Chapter 2 - THE BLONDE MAID SHOWED THE MAFIA KING THE LETTERS HE NEVER RECEIVED—BUT WHEN HIS DAUGHTER DISAPPEARED FROM A LOCKED HOTEL ROOM, AN OLD ENEMY LEFT A WARNING WRITTEN IN HIS FATHER'S HAND
The first thing Lucas did was lock the door. The second was unlock it again.
Jessica noticed both movements. “What are you doing?”
“Making sure nobody comes in without permission,” he said. “But I promised you weren't trapped. I meant it.”
Joseph stood in the hallway, his hand near the radio at his shoulder. Lucas told him to keep Peter Rourke away from the private floor, then asked for a woman from hotel security to wait outside the sitting room. He wanted Lily protected without making Jessica feel surrounded by his men.
“Rourke isn't getting close,” Joseph said.
“Not until I know why he's here.”
Jessica sat beside Lily, holding her hand so tightly that the child squirmed. “Mom, you're hurting my fingers.”
She released them immediately. “Sorry, sweetheart.”
Lucas crouched again. “Lily, have you ever met a man named Peter?”
Jessica's head snapped up. “Don't.”
“I'm not interrogating her. I need to know whether he approached her before tonight.”
Lily shook her head. Then she frowned. “There was a man outside the library last Thursday. He asked if I liked living in the big house.”
Jessica went pale. “What man?”
“He had a brown coat and smelled like peppermint. He said he knew my grandpa.”
Lucas rose slowly. His father had favored peppermint lozenges. Rourke had carried them too, partly out of imitation and partly because Dominic hated the smell of cigarettes.
“Did he touch you?” Lucas asked.
“No. Mrs. Alvarez came out and he walked away.”
Mrs. Alvarez was the head housekeeper, the woman who had hired Jessica and organized staff childcare on gala nights. Lucas made a note to speak with her immediately.
Jessica looked as though she might be sick. “I thought we were finally safe.”
“You should have been.”
“Don't promise me safety as if it's something you can buy.”
He accepted the rebuke. She had survived ten years without him. He had no right to arrive with bodyguards and pretend her life could be repaired by issuing orders.
A quiet knock interrupted them. Mrs. Alvarez entered carrying Lily's coat and a small canvas bag. Her dark hair was streaked with gray, and she regarded Lucas with the frank disapproval of a woman who had managed his household for twelve years.
“The child has asthma,” she said. “Her inhaler is in the front pocket. I thought someone should know.”
Jessica took the bag. “Thank you, Rosa.”
Mrs. Alvarez looked at Lucas. “And you should know your staff aren't decorations. Some of us have names.”
“I know yours.”
“Then perhaps learn the others.”
For once, he had no answer. She kissed Lily's forehead and left.
Jessica's shoulders relaxed a fraction. “Rosa is the reason I stayed. She knows Lily can't always be left with strangers. She lets me use the little apartment above the carriage house when the buses stop running.”
Lucas stared. The carriage house sat behind his estate, less than a quarter mile from his own bedroom windows. He had passed it on morning runs. Once, he remembered, he had seen a child's bicycle beside the steps and assumed it belonged to a gardener's family.
He had lived close enough to hear his daughter's laughter and never recognized it.
“Jessica,” he said, “why didn't you come to me after you learned who owned the estate?”
She glanced toward Lily. “Because I believed you already knew about her. And I believed you'd made your choice.”
“I never knew.”
“Then someone worked very hard to make sure of it.”
Lucas asked Joseph to arrange a car to take Jessica and Lily wherever they wanted to go. Jessica chose Rosa's sister's apartment in Brookline rather than the estate. She refused his offer of a driver until Joseph explained that reporters had gathered outside the hotel after photographs from the gala circulated online.
“Then a driver,” she said. “No bodyguard in the apartment.”
“Agreed.”
