The Photographs of Grace
Chapter 02 - The Photographs of Grace
When Olivia returned from urgent care at eleven, the mansion was lit like a ship refusing to admit it had hit something. The doctor had documented bruising and swelling around her left eye, advised rest, and asked whether she felt safe at home. Olivia said she lived alone, which was an answer but not quite the one she'd been asked for.
The driver had waited while she filled the prescription. He was an older man called Peter, who spoke once on the way back. “Mr. Moretti told the housekeeper you're off with pay until Monday.”
“Monday is four days away.”
“I know.”
“He can't just decide things for me.”
Peter considered this. “You're right.”
She liked him better for saying it.
Upstairs, the engagement photographs still lined the gallery. Vanessa had selected images from the party where Luca had proposed: the two of them smiling on a terrace, champagne behind them, a city arranged at their feet like something they owned. Olivia had dusted those frames for months. After tonight she noticed that Vanessa looked into the camera in every picture while Luca often looked past it.
Her phone rang. A number she didn't know.
“Miss Hayes?” a woman asked. “This is Grace Calder. I believe someone took photographs of me at St. Agnes House.”
Olivia sat on the narrow bed. “How did you get my number?”
“Mrs. Bell gave it to me. She said a young woman had helped her with her medication after the clinic canceled her transport. That was you?”
“Yes.”
“Is she all right?”
“As far as I know.”
A pause. “I am sorry about your face.”
It was not the apology Olivia expected. “You know?”
“Someone called me from the Moretti house. He told me a server had been hurt because of photographs taken of my work.”
“Who called?”
“Luca.”
Grace did not sound like a woman pleased to have received a former husband's attention. Her voice was practical and tired, with the briskness of someone who had spent her day helping strangers navigate offices.
“Why were they photographing those women?” Olivia asked.
“That's what I want to find out. St. Agnes belongs to Frances Moretti's memorial trust. I've been working with its residents to stop an unexplained transfer of ownership. We were told the board had approved a sale. Nobody showed us minutes.”
“Luca approved it?”
“I don't know what Luca knows. That is part of the problem.”
Olivia heard the small rattle of a kettle on the other end. Grace said she would call again in daylight. Before hanging up, she asked Olivia to write down exactly what she remembered, without trying to make it sound more certain than it was. “Memory matters,” she said. “And uncertainty belongs in the record too.”
Across the hall, Luca sat in his mother's former sitting room, wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had kept a photograph of Frances on the mantel: short, sturdy, her gray hair clipped at the back, smiling with a hand on the shoulder of a stranger. He remembered the woman as angry at injustice and impatient with excuses. His father had called her sentimental. She'd called that an expensive word for ordinary decency.
Luca's lawyer, Aldo Rinaldi, arrived at midnight smelling of cold air and cigarette smoke he insisted he no longer indulged in.
“St. Agnes?” Aldo said when Luca showed him the strip. “That facility? Frances left it to a charitable trust.”
“Who can sell it?”
“The board, with approval from both special trustees.”
“Which are?”
“You and Grace Calder.”
Luca had once thought the arrangement a last small insult from his mother, who'd adored his former wife. Tonight it sounded more like foresight.
“Did I approve a sale?”
Aldo put on his glasses. “You signed a redevelopment authorization in May.”
“I signed a roof repair authorization.”
“You signed a packet containing several resolutions.”
“Did it contain a vote to evict twenty-seven women?”
“You're using loaded language.”
“And you're avoiding a yes or no.”
Aldo shut the folder he'd brought without opening it. Luca noticed.
By morning, Grace was waiting for Luca outside St. Agnes House, a plain four-story brick building between a pharmacy and a laundromat. She wore a raincoat and sensible shoes. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, dark threaded with silver near the temples. She had a canvas bag full of folders and no inclination to make their reunion easy.
“You called Olivia,” Luca said.
“Because a woman was injured in your house. I wanted to know whether she was safe.”
“She is.”
“Good. Then we can discuss why strangers are taking photographs of women in their seventies.”
He nearly smiled. Grace hadn't changed the order in which she ranked human problems.
Inside, Mrs. Bell was making tea in the communal kitchen. She was eighty-one, and complained that management had removed the garden chairs before they'd been able to bring the plants in from the cold. A second resident, Mrs. Alvarez, said someone had surveyed the basement at dawn without asking anyone's permission.
“Men with measuring wheels,” she said. “They didn't come to fix the elevator. They counted doors.”
Luca asked Grace why she hadn't called him sooner.
“I did,” she said. “In June, July and September. Your office said you knew everything.”
“My office?”
“Your office, Luca. We can't build a life around guessing whether you're available.”
He had no reply. That too was familiar.
In Mrs. Bell's apartment, Grace spread copies of the transfer documents across a floral tablecloth. The developer was Bellini Urban Renewal, a company belonging to Vanessa's father. The price was low. The timetable was brutal. Under the signature marked Grace Calder, the letters had the slope of her handwriting but not its rhythm.
“That isn't mine,” Grace said.
Luca studied the page. “And mine?”
“Yours is real.”
He remembered May: a lunch with Aldo, a family settlement, three phone calls he took standing at the window. He had signed pages without reading them because he believed a man employing hundreds shouldn't be detained by details. Now twenty-seven lives stood inside those details.
Mrs. Bell returned with a chipped plate of biscuits. “You're Frances's boy,” she told Luca, looking him straight in the eye. “She always made us sit down before she discussed business.”
He sat.
After a moment the woman added, “She said one day somebody rich would decide we're easier to move than to look at. She said we should ask for you by name.”
Luca was ashamed to realize the woman had been waiting years for a promise he'd never heard.
Grace's phone rang. Her expression sharpened as she listened. She thanked the caller and put it down.
“That was the registrar,” she said. “The transfer will be recorded tomorrow morning unless we obtain an injunction.”
“Tomorrow?”
Grace nodded. “And Aldo filed the paperwork yesterday, using a notarized declaration that I personally consented.”
May you like
She slid another page toward him. Luca recognized the notary's name immediately.
It was the name of the woman who had witnessed their divorce.
