Chapter 4 - THE MAFIA BOSS FOUND HIS NEW WIFE CRYING OUTSIDE THE CHILDREN'S BEDROOMS—AND THE SECRET SHE REVEALED ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD CHANGED EVERYTHING
The first thing Arthur did when Nico said Mrs. Donnelly's name was order every security officer away from the schoolroom.
Not toward it. Away.
"Nobody questions my children," he said. "Nobody takes their tablets. Nobody makes them think they've done something wrong."
Nico nodded, but his expression remained troubled. "Then we need to speak to Donnelly privately."
"And we will," I said.
Both men looked at me. I had been a Costa for barely a week, and already I was learning that a quiet sentence could sometimes interrupt the machinery of fear more effectively than a shouted command.
"She helped Sofia when her rabbit tore," I continued. "She knows which nights Matteo has nightmares. She remembers that Lucia hates cinnamon. Before we accuse her, shouldn't we ask whether someone stole her credentials?"
Arthur studied me. The streaks of silver at his temples caught the gallery light. "That's what you think happened?"
"I think the person who wanted those photographs sent to Bianca also wanted us to suspect someone the children trust."
Nico rubbed his jaw. "The access log has a time stamp. Donnelly was in the kitchen with the catering supervisor. I can verify it."
"Then verify it," Arthur said. "And tell her I want her protected, not interrogated."
We separated at the staircase. Arthur went to the security office, and I went upstairs to check on the children. The hallway smelled of lavender polish and the faint sweetness of Sofia's bedtime lotion. Four doors stood along the east wing, each marked by a different small brass animal. Gabriel's eagle. Lucia's fox. Matteo's bear. Sofia's rabbit.
Behind the rabbit door, Sofia was singing badly and enthusiastically to Captain Buttons. I smiled despite everything. Behind Matteo's door came the soft thump of a basketball, followed by an apologetic whisper. Lucia's light was still on. Gabriel's door was closed, and I knew better than to knock simply because I was worried.
I stopped beside the window between their rooms.
It was an ordinary window overlooking the garden. The roses below were silver in the moonlight. Beyond them, the security lights illuminated the wall that separated the Costa estate from the rest of Chicago. Inside that wall were four children who had already lost one mother and feared losing every other person they loved.
I sat on the bench beneath the window and cried.
I didn't make a sound. I had practiced that skill long before I met Arthur. I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth and tried to make the tears stop. They wouldn't.
"Evelyn?"
Arthur's voice came from the stairs. I wiped my face, too late.
"I'm fine."
He approached but didn't sit until I shifted to make room. "That's a sentence people use when they don't want to explain why they aren't."
"You would know."
A reluctant smile touched his mouth. "Fair."
For a while, we watched the dark garden. I could feel his attention without the pressure of his gaze. It was one of the things that made him dangerous to my defenses: he didn't demand an answer just because he could.
"My parents never let me cry where anyone could hear," I said finally.
His posture changed almost imperceptibly.
"When I was nine, I fell from a horse. I broke my wrist. My father was hosting a dinner, and my mother told me that guests didn't want to hear an ugly child making ugly noises. She wrapped my wrist in a towel and put me in the pantry until the last guest left."
Arthur said nothing.
"At eleven, I started having the pain the doctors finally examined last week. My mother said I was inventing it to avoid school. At fourteen, I fainted at a recital. My father told the school nurse I was attention-seeking. Eventually I stopped asking anyone to believe me."
I looked at the four doors. "Tonight, when Sofia stood up for me, all I could think was that she's so small. She shouldn't have to defend an adult from cruelty. None of them should."
"They weren't defending you because they had to," Arthur said. "They did it because someone finally showed them what defending a person looks like."
"What if I fail them?"
"You will make mistakes. So will I. That's different from failing them."
He turned his hand over on the bench. I put mine in it.
"I used to think protection meant keeping people away from every dangerous thing," he said. "Then Isabella died, and I realized I'd built walls so high that my children couldn't see the world beyond them. Bianca filled the silence I left. I let her."
"You were grieving."
"I was their father. Both things are true."
A floorboard creaked. Gabriel stood at the end of the hallway in a gray sweatshirt, looking younger than he did at the dinner table.
"I wasn't spying," he said. "I heard somebody crying."
I straightened. "I'm sorry I woke you."
"You didn't." He hesitated. "Mom cried in that spot too. Sometimes."
Arthur went still.
"When?" he asked.
Gabriel glanced toward Isabella's old bedroom at the far end of the wing. "Before the accident. She said she was tired. She said not to tell you because you were busy."
A terrible quiet settled around us.
"Did she say why?" Arthur asked.
Gabriel shook his head. "But once I heard her arguing with Uncle Vincent on the phone. She told him he couldn't use us as an excuse anymore."
Arthur released my hand slowly. "Vincent?"
"Your cousin," Gabriel said. "The one who sends me birthday cards with money and never remembers how old I am."
I watched Arthur's expression harden, then soften when he looked at his son.
"Thank you for telling me. You haven't done anything wrong."
Gabriel looked at me. "Are you leaving? Because of Bianca?"
"No," I said. "Not because of Bianca."
