The Question Nobody Could Answer
Chapter 01 - The Question Nobody Could Answer
The first thing Rachel noticed was that Bianca had chosen the good microphone.
There were two on the little brass stand beside the orchestra: one that crackled, and one that carried a whisper all the way to the back of the ballroom. Bianca Moretti had tested both before dinner. Now she stood in her red satin dress beneath a chandelier the size of a fishing boat, holding the better one as though she had been born with it in her hand.
“Michael has been dead for eighteen months,” she said pleasantly. “Maybe it's time you stopped calling yourself Mrs. Moretti.”
Someone set down a champagne glass too hard. The tiny sound reached Rachel through the music, which had stopped in the middle of a waltz. Fifty-two guests were seated beneath the white roses, and not one of them looked surprised enough to intervene.
Rachel had come because Luca had asked her to bring Ethan. Her brother-in-law was getting engaged to Sofia Rinaldi, a woman who had once sent Ethan a wooden train after his father died. Rachel had thought there might be room at a family celebration for a widow and her ten-year-old son. She understood now that an invitation could also be a trap.
Ethan's fingers tightened around hers. His navy suit was new, the cuffs still stiff from the tailor. He had spent all afternoon practicing how to shake hands with grown men. He looked up at his mother, then at the microphone.
“If Mom isn't a Moretti anymore,” he asked, “what am I?”
Rachel's throat closed. She wanted to tell him he was Ethan, that this was enough, that blood and names were only a small part of a life. But he was standing under a hundred years of Moretti family portraits, waiting for an answer from the people who had taught him that his last name meant everything.
Luca moved before anyone else. He crossed the polished floor, ignored Bianca's attempt to resume speaking, and knelt beside the boy. His black suit pulled at the shoulders; the dark ink at his neck showed above his collar. Men twice his age tended to become deferential in his presence. Ethan, who knew him mostly as the uncle who smelled of cedar soap and occasionally brought baseball cards, simply stared.
“Your father dying didn't erase your mother from this family,” Luca said. “It didn't erase you either.”
“Then why did Aunt Bianca say it?”
“Because your aunt was wrong.”
The answer was plain enough to make Rachel want to cry. It was the first plain answer she'd heard in a year and a half.
At the edge of the room, a maid named Emma Reed stood beside a cart of untouched desserts. Rachel knew her by sight. Six months earlier Emma had found Ethan crying alone in a corridor and sat with him until Rachel returned from a meeting with the estate lawyers. Tonight the young woman was looking not at Luca but at Bianca's hand. Bianca was gripping the microphone so tightly her knuckles had blanched beneath the rings.
Rachel straightened. “You've been trying to push us out since before Michael died.”
Bianca lowered the microphone. “This is not the place.”
“You chose the place.”
At the head table, Sofia rose. She had no jewels except a pair of pearl earrings, though the ring Luca had given her caught the light when she pushed back her chair. She took a step toward Rachel, then stopped, uncertain whether sympathy offered in front of an audience might make the insult worse.
Ethan seemed to remember something. It changed his face in a way Rachel knew too well: the inward look he got before speaking of his father. For months after the funeral he had believed that if he remembered one more thing correctly, Michael would come home.
“Dad said,” Ethan began, then swallowed. “He said if she went near us again, Uncle Luca would find out what she did.”
There was no movement from Luca. Even kneeling, he seemed suddenly taller than everyone standing around him.
“What did your dad mean?” he asked.
“I don't know.” Ethan wiped his nose with his sleeve. “He was scared that day. I didn't like it when he was scared.”
Bianca tried a small laugh. “Michael said many things at the end. He wasn't himself.”
Rachel stepped between Bianca and the boy. “Don't you dare talk about him that way.”
Luca stood. He took the microphone from his sister without pulling or making a scene. The guests watched his hand, then his face. When he spoke, he kept his voice low enough that the orchestra's first violinist, halfway across the room, leaned forward to hear.
“Dinner is over. Anyone with business can call my office on Monday.”
A few guests hesitated until the older woman at table four began gathering her handbag. Then chairs moved in a restrained, embarrassed scrape. The party had cost more than Rachel had earned in her last three years of teaching. It ended in less than ninety seconds.
Sofia approached and put a coat around Ethan's shoulders. She said nothing grand. “It's colder in the hall,” she told him, and he accepted the coat because she spoke as if his comfort still mattered.
Rachel thanked her. Sofia looked toward Luca, whose expression had gone flat and unreadable. “I think I should call you tomorrow,” she said.
Emma arrived with Ethan's little blue overcoat, which someone had left in the cloakroom. She helped him into it with the practiced care of a person accustomed to children who resisted being fussed over.
“Your father's name was Michael,” she said softly when Ethan whispered an apology for ruining the party. “You don't have to apologize for remembering him.”
Bianca, across the room, heard. “Emma, your shift is finished.”
Emma continued buttoning the coat. “Yes, ma'am.”
Rachel saw Luca watch that exchange. For the first time, she wondered whether he had been watching his sister at all during the last eighteen months.
In the vestibule, a driver brought the car around, windshield silver with sleet. Ethan sat on the low marble ledge while Rachel searched her bag for gloves. He was still wearing Sofia's borrowed coat.
“Mom,” he said, “did Dad have a blue notebook?”
Rachel looked up. Michael had kept ledgers, legal pads, the occasional shopping list on the back of envelopes. But a blue notebook—that was something she had not heard of.
“Why, honey?”
“I saw Aunt Bianca take one from his desk after the funeral. She told me it was a grown-up thing.”
“Are you sure?”
Ethan nodded. “There was a little white bird on the cover. Dad made me promise not to tell anyone where he kept it.”
Luca had followed them into the hall without Rachel noticing. At the mention of the bird, his face changed—not with surprise, but recognition.
“Ethan,” he asked, “where did your father keep that notebook?”
May you like
The boy looked from his uncle to his mother. “In the place he said Aunt Bianca would never think to look.”
And for the first time that night, Rachel was afraid not of what the Morettis might take from her, but of what her dead husband had left behind.