As they prepared to leave, Lily slipped her hand into Lucas's. He stared down at the small fingers curled around his tattooed knuckles.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Anything.”
“Do you like dogs?”
“Very much.”
“Duke likes you. He waits at the window when you're gone.”
Lucas had always assumed Duke waited because dogs liked routine. Perhaps the animal had understood loneliness better than he did.
“Will you tell him I said hello?” Lily asked.
“I will.”
She hesitated. “Will you come see me again?”
Lucas looked to Jessica for permission. Jessica's face tightened, then she gave the smallest nod.
“Yes,” he told Lily. “If you want me to.”
“I do.”
He watched them leave in the elevator. When the doors closed, he remained standing until Joseph cleared his throat.
“Rourke?” Joseph asked.
“Bring him to the conference room. Two witnesses. Cameras on. Nobody touches him.”
Peter Rourke looked older than Lucas remembered. His shoulders had narrowed and his hair had thinned, but his smile still had the same oily confidence. He sat beneath a painting of Boston Harbor and spread his hands.
“Look at you, son. All grown up.”
“Don't call me that.”
“Your father would be proud.”
“My father made a habit of ruining things he couldn't control. Tell me why you're here.”
Rourke's gaze flicked toward the camera in the ceiling. “You always were sentimental about the Turner girl.”
“Her name is Jessica.”
“Names don't matter. Blood does.”
Lucas pulled out a chair and sat opposite him. “Did you threaten her while she was pregnant?”
Rourke smiled without warmth. “I delivered a message.”
“From my father?”
“From someone who understood the family's interests.”
“Did you forge messages on her phone?”
“Careful. Accusations like that can be expensive.”
Lucas placed a copy of the photograph Lily had shown him on the table. “A nine-year-old child walked up to me tonight because she wanted to know her father. If you know anything about the people who kept us apart, now is the time to speak.”
For the first time, Rourke's expression shifted. “You really didn't know.”
“That's what Jessica said.”
Rourke looked toward the door. “Then your father took more secrets to his grave than I thought.”
“Explain.”
“Not for free.”
Lucas stood. “You can explain to the police instead. We have a report from a child about a man approaching her outside the library. Security footage may tell us who it was.”
Rourke's jaw clenched. “I didn't go near that girl.”
“You knew exactly which girl I meant.”
Rourke said nothing.
Lucas left him with Joseph and returned to the empty ballroom. Staff were clearing plates. The string quartet had gone. A single gold balloon drifted against a chandelier, caught in the warm air. He thought of the life he had planned with Jessica: a small house, a dog, a child someday, nothing like the gilded loneliness he had inherited.
At midnight, Rosa Alvarez called him.
“Mr. Valentini, I found something in Jessica's personnel file. I think you should see it.”
“What?”
“A note from the agency. It says she was recommended personally by a consultant named Peter Rourke.”
Lucas stopped walking. “Rourke placed her in my house?”
“Yes. The agency claimed he was working for your management company. He wasn't.”
Lucas had spent hours wondering how Jessica ended up on his property. The answer was no accident. Someone had put her there.
He asked Rosa to secure the file and call the agency's owner in the morning. Then he called Jessica. She answered on the third ring.
“Is Lily okay?” he asked.
“She's asleep. What's wrong?”
“Did you apply to the estate directly?”
“No. The agency called me about a job with health insurance. They said a family needed someone who knew how to care for an injured dog.”
“Rourke recommended you.”
Silence.
“Jessica?”
“I never told the agency I knew him.”
“I know.”
She took a shaky breath. “I have something you need to see. Letters I wrote you. I kept copies because I was afraid I'd forget what I said.”
“Can I come tomorrow?”
“Yes. Alone.”
He agreed.
The next morning, Lucas arrived at Rosa's sister's apartment wearing jeans and a plain coat. No visible bodyguards. He brought blueberry muffins because he remembered Jessica liked them, then felt foolish for assuming a preference could survive ten years.
