🎀 THE MAFIA BOSS WORE PINK—THEN SHE SAW THE BAD MAN

Chapter 03 - A Photograph Behind the Frame

At one in the morning Dominic telephoned his mother.

Rosa Russo answered on the third ring. At sixty-eight she had a way of sounding completely awake even when she was not, a habit learned from raising sons who rarely came home at reasonable hours.

“Is anyone hurt?” she asked.

“No. But I need you to tell me if you knew Matteo had a child.”

Silence. He could hear an old wall clock ticking at her end of the line.

“Where is Emma?” Rosa said at last.

Dominic sat down. The leather chair creaked beneath him. His mother knew the woman's first name. She hadn't asked who Emma was, or how Dominic had met her. She knew.

“In my house. With her daughter.”

“Are they safe?”

“For tonight.”

Rosa exhaled. “Then I'll be there in the morning.”

“Mother—”

“Don't punish her because I was afraid.”

The call ended.

Dominic remained still a long time. He remembered the last argument he had had with Matteo. They had stood in a warehouse office beside the river, surrounded by dusty filing cabinets. Matteo had accused their godfather Vincent of stealing from the Harbor House trust. Dominic had accused him of letting a difficult financial audit turn into a personal obsession. Matteo, thirty-two and flushed with anger, had said, “One day you'll discover how much it costs other people when you refuse to look.”

Two weeks later the warehouse burned. Matteo had been identified among the dead. The official account blamed faulty wiring, and a separate internal report implicated him in missing funds. Dominic had buried him without forgiving him.

At breakfast, Rosa arrived in a plain camel coat with her own key. Sophie, who had already eaten three pancakes, recognized Rosa from their occasional visits to Emma's apartment and ran into her arms.

“Nonna Rosa!”

The word struck Dominic harder than anything Emma had told him. His mother held Sophie with a familiarity that could not have been invented overnight. She knew exactly how to settle the child's curls beneath her hand and what to whisper when Sophie became shy.

Emma hovered behind them, her exhaustion visible in the skin beneath her eyes. Rosa touched her cheek and said, “You should have called sooner.”

“I was trying not to make things worse.”

Rosa's expression folded. “That's what I kept saying.”

Dominic waited until Sophie was in the breakfast room helping the cook cut strawberries. Then he took the women into the library and shut the door.

“How long?” he asked.

Rosa sat with care, smoothing her coat across her knees. “Since before Sophie was born.”

“You watched me mourn Matteo. You listened to me call him a thief. You said nothing.”

“I watched you bury him, Dominic. I watched you stop sleeping. There is a difference between what a mother ought to do and what she can bear to do.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“No,” she said. “It isn't.”

Emma had been holding a brown paper envelope. She placed it on the desk between them. Inside lay a photograph of Matteo on a park bench, smiling toward the camera, his hand spread protectively over Emma's pregnant belly. The date on the back was written in blue ink: September 14, 2020. Four days before the fire.

Dominic studied the image. Matteo looked older than Dominic remembered, and more content. Sophie had Matteo's stubborn chin, the same small crescent between her eyebrows when she concentrated. He wondered how many times the girl had passed him in the hallway while he looked only at her ribbons and shoes, never once seeing his own family. If Emma had come to him six years earlier, would he have recognized that chin on a newborn? Or would his anger have taught him to turn away then, too? He had never seen his brother look at anyone quite that way. The discovery hurt differently from anger: it introduced a whole life he had not bothered to ask about.

“He wanted to tell you,” Emma said. “I asked him to wait. We had only just found out about the baby. He said there were things happening at Harbor House that could put us in danger.”

“Why not come to me afterward?”

“I did.”

Dominic raised his eyes.

“I came to your office the week after the funeral. Your receptionist told me you wouldn't see anyone who claimed to know Matteo. I left a letter.”

“I never received it.”

“I wrote three more.”

Rosa closed her eyes. “I intercepted the last two.”

Emma's face grew still. She remembered mailing the letters, taking the baby stroller through rain and icy wind to the blue postal box outside the pharmacy. She had stood there each time convincing herself that this would be the message the family answered. When no reply came, she had finally decided that silence was the Russo family's way of telling her she did not belong.

“Did you read them?” Emma asked.

“All of them,” Rosa said. “I kept the photographs. I told myself I was protecting you. But I was deciding for you, and you never gave me the right.”

Dominic turned toward her. She didn't flinch.

“Vincent told me the allegations could hurt the baby. He said if Sophie's existence became public, people who wanted Matteo's records would come for her. I believed him. I gave Emma money, and I helped her move.”

“Vincent knew about Sophie?”

Rosa rubbed her thumb along the seam of her coat. “He knew about a pregnant woman. I never gave him the child's name.”

Emma looked unconvinced. “He found us anyway.”

Dominic stood at the window. Beyond the garden, delivery trucks moved in the ordinary morning traffic. People were buying coffee, waiting for buses, getting their children to school. His world had shrunk to a photograph and four missing letters.

“The box,” he said. “What is in it?”

“Matteo gave me a small wooden box the day before the fire. It held a few old papers, a key, and his grandfather's watch. I hid it after the first visit from the Sunday man.”

“Where?”

“I moved it. Someone found the first hiding place.”

She took a breath. “I don't have all of it anymore.”

Rosa reached into her handbag. From a battered silver frame she removed a photograph of the Russo brothers as children. She turned it over and pried away the cardboard backing. A folded note fell onto the desk.

“Matteo gave me this the last time I saw him,” she said. “He told me not to read it unless something happened.”

“Did you?” Dominic asked.

“Yes. And then I did exactly what he begged me not to do.”

The note was short, written in Matteo's hurried block letters. Dominic recognized the shape of each word. At the bottom, beneath a line about the Harbor House residents, was one sentence he read three times.

IF VINCENT SAYS I STOLE IT, ASK HIM WHY HE NEEDED YOUR SIGNATURE.

Dominic looked at his mother. “What signature?”