His Name on the Page
Chapter 03 - His Name on the Page
Nicholas Moretti had spent twenty-two years making himself useful. He remembered birthdays, paid hospital bills without being asked, knew which businesses belonged to whose sons and which promises should never be made in writing. Luca had trusted him with the family office because Nicholas was the sort of man who smiled at waiters and never lost his temper. In Luca's world, that counted as evidence of character.
“I hear dinner went badly,” Nicholas said.
“Dinner was fine,” Luca replied. “Everything before it wasn't.”
He took Nicholas into the small library, where his attorney, Miriam Shaw, waited with a stack of files. Miriam had represented Luca's legitimate holdings for seven years. She was fifty-eight, with salt-white hair cut bluntly at her jaw, and she had once told him that men who claimed never to be surprised were either liars or poorly informed. He was discovering how right she had been.
On the table lay an amendment to the Catherine Bennett Moretti Memorial Fund. It dated from nine days before Catherine's death. The amendment allowed funds reserved for scholarships and emergency housing to be transferred temporarily into “operational partnerships” under the family office. Luca's signature appeared on page seven.
“Did I sign this?” he asked.
“You did,” Nicholas said. “It was part of the annual restructuring. I walked you through it.”
“Where?”
“In your office.”
“I remember signing a package before a flight to Seattle. You said the contractors needed authorization for repairs at St. Anne's.”
“That's what this was.” Nicholas spread his hands. “You're acting as if we moved money into a casino. We were keeping a community building open.”
Miriam pushed a second document across the desk. “The contractors you paid were incorporated six weeks earlier. Two had the same mailing address. One was dissolved the month after Catherine died.”
Nicholas looked toward her, his expression pleasantly disappointed. “And I'm sure your associate has a dramatic explanation.”
“I have bank records,” she said. “They tend to be duller and more persuasive.”
Luca could feel his anger gathering, but it had nowhere useful to go. If he had signed a paper he did not read, shouting would not erase his name from it. He remembered Catherine asking him about a deposit at the old kitchen table. He had been answering email, impatient because the flight was delayed. *Can you listen for five minutes?* she'd asked. He had kissed her forehead and said he would after the call. Then there had been another call.
“Catherine questioned these payments,” Miriam said. “There are annotations on a copy of the accounts made in her hand.”
Nicholas folded his arms. “Catherine had a tendency to see conspiracies in paperwork.”
Luca stood. “Don't speak about her that way.”
“I'm not being disrespectful. She was under tremendous pressure.”
“From whom?”
Nicholas looked genuinely hurt. “From life, Luca. From motherhood. From the fact that you were never home.”
Miriam's assistant had traced a payment of $280,000 to a management company called Pier Seven Services. The recipient had no employees and no visible contracts. Its registered agent was a lawyer named Martin Bellini—Vanessa's uncle.
Nicholas's coffee sat untouched. “Vanessa knew nothing about day-to-day finances then.”
“Nobody said she did,” Luca replied.
But Nicholas had said it before anyone asked.
After his cousin left, Luca tried to call Vanessa. She answered from a friend's apartment on the third ring. Her voice sounded tired, almost convincingly so. “Have you decided I'm a criminal because Nicholas forgot to staple something?”
“Martin Bellini formed a company that received money from Catherine's fund. Did you know?”
“No. Martin handles dozens of companies.”
“Did you know Eleanor was being turned away?”
“I've apologized for making a difficult judgment.”
“You haven't apologized to her.”
A pause. “If you invite her back into your life, you'll discover Catherine was more complicated than you remember.”
He looked at Catherine's photograph on the desk. “I hope so,” he said. “I didn't know her well enough when she was alive.”
He ended the call before Vanessa could choose which part of that confession to use against him.
That afternoon Emily found Grace behind the long drapes in the music room, cutting blue paper into ribbons. The child had been quiet since the dinner, and Emily had not wanted to pry. She sat on the floor several feet away and began folding laundry.
“Grandma used to say the moon was a torn postage stamp,” Grace said after a while.
“That's a strange thing to say.”
“Mommy made her say it when she missed Grandpa. They had jokes so they wouldn't be sad all the time.” Grace worked the scissors carefully. “Do you think Daddy's angry with me?”
“No. I think he's angry he wasn't listening.”
“That's different?”
“Very different.”
Grace put down the scissors. “Miss Vanessa said Grandma was confused and might take me away. She said if Daddy got upset, he could send me to a school where I wouldn't see him until Christmas.”
Emily stopped folding. “Did anyone ever tell your father that?”
Grace shook her head. “I tried once. He was on the phone.”
At dusk Luca joined them. He sat on the rug in a suit that cost more than Emily earned in six months, looking completely out of place beside the paper scraps. Grace handed him a crooked blue circle.
“What's this?”
“It's where Grandma sits,” she said.
He slipped it over his wrist. “Then I'll keep it.”
Grace studied him. “Will you come to the breakfast table tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“You can't say yes like you do when somebody wants money. You have to mean it.”
He looked at her with painful attention. “Eight o'clock. You and me. No phone.”
“Grandma too?”
“If she'll come.”
“She will,” Grace said. Her certainty made him ashamed all over again.
Later that night, Eleanor called from her house in Evanston. She had found Catherine's old pantry tin. She would not describe its contents over the phone, only asked Luca to come in the morning without Nicholas or Vanessa. “Bring Emily if you like. I trust the way she looks at Grace.”
Then her voice changed. “There is something else. I looked up the dates in Catherine's notebook.”
“Tell me.”
“The transfer from her fund wasn't completed before she died. The largest payment was made nine days afterward.”
Luca felt cold. “Using whose approval?”
May you like
“That's what I think you need to see.”
The next morning, before he left for Evanston, Miriam sent him one photograph from the bank's archived records. The posthumous authorization form bore Catherine's signature beneath a date when she had already been buried.
