Chapter 2 - The Ten Minutes I Almost Refused

The second number kept calling until Mia reached across the back seat and turned my phone facedown.

“You don't have to answer him,” she said.

Outside, Chicago moved past in familiar pieces. The highway signs. The distant gray shape of the lake. The tall buildings that had once meant I was almost home. Leo slept against his car seat, one hand resting on the small blue airplane he had carried all the way from Zurich.

I had promised myself that this visit would be simple. There would be a meeting with the cemetery director, a signature at my father's attorney's office, and five nights in a hotel where nobody knew us. I had forgotten what it felt like to be in a city where my sister knew people who could identify a car from its license plate.

“I'm not answering,” I said.

The phone lit up again. This time the message came from the same unfamiliar number.

I will come alone. You can choose the place. I won't ask to see him.

I looked at Leo. In sleep, his resemblance to Dante was less severe. His cheeks were still soft, and the small crease between his eyebrows had disappeared. He looked like a child who had never heard the name Moretti spoken as a warning.

“That's the first promise he's made that I might believe,” Mia said when I showed her.

I didn't smile.

At the hotel, Mia took Leo upstairs while I called Sarah Vale, the attorney handling my father's estate. She had known me since I was seventeen. When I told her whom I wanted to meet, she was quiet for a moment.

“Are you asking me to arrange a conversation,” she said, “or to witness one?”

“Both.”

“Then he comes to my office. No associates. No recordings. And the meeting ends when you say it ends.”

I sent Dante the address and one sentence: Ten minutes. Sarah Vale will be present.

His reply arrived before I could set down the phone.

Thank you.

I resented those two words. I resented that they sounded exactly like him.

An hour later, I sat in Sarah's office above a narrow street lined with wet trees. My hands were folded on my lap. Across from me stood a chair Sarah had deliberately left empty.

Dante arrived without his black overcoat. He wore a charcoal suit and had a shallow cut beside one knuckle. I knew that hand. I had once held it when he couldn't sleep. Looking at it now made me angry with myself for remembering anything tender.

He stopped when he saw me.

“Elena.”

Sarah nodded toward the chair. “Mr. Moretti, you have ten minutes.”

Dante sat, but his eyes did not leave mine.

“Is Leo my son?”

I had expected a speech. An apology. Some carefully arranged explanation that would make the last three years sound like an unfortunate misunderstanding. Instead, he asked the one question I had spent the flight avoiding.

“Yes,” I said.

Something passed over his face. It wasn't surprise. He had already known enough to chase us through the airport. It was grief, perhaps, for a child whose first steps and first words he would never recover.

“How old?”

“Two years and ten months.”

He lowered his head. For several seconds he said nothing.

“Do not ask where he goes to school,” I told him. “Do not send anyone to Switzerland. And do not approach him.”

“I won't.”

“You said you would explain.”

Dante looked toward Sarah, then back at me. “Your sister had documents. Bank authorizations. Transfers from the Carter charitable trust into a company connected to our harbor operation. They carried your signature.”

I stared at him.

“I never moved money from my father's trust.”

“I know that now.”

“Now?”

Dante's jaw tightened. “Victoria told me the documents could put you in the middle of an investigation. She said people who had lost money would think you were responsible. She promised to keep the papers private if I married her.”

The clock on Sarah's desk made a quiet clicking sound.

“You believed her?” I asked.

“I believed there was a danger.”

“Then why didn't you warn me?”

“Because I thought I could settle it without bringing you into it.”

I remembered eight years of asking for a ring. Eight years of hearing that it wasn't possible. I had imagined another woman, an old obligation, a promise made before he knew me. I had not imagined that when a danger finally arrived, Dante would decide my future without speaking to me.

“And the first eight years?” I asked.

His eyes changed.

“Marriage puts a name on someone in my world,” he said. “A wife becomes a public part of the organization, whether she wants to or not. My mother died because someone knew who mattered to my father. I told myself I was keeping that from happening to you.”

“But you let me live with you. You let everyone know I belonged to you. You protected a title, Dante. Not me.”

He accepted the correction with a small movement of his head.

Sarah turned one of the papers in her folder. “Do you have copies of the authorizations?”

“I can obtain them.”

“Obtain them before making any further claims,” she said. “Elena is not admitting that she signed anything.”

Dante looked at me. “Your father questioned one of those transfers shortly before he died. I didn't understand how far he'd gone until later.”

That hurt in a different place.

My father had died four years earlier after years of trouble with his heart. He had been meticulous and stubborn and often wrong about people, but he had never stopped asking questions when numbers didn't make sense.

“What did he find?”

“I don't know everything.”

“You married my sister without knowing everything.”

“Yes.”

He said it without an excuse. Somehow that made it harder to listen.

Sarah glanced at the clock. “Time.”

Dante rose immediately. He didn't reach for my hand. He didn't ask me to come home, although we both knew he still lived in the house where I had once imagined raising a family.

At the door, he turned.

“Elena, I wanted to tell you about the wedding. I kept thinking there would be a safer time.”

“There was a safer time,” I said. “It was before you walked down the aisle.”

After he left, I remained in my chair until Sarah quietly poured me a glass of water.

“Your father left some personal records with me,” she said. “You weren't ready to look at them when you moved away. I didn't press you.”

I remembered refusing every letter that mentioned the estate. Back then even the Carter name had felt unbearable.

“What records?”

“A notebook, some bank correspondence, and a sealed envelope addressed to you.”

My hands went cold.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I did. In the probate notice. You asked that everything not requiring your signature remain in storage.” She paused. “I kept my promise.”

I remembered the email. I had read it beside a kitchen window in Zurich while Leo, still an infant, slept in the next room. I had closed it before the second page.

Sarah opened her desk drawer and placed a small brass key on the table.

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“Your father's box is still in my records room,” she said. “Now I think you need to see what's inside.”

I picked up the key. I had come to Chicago to take my father's remains away. I was beginning to understand that he had left something else here for me to carry home.