🥀 THE WOMAN AT THE ENGAGEMENT

Chapter 04 - A Name That Should Be Dead

Emma took the note directly to Luca. She found him in the study with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, staring at a map of Chicago that had been pinned to the wall since his father’s time. He had not changed out of his dinner clothes. The candle beside his desk had burned down to a crooked puddle of wax.

When he read the note, he did not swear or raise his voice. He simply placed it on the desk and asked Emma to close the door.

“Where did you find it?”

“Under Miss Bellini’s glass. I was clearing the table.”

“Did anyone see you take it?”

“I don’t think so.”

He studied her face. “You’ve risked a great deal tonight.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

Emma thought of her mother, who had worked as a cleaner in a hotel until arthritis made it impossible to stand for long hours. She thought of how people with money often assumed that a woman in an apron had no loyalties beyond her next paycheck. “Because Rosa was frightened, and no one else was willing to listen.”

Luca nodded once, as if he understood more than she had said. “From now on, you will not be alone in a corridor with Vanessa. If she speaks to you, you come to me or Marco.”

“That will make her suspicious.”

“She is already suspicious.”

He called Marco and ordered a quiet background check on every person connected to Bellini Holdings, including the supposedly deceased Marco Bellini. By midnight, the first results arrived: the company had been dissolved after the owner’s death, but its accounts had continued moving money through a private trust. The trust was administered by a lawyer who had once represented Luca’s father.

“Someone has been maintaining the machinery,” Marco said.

“Find out who.”

While Marco worked, Luca returned to the letter. The phrase “where your mother used to keep her roses” brought back a memory of his childhood: his mother, Elena, kneeling in the garden at the lake house, teaching him to prune rose stems. She had kept a small iron cabinet beneath the greenhouse bench, where she stored gloves, labels, and old garden plans. If Daniel had hidden a ledger there, it might still be waiting.

The lake house had been sold to Bellini Holdings twenty years earlier. The property was now listed under a different name, but the title records showed that it had never been occupied by a normal family. The house had been renovated, then left empty. A caretaker visited twice a month.

Luca wanted to leave immediately. Marco insisted they wait until dawn and take two cars. Emma, who had been listening from the doorway, asked to come.

“No,” Luca said.

“You’ll need someone who knows what Vanessa looks like when she’s lying.”

He stared at her.

Emma flushed but held his gaze. “She knows you’ll bring security. She won’t expect me.”

“You are a maid, not an investigator.”

“I’m the person she thinks no one will notice.”

For a moment, he looked as if he might dismiss her. Then he glanced at the note again. The maid must take the blame. He understood the trap better now: whoever had written it already saw Emma as a useful scapegoat.

“You stay behind me,” he said. “You touch nothing without gloves. If I tell you to leave, you leave.”

The drive to the lake house took forty minutes. The sky was just beginning to lighten when they reached the property. The building stood above the water with its shutters closed and its gardens overgrown. Roses had spread wild across the old stone beds, their branches tangled and heavy with thorns. Emma could imagine a younger Luca running through them, still young enough to believe that every adult in his life meant well.

The greenhouse door was locked. Marco opened it with a tool from his kit. Inside, dust lay over empty pots and rusted shelves. Luca knelt beside the iron cabinet beneath the workbench. The brass key from Rosa’s envelope fitted the lock.

Inside was a ledger wrapped in oilcloth, a stack of letters, and a small cassette recorder. Luca lifted the ledger carefully. Its pages contained dates, company names, account numbers, and payments to people who appeared in no official records. Some entries were marked with a red line. Others had initials beside them: I.M., M.B., D.M.

“Isabella Moretti. Marco Bellini. Daniel Moretti,” Emma said.

“And someone else,” Luca replied. The initials E.M. appeared beside a payment dated two days after his father disappeared.

“Your mother?” Emma asked.

He did not answer.

The cassette recorder held a tape labeled simply: For Luca, when he is ready. Luca pressed play. A burst of static filled the greenhouse, followed by his father’s voice—older, tired, unmistakable.

“If you are hearing this, then I have failed to return. Isabella believes the ledger is the only thing that can ruin her. She is wrong. The ledger can ruin all of us. I signed papers I should never have signed. I let people use the company for things I did not want to understand. But the night I disappeared, I discovered something worse. Someone in this family arranged the transfer of the lake house before I was supposed to die.”

The tape clicked. A second voice entered, a woman’s voice, calm and clear.

“You promised me Luca would never find out.”

Luca froze. He knew that voice. He had heard it in his childhood, in the kitchen, in the garden, in the quiet moments before his mother went upstairs.

His mother, Elena.

The tape continued, but a sharp crack interrupted the recording. Then Daniel said, “You don’t understand what you’ve done.”

The woman answered, “I understand exactly.”

The tape ended.

Luca stared at the recorder as if it had become a living thing. Emma had never seen him look so young.

From outside came the sound of a car door closing.

Marco moved to the window and drew back the curtain by a fraction. “We have company.”

A black sedan sat at the end of the drive. A woman stepped out wearing a pale coat. Even at a distance, Emma recognized the posture.