"Good." He shoved his hands into his pockets. "Matteo wants you to come to his game Saturday. He won't ask. He thinks it makes him look little."
"Then I'll pretend I decided on my own."
He nodded, satisfied, and disappeared into his room.
Arthur stood only after the door closed. "Vincent oversaw estate logistics when Isabella died. He approved the vehicle schedule."
"Then he needs to be questioned."
"He will be. But not here, and not tonight."
Arthur looked toward Gabriel's door, and I saw a different kind of anger on his face. Not the rage that had made men fear him at the Continental. The anguish of a father realizing his child had been carrying a piece of an adult secret alone.
The next morning I found Mrs. Donnelly in the pantry counting tea towels. Her hands shook when she saw me.
"Mr. Costa says my access card was used," she whispered. "I never sent any photographs."
"I believe you."
She blinked. "You do?"
"Yes. But I need to ask you something. Did anybody borrow your keys or ask you to leave the schoolroom unattended?"
She thought for a long moment. "The memorial florist. A woman with dark hair. She said Mrs. Bellini needed a vase brought upstairs. I left my apron in the schoolroom for five minutes. My badge was clipped to it."
"Mrs. Bellini?"
"Bianca's event coordinator. I didn't know her name."
Nico joined us, carrying a printed photograph of the florist taken from a delivery camera. Mrs. Donnelly identified her immediately. Nico's jaw tightened.
"That's no florist," he said. "Her name is Mara Kessler. She worked for Vincent Costa until last winter."
Arthur arrived minutes later. He listened without interrupting, then asked Mrs. Donnelly to take the afternoon off with full pay. When she protested, he said the children would be told she was visiting her sister, and he would explain everything himself when it was safe.
I admired that. It was not how my father would have handled an employee whose name appeared in a security report.
Arthur took the photograph from Nico. "Find out who let her through the gate."
"Already working on it."
"And Vincent?"
"His office says he's in Milwaukee. His driver says he hasn't seen him in two days."
Arthur's phone rang. He glanced at the screen and walked into the hall. I heard only one side of the conversation.
"No. Don't move anything. Seal the office. I'm coming."
When he returned, the color had drained from his face.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Isabella kept a private apartment downtown. I knew about it. She used it for foundation work." He swallowed. "Someone broke into it last night."
"What did they take?"
"Nothing, according to the building manager."
"Then why break in?"
Arthur met my eyes. "They left something."
At the apartment, the air smelled of fresh paint and old paper. Isabella's desk stood beneath a window overlooking the river. A framed photograph showed her with the children at the zoo. Sofia was missing her front teeth. Matteo was making a face. Gabriel had his arm around Lucia, who looked furious at being photographed.
On the desk lay a child's red mitten.
Arthur picked it up with a hand that wasn't quite steady.
"Sofia lost this the winter Isabella died," he said.
Beneath it was a note written in block letters.
ASK YOUR NEW WIFE WHAT HER FATHER SIGNED THE NIGHT ISABELLA DIED.
I read the words twice. My father had sold me to pay a debt. He had hidden my pain. He had lied about my future. But what could Richard Vale have signed for the Costa family?
"Arthur," I whispered, "I didn't know."
He looked at me, and for one frightening second I saw how easy it would have been for suspicion to enter the space between us.
Instead he took my hand.
"I know you didn't," he said. "That's why whoever left this wanted you to find it."
Then Nico called from the doorway. "Arthur, we found the original vehicle dispatch sheet. The signature authorizing the change wasn't Vincent's."
"Whose was it?"
Nico looked at me.
"Richard Vale's."
Before we left the apartment, Arthur insisted on walking through every room. He did not touch Isabella's clothes or the framed drawings on her walls. He moved like a man visiting a place where his own voice might disturb the dead. In the small kitchen, he opened a cabinet and found a chipped blue mug. He held it for a long time.
"She bought this at a street fair," he said. "It cost four dollars. I offered to replace it with a whole set, and she told me that was exactly why I didn't understand it."
"What did you say?"
"Something stupid about how I could buy the entire fair."
"And she laughed?"
"She told me I couldn't buy the afternoon she'd spent there with the children."
I looked around the apartment differently after that. Isabella had made a place where money was not the most important thing in the room. The windowsills held cheap plants. The refrigerator carried crooked magnets. A list on the wall reminded her to buy strawberries and return a library book. Whoever she had been to Chicago's wealthy families, she had also been a mother who remembered snacks.
"I won't try to become her," I said.
Arthur put down the mug. "I would never ask you to."
"But I want the children to keep these things. I want them to know she was more than the worst day of your lives."
He nodded. His eyes were bright. "Then we'll bring them here someday, when it's safe. They can choose what they want to remember."
On the drive back I called the hospital that had given me my diagnosis. I asked for copies of my medical records and an independent referral. Not because I expected a miracle, but because I was tired of other people deciding what my body meant for my worth. Arthur heard the call and said nothing until I hung up.
"You don't have to explain that to me," he said.
"I know. That's what makes me want to."
May you like
For the first time in my life, a future did not look like a contract someone else had written. It looked uncertain, frightening, and mine. That freedom was almost as overwhelming as the danger gathering around us.
END OF CHAPTER 4
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