273.💍 THE LAST SUNDAY TABLE

Chapter 03 - The Woman They Blamed

Teresa Reed lived on the third floor of a narrow brick building where the elevator had been out of order since July. Luca climbed the stairs carrying nothing but a paper bag of apricot pastries from Caruso's. Emma met him on the landing and eyed the bag.

"You thought dessert might improve the conversation?"

"Rosa said your mother used to take these home."

"Rosa remembers too much."

Emma opened the apartment door. The place was small and painfully neat: pressed curtains, books repaired with clear tape, a bowl of pears on the table. A sewing machine occupied the corner by the window. Luca noticed how carefully it had been positioned to catch daylight.

Teresa was sixty-one. She had Emma's brown eyes and the straight posture of someone who had spent years refusing to look defeated. A pale scar crossed one knuckle. She wore a cardigan with a missing button sewn back on in a different shade.

"Mr. Moretti," she said.

"Mrs. Reed."

"You've grown."

"I suppose I have."

She turned to Emma. "You didn't tell me you were bringing him here."

"You wouldn't have answered the door."

"That was my choice to make."

Emma flushed. Luca put the pastries on the table and stepped back, suddenly conscious that for thirteen years women in this apartment had been making arrangements around his family's silence.

"I owe you an apology," he said.

Teresa pulled out a chair but remained standing. "For which part?"

He had no answer good enough.

At last she sat and opened a tin that held buttons, old stamps, and an inhaler. Beneath them lay a copy of a letter dated October 2014, six weeks after Angelo Moretti's funeral.

"Dorian Vale told me the charity was being wound down," she said. "There was money missing from a wage fund, and I was the last bookkeeper who had reconciled it. He offered me twenty thousand dollars if I signed a statement saying I'd misunderstood the accounts."

"Did you?"

"I asked him to let an independent accountant read the books. The next day he said I had stolen from the fund."

Emma looked out the window. She had heard this story so many times that its words no longer startled her; the damage lay in what came afterward.

Teresa continued. "I lost my job. When I tried to apply for another, somebody had already warned them. My husband had just died. I had a fifteen-year-old daughter and a mortgage I couldn't manage. I took sewing work. I thought it would be for a few months."

Luca sat down because standing had begun to feel like another kind of authority.

"My father knew about the wage fund?"

"Your father set it up. Employees of several Moretti-owned businesses were supposed to receive money when they retired. Not a fortune. Enough to cover medicines and rent after forty years on their feet. He was rough with people, your father, but he had known what it was to be poor."

She handed him a bank statement. The fund had held just over three million dollars shortly before Angelo's death. Nine months later, nearly all of it had been transferred through an entity called Lakeshore Renewal Partners.

"Vanessa's mother's company," Luca said.

"Not then. It was a shell with a mailing address at a law office. Vale's office."

He looked at the date. 2015 again.

"I have to show this to investigators."

"You can show them copies. The originals stay with me."

It was not defiance. It was hard-earned competence, and Luca respected it more than the deference he usually received.

Emma went to make coffee. In the kitchen, a spoon clattered against the sink. Teresa closed the tin and studied him.

"Your father liked you," she said. "He didn't always know how to be your father. But he liked the way you listened before you spoke. You seem to have forgotten it for a while."

Luca accepted the rebuke. "I forgot a great deal."

"People who inherit power usually do. Someone else has to remember for them."

Before leaving, Luca noticed a row of carefully folded envelopes on the windowsill. Teresa said they were utility bills, sorted by the day they would be due. Emma had written the dates in large lettering so her mother could see them without her reading glasses.

"We were never destitute," Teresa said, following his gaze. "I want you to understand that. We paid what we owed. We simply had to think about each dollar before spending it. There is a difference between poverty and the shame people attach to it."

Luca did understand at least one part. His family had never thought about a dollar. They had thought about what a dollar could make someone else do. It was a distinction he had learned to hate.

He went back to Caruso's that afternoon. Rosa showed him the basement, where flour dust settled along the pipes and the freezer made a rattling noise that sounded like a cough. Six employees had been with the family for more than twenty years. Two had never worked anywhere else.

"They aren't numbers in an investment report," she said.

"I know that now."

"Knowing after a notice goes up is expensive."

She stopped beside a shelf of canned tomatoes and turned a photograph toward him. Angelo stood in the same kitchen, arm thrown around Gianni's shoulders. At the far edge of the picture was Luca's mother, Evelyn, with a younger Teresa.

Luca had not spoken properly to his mother in months. She lived in a modest house outside the city now, tended roses, and declined almost every invitation to his mansion. Whenever he asked why, she said she liked the quiet.

"My mother knew Teresa worked for us?"

"They were friends," Rosa said. "Closer than you'd think."

"Why did she never tell me?"

"I can't answer for Evelyn."

From a drawer beneath the counter, Rosa produced an old business card bearing the name of a title company no longer in operation. On its back, in Teresa's handwriting, was a reference number and the words CANCELLED RELEASE — NOT FILED.

"There's more," Rosa said. "Papa made me promise I wouldn't give you everything at once. He thinks secrets are like medicine. Too much at once, and a person can't keep it down."

"You don't agree?"

"I've watched what small doses did to this family."

She told him that a second release had been filed after the first was rejected. Unlike the earlier document, it carried two signatures: Gianni's and Evelyn Moretti's. Gianni insisted he had signed nothing. Evelyn had never mentioned it.

Luca called his mother from the sidewalk. She answered on the fifth ring.

"Luca? Are you all right?"

"I'm standing outside Caruso's."

A silence followed, long enough for him to hear the ticking pedestrian signal across the street.

"Then you know," she said.

"I know someone used your signature to end their lease."

"Come here, darling. Come before you ask anyone else."

"Was it forged?"