Chapter 2 - THE MAFIA BOSS ORDERED HIS SECURITY CHIEF TO INVESTIGATE THE NEW MAID WHO REFUSED TO FEAR HIM—BUT WHEN HE DISCOVERED SHE HAD ONCE WORKED AT THE HOSPITAL WHERE HE NEARLY DIED, HE BEGAN TO SUSPECT HER ARRIVAL WAS NO COINCIDENCE
By seven the next morning, Carmine had assembled a file thick enough to make Fay Willis look like a woman with a hundred lives. The problem was that most of the pages were empty.
“Twenty-six,” he said, standing across from my desk. “Born in Indiana. Mother died when she was nineteen. Father died three years later. No criminal record. Two apartments in Chicago, both cheap. A string of jobs in food service and cleaning.”
“Nothing medical?”
“A volunteer badge at St. Catherine's Rehabilitation Center. Two years ago. The hospital says she stopped coming six months back.”
Six months. The exact length of time since I had been shot.
“Was she there when I was admitted?”
“Your records are restricted. I haven't asked the hospital to violate them.”
I looked up. Carmine had never been sentimental about privacy before. “Since when do you care about rules?”
“Since someone used your private hospital information to find you at Pier Nineteen.”
The words settled between us. Carmine believed the attack had involved an insider. He had believed it from the beginning, though he had never named one. I had refused to consider that the person who betrayed me might be someone I trusted.
“What about the man at the chapel?”
“Camera angle's bad. Tall, limps slightly. We lost him behind the bus depot.”
“Find him.”
Carmine closed the file. “And the maid?”
“Leave her alone.”
He frowned. “You asked me to investigate her.”
“I didn't ask you to frighten her.”
He studied me as if I had begun speaking another language. Perhaps I had.
Fay arrived at eight with coffee and a folded newspaper. She noticed the file immediately, though I had turned it facedown. Her gaze lingered on the corner of a photograph protruding from the folder.
“You're investigating me,” she said.
“I investigate everyone who works here.”
“Do you?”
“Do you have something to hide?”
“Yes,” she said.
I wasn't prepared for the honesty.
“Everyone does,” she added. “Some secrets are debts. Some are grief. Some are mistakes people can't afford to repeat.”
“Which kind is yours?”
“The kind that isn't yours to take.”
I leaned back, anger rising out of habit. Then I noticed the dark circles beneath her eyes. She had worked a double shift because one of the cleaners had called in sick. Her left hand still wore the bandage from my broken cup.
“You'll be paid for the extra hours,” I said.
“I already told Mrs. Gable.”
“And the cup?”
“What about it?”
“I'll pay for your bandage.”
She blinked. “It's a bandage, Mr. Corso.”
“I know what it is.”
“Then perhaps you know how to say sorry.”
For a moment the only sound was the clock above the fireplace. I had apologized to investors, judges, and women I wanted to keep in my bed. I had never apologized to someone I could not intimidate into forgiving me.
“I shouldn't have thrown the tray,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “You shouldn't have.”
I waited for her to soften. She didn't. Oddly, that made the apology feel more real.
At ten, Dr. Nathaniel Brooks arrived for a scheduled examination. He was the rehabilitation specialist my surgeon had recommended after discharge, a careful man with gray hair and a habit of explaining things twice when I looked angry. I had ignored three of his appointments.
He reviewed the spasms, examined my skin, discussed medications and potential triggers, and suggested a structured rehabilitation plan. He made no promise that I would walk. He did explain that the early predictions I remembered had been made when swelling and trauma were still evolving, and that recovery after spinal cord injury was uncertain and individual.
“You've been treating uncertainty as a verdict,” he said.
“I prefer verdicts.”
“I know. But your body isn't a court.”
Fay stood by the doorway with fresh towels. Brooks looked at her, then stopped speaking.
“Fay?” he asked.
Her face drained of color. “Doctor.”
“You're working here?”
“I'm carrying towels.”
“That isn't what I meant.”
I watched the exchange. “You know each other.”
Brooks set his pen down. “She volunteered on the spinal rehabilitation floor. She was exceptionally good with patients.”
“Was?”
Fay's jaw tightened. “I left.”
Brooks looked as if he wanted to say more. Fay shook her head once, so small that a stranger might have missed it. He honored the warning.
After he left, I asked her to stay.
“Why did you quit?”
“Because the hospital wasn't a safe place for me anymore.”
“Did somebody threaten you?”
She looked at the window. “Mr. Corso, you have enough enemies. You don't need mine.”
The answer was a warning and an invitation, and I couldn't tell which frightened me more.
At lunch I sent Carmine to St. Catherine's with a request for the hospital's incident-report procedures, not anyone's medical records. He returned with a copy of a public complaint filed by a former employee about missing security footage during the night of my admission. The complainant's name had been redacted. The complaint had been dismissed for lack of evidence.
Attached was a date. Six months earlier. Two days after the shooting.
“Who filed it?” I asked.
“We can't tell from this. But there was a volunteer witness listed.”
“Fay.”
He nodded.
That evening I found her in the kitchen, peeling potatoes beside Mrs. Gable. The sight was absurdly ordinary. I had spent a lifetime surrounded by people who could make a phone call and alter a man's future; here was the woman who might know who had shot me, removing eyes from a potato with a blunt knife.
“Mrs. Gable,” I said, “would you give us a minute?”
Margaret looked from me to Fay. “You may speak here. This is my kitchen.”