Jessica opened the door cautiously. “You brought breakfast?”
“I didn't know what else to bring.”
“Then you could have brought answers.”
“I brought what I have.”
She stepped aside. The apartment smelled of coffee and crayons. Lily sat at the kitchen table working on a school project about constellations. She grinned when she saw him.
“Lucas! I mean—” She looked at Jessica. “What do I call you?”
“Lucas is fine,” he said. “Whatever feels comfortable.”
Lily nodded solemnly. “Okay, Lucas. Do you know where Orion is?”
He sat with her for twenty minutes, pointing out stars on a printed chart. He made no promises about being a father. He simply stayed when she asked him to stay. Jessica watched from the counter, her expression difficult to read.
When Lily went to the living room to draw, Jessica placed a shoebox on the table. Inside were copies of letters, hospital bills, and envelopes stamped RETURN TO SENDER. Lucas opened the first letter.
Lucas, I don't know if you'll ever read this. I am pregnant. I am frightened. But I want you to know that I loved you when we were poor, and I would have loved you if we stayed poor forever.
He read the line twice. Then a third time.
The next letter described the break-in. Another begged him not to believe anyone who said she wanted money. One included a sonogram image. The final envelope had been mailed three days before Lily's birth.
“I thought you hated us,” Jessica said.
Lucas looked up. “I thought you hated me.”
“That's what they wanted.”
He reached for her hand, then stopped before touching it. “I am sorry for every year you carried this alone.”
She blinked rapidly. “Sorry doesn't give me back the nights I sat in emergency rooms by myself. It doesn't give Lily her first steps with her father watching.”
“No. It doesn't.”
“And I won't let you become the center of her world just because you can buy her things.”
“Then don't. Let me earn a place.”
A phone buzzed on the counter. Jessica glanced at the screen and frowned. It was a message from an unknown number: YOU SHOULD HAVE KEPT THE GIRL AWAY FROM HIM.
She showed Lucas. He photographed the message and advised her not to reply. Then he called Joseph, asking him to preserve the number and contact the police about the threats.
Lily appeared in the doorway holding a drawing of three stick figures beside a golden dog. “I made us,” she said. “I didn't know what your hair looked like when you were little, so I made it spiky.”
Lucas accepted the paper with both hands. “It's perfect.”
Jessica looked at the picture. Her expression softened, but fear remained beneath it.
That afternoon, Jessica insisted on taking Lily to her regular after-school art program. Lucas respected the routine. He waited outside in a rented car while Jessica signed the attendance sheet. Lily waved at him through the glass doors.
Twenty minutes later, the art instructor called Jessica from a back office. A woman claiming to be Lily's grandmother had arrived with a forged pickup authorization. The instructor had refused to release the child and taken her into a locked classroom while calling for help.
Jessica ran down the hallway. Lucas followed at a distance, heart hammering. They found Lily safe with the instructor, frightened but unharmed. The stranger had fled through a side exit. Police took statements and collected the authorization form.
The name written on the forged document was not a stranger's name.
It was Elena Valentini.
Lucas's mother.
Elena had died eight years earlier.
Jessica stared at the signature. “Why would someone use a dead woman's name?”
Lucas examined the slanting letters. His mother had taught him to sign his name with a fountain pen. He recognized her handwriting—or something frighteningly close to it.
Joseph arrived with an envelope recovered from the hallway near the side exit. Inside was a photocopy of an old family letter on Dominic Valentini's stationery. Across the bottom, someone had written in black ink: THE FIRST LIE WAS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. THE SECOND WILL COST YOU THE GIRL.
Lucas folded the paper carefully. The threat was no longer about a broken romance. Someone had studied his family, learned his daughter's routines, and tried to take her from a public building.
May you like
Lily reached for Jessica. “Mom, I want to go home.”
Lucas looked at the two people he had only just found. “You will,” he promised quietly. “And this time, I'm going to find out who is trying to make you disappear.”
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