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Dominic heard his mother tell him a truth too late to save anyone from its consequences.
