Chapter 4 - The Visits That Never Reached Him

The first thing Luca did was stop the search for a person to blame and begin looking for records that couldn't be intimidated.

He ordered the original court documents preserved and asked an attorney outside the Moretti organization to review them. He also requested his travel history from the year Grace was born. I saw none of those calls. I knew only that he spent most of the morning in his office while Anna sat by the library window, holding her handmade birthday book.

At lunchtime, Grace appeared downstairs.

She wore the same pale blue dress from the previous evening. Her dark curls were pinned back, and her face looked tired. I offered to make her something to eat. She asked whether Anna was still here.

"Yes," I said. "Would you like me to tell her you're ready to talk?"

"I don't know if I'm ready."

"You don't have to decide now."

She studied me. "You got fired because you let her sit down."

"I offered a chair. Your uncle made sure I could stay."

"Grandma says you broke the rules."

I thought about the little brown-paper gift falling into the trash. "Sometimes a rule tells you more about the person who made it than the person being punished."

Grace considered that without responding. Then she asked me to bring Anna to the morning room, but only if I stayed nearby.

Their conversation began awkwardly. Anna didn't call herself Grace's mother again until Grace asked her directly. She didn't demand affection. She answered questions about St. Agnes, about her recovery, and about the few months during which she had been allowed brief visits before Celia ended them.

"I remember you," Grace said at last. "You were a lady who gave me a paper flower. I thought I dreamed it."

Anna swallowed. "You were very small. I didn't know if you'd remember."

Grace rubbed her thumb across the edge of her glass. "I'm angry."

"I know."

"I'm angry at Grandma, but I'm angry at you, too."

Anna nodded. "You can be. I wish I'd found a way to get to you sooner."

I stepped back toward the doorway, giving them what privacy I could. They remained together for nearly half an hour. When Grace left, she hadn't hugged Anna. But she had asked whether they could talk again tomorrow.

Later that afternoon, Luca called me into his office. An old travel itinerary lay beside the guardianship papers. His records showed he had been in Rome meeting shipping partners on the date the supposed witness statement was signed in Chicago. He'd also found a bank authorization from the same day bearing his genuine signature.

The two signatures were plainly different. An expert would have to establish whether the court document was forged, but the discrepancy was impossible to ignore.

"Celia says I may have signed it before traveling," he told me. "The document says I appeared in person that afternoon."

"Then she needs to explain how you could be in two places."

He almost smiled. "You make it sound simple."

"It would be, if nobody had spent thirteen years making it complicated."

He leaned back. "You said you send money home every Friday."

I stiffened. "How do you know that?"

"Payroll mentioned the regular transfer when Celia tried to terminate you. I didn't ask for your private details. I asked whether the dismissal had already disrupted your pay."

My father's death was still recent enough that saying it aloud felt strange. I told Luca about my sixty-two-year-old mother, the mortgage, and the house my father had spent his life paying for. I also told him I would not want him to keep me employed out of pity.

"I won't," he said. "You did your job. And you did the decent thing when a guest was mistreated. Those aren't reasons to dismiss someone."

He made sure my missing wages were restored and the disciplinary notice removed. I thanked him and returned to work. For the first time since coming to the mansion, I felt that the house might be capable of changing.

That evening, the head housekeeper found an old visitor ledger in a storeroom. It had been kept for deliveries and people stopped at the outer gates before the security system changed. The entries were faded but legible.

Anna Bennett. Anna Moretti. Sometimes just Anna.

Birthday after birthday, for thirteen years, her name appeared beside the same instructions: No admission. Do not inform Mr. Moretti. Return any package.

Some visits lasted ten minutes. Others were marked with times more than two hours apart. Anna really had stood outside the gates waiting.

Luca arrived as I was reading the final page. He compared the handwriting with a set of older household instructions Celia had signed. Several entries were recorded by different guards, but the directive was consistent.

"She came every year," he said.

"Yes."

"And nobody told me."

He stared at the pages for a long time. Then he asked the question I had begun to fear.

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"If my aunt stopped her at the gates, where did all the returned gifts go?"

He asked me to preserve the ledger and bring it to his independent lawyer in the morning. He didn't send men into Celia's rooms or order anyone to force a confession. There had been enough decisions made in this house without asking the people affected. That evening, Luca began doing something I hadn't expected of him: he wrote down each question before asking it, as though answers mattered more than the power to demand them. I thought of Anna sitting outside the gates while security recorded the time. For her, the waiting had never been an abstract number in a book. It had been a portion of her life she couldn't get back. And somewhere in this vast house, there might still be proof that she had tried to reach her brother and daughter every single year.