I almost laughed. In the last six months she had been the only person who could still order me around. Fay set down the knife.
“You were at St. Catherine's the week I arrived,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Did you see me?”
“Yes.”
I felt the room contract. “Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because you wouldn't have believed I was here for the job.”
“Are you?”
She looked at Margaret, then back at me. “I need the wages. That part was never a lie.”
“What part was?”
“I didn't come here without knowing your name.”
Margaret stopped wiping the counter. I kept my voice level by force.
“What happened at the hospital?”
Fay rubbed her thumb against a pale scar on her wrist. “I saw a man outside your room. He wasn't on the visitor list. He wore a hospital badge with the photograph covered by tape. When a nurse challenged him, he said he was from security.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“No. But I recognized the voice.”
“From where?”
“From a recording my brother made before he disappeared.”
My blood went cold. “Your brother?”
She swallowed. “Ethan.”
I knew the name. Ethan Willis had been a contract driver on the waterfront. Carmine's men had questioned him after the shooting, then released him. Three days later he vanished. Carmine had said he was probably hiding from creditors.
“Ethan was at Pier Nineteen,” I said.
Fay nodded. “He told me he had seen something he shouldn't. He said if anything happened to him, I should find out who was paying for the ambulances.”
“The ambulances?”
“Not the one that took you away. The private one that arrived before the police.”
I remembered flashing lights, or thought I did. Memory after the gunshot was a broken film. I could not be sure whether I had seen an ambulance or dreamed it later.
“Why come to me now?”
“Because someone left a note under my door two weeks ago. It said Ethan was alive. It said the only way to find him was to get close to you.”
“Who sent it?”
“I don't know.”
“And you believed it?”
She stared at the scar on her wrist. “When your brother has been missing for six months, you learn to believe almost anything that might bring him home.”
There was no calculation in her voice. Just exhaustion. I knew enough about grief to recognize it when it sat across a kitchen table from me.
“Show me the note,” I said.
She hesitated. “I burned it.”
“Why?”
“Because the second line said if I went to the police, Ethan would die.”
Mrs. Gable crossed herself. I stared at the woman in front of me and realized how much courage it had taken to enter a house full of armed men with nothing but a rumor and an overdue rent notice.
“You should have told me,” I said.
“You spent my first day telling me to get out.”
It was a fair answer. I hated fair answers.
That night I ordered the security team to check the property for surveillance devices and to review staff access logs. I also told Carmine that Fay's brother was now our priority. He objected that a missing driver mattered less than finding the person who had shot me.
“Maybe they're the same investigation,” I said.
He didn't answer immediately. Then he promised to look.
That night I opened the financial statements I had ignored since leaving the hospital. There were pages of numbers, each one an insult to the man I had been. I discovered that Carmine had refused a lucrative offer from a logistics consortium without asking me. When I confronted him, he said the consortium's owners were anonymous and the terms were too generous to be honest. Before the injury, I would have called that caution. After the injury, I had called it disobedience. I sat with the difference for a long time. I had mistaken every attempt to protect me for an attempt to replace me, and the people closest to me had been paying for it. I asked Carmine to bring the contract back. We would examine the ownership together. For the first time in six months, we discussed business without either of us pretending that I was still the man who could walk into a room and settle an argument by standing over everyone in it.
When Mrs. Gable came to turn down the lights, I asked whether Fay had eaten. Margaret looked at me with undisguised surprise. She said Fay had taken bread and soup to her room after the kitchen closed. I asked that meals be kept available for staff working late. Margaret nodded as though the request were perfectly ordinary, which was a kindness I did not deserve. Before leaving, she said, “A house can survive an angry owner, Mr. Corso. It cannot survive an owner who forgets the people living inside it.” I had no answer. I listened to her footsteps fade and realized I was finally beginning to hear the house again.
At eleven I found Fay in the library, staring at a photograph on the mantel. It showed me before the injury, standing with Carmine and several dock supervisors. My legs looked strong. My smile looked cruel. I hardly recognized the man.
“You were happy,” she said.
“I was standing.”
“Those aren't the same thing.”
I wanted to argue. Instead I asked, “Did you know me before the hospital?”
“Only by reputation.”
“And now?”
“Now I know you take your coffee without sugar, you hate the sound of pity, and you pretend not to notice when Mrs. Gable leaves the hallway light on because you don't like waking in the dark.”
I turned away. Nobody had noticed that last detail. Or nobody had dared mention it.
“I'm not asking you to trust me,” she said. “I'm asking you not to hurt people because you're afraid they'll leave.”
The sentence struck the one place the bullet had missed.
After she went upstairs, Carmine called from the security room. His voice was unusually clipped.
“We found the private ambulance,” he said. “Not the vehicle. A payment record. It was hired through a shell company.”
“Who owns it?”
“That's the problem. It was paid from one of our own accounts.”
I gripped the armrest. “Which account?”
A pause. “The emergency operations fund. Only three people have access. You, me, and your former fiancée, Victoria Ashford.”
Victoria had left me the week I came home from the hospital. She had told the press we had grown apart. I had let her keep the diamond ring because I couldn't bear to watch her return it.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Back in Chicago. Arrived this afternoon.”
Before I could reply, a photograph appeared on my phone from an unknown number. It showed Fay entering the mansion in the rain, her bag held against her chest. Across the image, someone had typed a message.
SHE CAME FOR HER BROTHER. ASK HER WHAT SHE DID TO YOURS.
I had no brother.
May you like
But there was a man I had once called one.
Carmine.
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