Bianca's Version of Love
Chapter 08 - Bianca's Version of Love
Bianca arrived at Harriet's office at half past ten the following morning, wearing a beige coat she had owned for years. Without the red dress and the microphone, she looked smaller, but not harmless. Rachel remembered too clearly how easily the woman could make a room look away.
Harriet had advised Rachel not to meet her alone. Luca waited outside the conference room with a cup of bad coffee, and Antonia sat beside the window, having insisted on coming despite her aching knees. Bianca glanced at the empty chair at the table and sat in it as though sitting there proved her right to speak.
“I paid to have security footage reviewed,” she said. “Not destroyed.”
“Why that night?” Harriet asked.
“Dominic told me someone had accessed the garage after hours. He said a private contractor could find out who.”
“Do you have an invoice?”
“I'll have to ask my accountant.”
“You authorized the payment. We will need the records.”
Bianca's gaze moved to Rachel. “You think I killed your husband.”
“I think you spent eighteen months making his son feel unwelcome,” Rachel said. “I know what you did. The rest is being investigated.”
The answer unsettled Bianca. She had expected accusations she could call hysteria, grief she could patronize. Rachel offered neither. She took out the petition to restrict Ethan's trust and laid it flat.
“Did you help file this?”
“Yes. I thought you were taking money from the estate without authorization.”
“Did you check?”
“Dominic showed me reports.”
“Did you ask me?”
Bianca studied her hands. “No.”
The meeting continued until noon. Bianca admitted approving the foundation's payment to the contractor. She admitted instructing Dominic to limit Rachel's access to family events. She denied altering Emma's affidavit or knowing that Lakegate had used a dead tenant's supposed consent. When Harriet asked for the documents that supported her explanations, Bianca's answers grew much less sure.
There was one thing she would not answer: why she had told Dominic that Michael kept a second set of records.
After she left, Antonia remained in her chair. She did not ask anyone to excuse her daughter. Instead she told Rachel that Bianca had kept the Moretti household running through their father's illness, that she had taken phone calls at midnight and paid servants when the accounts were frozen, that she had learned early to measure love by the number of disasters she could prevent. Antonia spoke these facts without using them as a defense.
“I taught her that being needed was the same as being good,” she said. “I wish I'd taught her otherwise.”
Antonia rubbed the crease in the tablecloth. She had outlived a husband who required loyalty from everyone and returned it unequally. She had mistaken Bianca's competence for happiness. The cruelest thing about old age, she thought, was not the aching body but the clarity with which some of your own lessons finally came back to you.
Rachel looked at the old woman, whom she'd once believed incapable of admitting a mistake. “I wish Michael had told me when he was afraid.”
“So do I.”
For a while neither said anything. Outside, office workers crossed the street against the light, their lives continuing with an indifference Rachel found unexpectedly comforting.
Luca met with his accountants that afternoon and learned that the seven properties were part of a larger package. Twelve more buildings had been pledged under amendments signed by former trustees. Most of the signatures could not yet be verified. The money had moved through Lakegate into a company registered in Delaware, then back into the Moretti organization as short-term operating capital.
Some of it had paid legitimate bills. Some had vanished into accounts held by two men Dominic employed. Luca went through the list of payments and found invoices he'd approved years earlier, when the family restaurants and trucking company were struggling. The amounts had not seemed remarkable then. He had been grateful not to ask where the relief came from.
Harriet's accountant explained that Luca could be exposed to civil liability for his approvals even if he hadn't known about the forged consents. He listened and authorized full cooperation. It cost him something real. He could no longer claim ignorance as a virtue.
At Rosa's apartment, Emma helped her mother prepare dinner. There was a pork roast too small for four but Rosa insisted on inviting Rachel and Ethan. She had spent most of her working life feeding people who never asked whether she had eaten. Now she wanted her own table full, even if they had to stretch the meal with potatoes.
Ethan brought the birdhouse and showed Rosa how its hidden panel worked. She laughed in surprise. “Your daddy always did like a secret compartment.”
“Did he make one for you?” Ethan asked.
Rosa's laugh faded. “Not exactly.”
She took a small envelope from a drawer beneath her dish towels. Inside was a photograph of Michael and Rosa standing beside an elderly woman in a hospital wheelchair. Written on the back, in Michael's hand, were the words: ASK MRS. PRICE ABOUT THE BLUE DOOR.
Rachel recognized the name from the notebook. Mrs. Price was the woman whose signature appeared on a loan after her death.
“She couldn't have told you anything after that date,” Rachel said.
Rosa shook her head. “There were two Mrs. Prices. Mother and daughter. The older one died. The younger one moved out when they said the building was condemned.”
The distinction gave the dead woman's signature a new and uglier meaning. Someone had been using old resident files without even checking which woman was alive.
Ethan studied the photograph, then looked up. “We had a blue door at Dad's old warehouse. He said it was painted that color so people would remember which one was safe.”
Rachel put down her fork. For eighteen months she had been asking adults to explain Michael's secrets. Her son had been carrying pieces of them around in an ordinary boy's memory.
Later that night, Harriet called to say the original bank statement had come through. The garage contractor's payment had been approved by Bianca, but the contractor had returned most of it two days later. The money had then gone to a separate repair shop—one whose invoice listed Dominic as the customer.
May you like
Bianca had not told them about the refund. More troubling still, her private messages to Dominic showed that she had asked him, the morning after Michael's death, whether the mechanic had “finished what you promised.”
No one could yet say what the promise was. But Rachel knew the question she would ask next.
