The Other Paper
Chapter 04 - The Other Paper
Evelyn Moretti met her son at the door with garden dirt beneath her fingernails. She had been pruning a rosebush in an old man's shirt, the sleeves rolled three times. Her hair was silver now. Luca remembered her dyeing it dark before parties his father insisted they attend, and wondered when she had decided she was finished pretending.
"You should have called before coming," she said, though she had told him to come.
"You sounded frightened."
"I was. I'm not now."
She poured coffee into mismatched cups. On the kitchen wall hung a calendar with the birthdays of people Luca didn't recognize. There were no photographs of him in a suit, no awards, no newspaper cuttings about Moretti Holdings. Only a snapshot of him at eleven, missing a front tooth, holding an enormous fish.
"What did you sign?" he asked.
"A letter. Dorian brought it to me after your father died. It said the family trust was being reorganized, and that certain charitable accounts might need temporary protection. I was executor. I signed a consent to review the accounts. I never signed the termination of a ninety-year lease."
"Why didn't you challenge it?"
"I did."
She pulled a binder from the sideboard. Its tab read 2015, in the same brisk handwriting that used to label Luca's lunch boxes. There were certified letters to Dorian, to the county recorder, to a private investigator, and to Luca himself.
His letter was returned unopened.
"I never got this," he said.
"I know. Dorian told me you didn't want to hear from me until the estate was settled. Later you told me I was taking advantage of your grief."
He remembered that conversation. He had been drunk, furious, and tired of hearing people criticize the only lawyer who seemed able to hold the business together. He had told his mother to let the past rest. She had obeyed him more completely than he deserved.
"You should have tried again."
She gave him a tired look. "Mothers have to stop knocking at some point, Luca. Otherwise we're only teaching our children that our dignity doesn't count."
He turned another page. There was a copy of the consent she had signed and a copy of the recorded release. Her signature appeared on both. In the recorded release, however, the lower half of the page had different spacing, and the signature sat at a peculiar angle to the text.
"They put my signature on a new page," Evelyn said. "I thought a judge would see it immediately. Instead everyone asked why I hadn't made a fuss sooner."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I was looking after your grandmother while she was dying. Because I couldn't prove where the original page had gone. Because you needed me to be the quiet mother in the background. Choose one. They're all true."
She opened a cupboard, took out a blue envelope, and handed him a photograph from Angelo's last summer. It showed him alone at Caruso's, standing before table six. He looked older than Luca remembered him, his cheekbones too sharp, his hand gripping the chair back.
"He had already made arrangements," she said. "I didn't understand them then. But he was trying to put certain things where Dorian couldn't touch them."
"What things?"
"The restaurant. The wage fund. A few properties bought in the neighborhood. He wanted them held for people who had made the money, not simply for people who inherited it."
Luca felt the familiar impulse to defend his father, then found he didn't know against what. Angelo had been generous and frightening. He had paid hospital bills without being asked, then demanded loyalty as though gratitude were a debt. Luca could no longer divide him neatly into the good man at Sunday lunch and the feared man in the newspapers.
"I didn't know him," Luca said.
"Neither did I, entirely. Forty years of marriage and there were rooms he wouldn't open. But some of the doors mattered."
That evening Luca telephoned Emma and asked if she would meet him at a public coffee shop, not at his house. He told her that her mother had been right about the suspicious records. Then he said something he'd never said to an employee before.
"If you want to resign, I'll provide a written reference. No questions about why you took the position."
Emma sat across from him with her hands wrapped around hot tea. "I am resigning. And I don't want a reference from a man whose house I entered under false pretenses."
"Fair."
"But I want to help fix this. Not because of you."
"I understand."
"You don't yet." She considered him a moment. "I'm not the girl behind your chair anymore. Speak to me as someone who can decide things."
He nodded. It was a small correction and a significant one.
They compared the dates Teresa had recorded with the pages from Evelyn's binder. Emma noticed that an allegedly notarized form bore a witness date of April 9, 2015, while the county's acceptance date was April 16. Nothing unusual there, except that Teresa had a hospital bracelet from April 9.
"She was admitted for an emergency operation," Emma said. "Her appendix burst. She couldn't leave the hospital for eight days."
"Why does that matter?"
Emma turned the page toward him. "They've listed her as the witness who personally appeared with Gianni and your mother."
Luca read the line twice. Teresa Reed, present and sworn.
"The notary says she watched them sign," he said.
"Mom could barely stand that day. I was fifteen. I remember washing her hair over a basin because the nurses wouldn't let her out of bed."
At home, Luca made copies of the hospital records and photographed the full file, not only the pages that favored him. He had learned one hard lesson from Dorian's polished summaries: a missing page could do more harm than an ugly fact.
His phone rang just after midnight. Vanessa. He almost let it go to voicemail.
"My mother says you're pulling title histories," she began.
"I am."
"Then stop treating me as if I wrote a forgery with my own hands."
"Did you know Dorian used a hospitalized woman as a witness?"
A pause. "What woman?"
"Teresa Reed."
He heard Vanessa exhale. "You are digging into something much older than our engagement, Luca. If you make this public, it won't be my family alone that suffers."
"What does that mean?"
"Ask your mother why she signed the first consent. Ask what she was protecting."
May you like
Vanessa hung up. Luca went back to the binder. On the final page, beneath a photograph he had overlooked, Evelyn had written a note: FRIDAY, THE EIGHTH — DO NOT LET HIM GO ALONE.
He looked at the date above it and realized she wasn't referring to the year of the forgery. She was referring to a Friday in the final month of his father’s life.
