Chapter 3 - THE DRIVER
I had spent most of my life believing my father repaired elevators.
Technically, he had.
After I was born.
Before that, apparently, he drove men named Moretti through Chicago nights and helped one of them disappear from the dead.
“Start at the beginning,” Luca said.
Dad looked at me.
“No.”
I almost laughed from disbelief.
“No?”
“You don’t need this.”
“Someone photographed my home and threatened you.”
His shoulders dropped.
The stroke had aged him ten years in six months. Suddenly he looked older still.
“I wanted one clean thing in my life,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“You.”
The anger left me too quickly.
I sat beside him.
“Then help me stay alive.”
Dad looked at Luca.
“Your father hired me when I was twenty-three. I drove him, carried messages, sometimes waited outside places I didn’t ask about.”
“Did you work for him when he died?”
“No. I left four years before.”
“Why?”
Dad’s eyes shifted toward me.
“Emma’s mother was pregnant.”
I had been two when Mom died in a car accident. I remembered almost nothing about her except a yellow sweater and the smell of lavender.
“I told Antonio I wanted out. He let me go.”
Luca frowned.
“Just like that?”
“He wasn’t what people said he was.”
Luca’s mouth twisted.
“He was exactly what people said he was. He was also other things.”
Dad nodded.
“That’s fair.”
“What happened with Matteo?”
Dad rubbed both hands over his face.
“In 2014, he called me.”
“Twelve years ago,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He said he needed a driver he could trust.”
“Why you?” Luca asked.
“Because I wasn’t working for the family anymore.”
Dad stood slowly and walked toward the window.
“He told me to meet him near an old warehouse on the South Side. When I arrived, smoke was already coming from the building.”
“That was the fire,” Luca said.
“Yes.”
“Was anyone inside?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t check?”
“Matteo had blood all over his shirt and a gun in his hand. He got into my car and told me to drive.”
Luca’s eyes sharpened.
“To O’Hare?”
“No. Midway.”
“Where did he fly?”
“I never knew.”
“You bought the ticket?”
“He already had documents.”
“What name?”
Dad shook his head.
“I didn’t see.”
Luca stood.
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
Dad gave him a long look.
“Your brother told me if anyone learned he was alive, Emma’s mother’s death would not be the last tragedy in my family.”
The room became very still.
I whispered, “Mom?”
Dad closed his eyes.
“She had been dead twenty-three years. Matteo knew exactly what to say.”
“Did he have something to do with her accident?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never asked?”
“I spent every day after that trying not to know.”
I wanted to be furious.
Instead I saw a man who had spent half his life building walls around one terrible night.
Luca’s phone buzzed.
Marco.
“We found Victor’s sedan,” he said through the speaker. “Abandoned near the river.”
“Safe?”
“Gone.”
“Cameras?”
“Working on it.”
“Vanessa?”
“No answer at her apartment.”
Luca looked toward the dark window.
“Find her.”
Dad turned.
“Don’t.”
Luca stared at him.
“Why?”
“Because if Matteo is back, Vanessa isn’t your biggest problem.”
“What is?”
Dad walked to a cabinet and removed a small metal box.
I had seen it my entire childhood.
Tax papers, I thought.
He opened it.
Inside was a brass key.
He handed it to Luca.
“Your father gave me this the day I quit.”
Luca turned it over.
A number was stamped into the metal.
317.
“What does it open?”
“I don’t know.”
“You kept a key for twenty-two years without asking?”
“Antonio said if anyone ever came looking for Teresa’s basement, I should give it to you.”
Luca stared at him.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because nobody came looking.”
“Until tonight.”
Dad nodded.
Luca looked at the number again.
“317.”
I thought of the restaurant.
“There’s no locker 317 there.”
“No,” Dad said. “But Union Station has old storage lockers.”
Marco heard him.
“I’ll check.”
Luca put the key in his pocket.
“No. We go together.”
Dad shook his head.
“You’re walking exactly where they want you.”
“Probably.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“It bothers me a lot.”
“Then why go?”
“Because my dead brother is threatening Emma’s family.”
He said my name naturally, as if protecting me had become part of the equation.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
At two in the morning, Luca insisted Dad and I return to the mansion.
I protested until I saw two security men checking my apartment windows.
Dad surprised me by agreeing.
“If Antonio’s son says go somewhere guarded, you go somewhere guarded.”
“Now you trust him?”
“I trust history.”
“That sounds unhealthy.”
“It usually is.”
Mrs. Caruso was awake when we arrived.
She hugged Dad.
Not greeted.
Hugged.
“You old coward,” she whispered.
Dad laughed into her shoulder.
“Good to see you too, Teresa.”
I stared.
“You know each other?”
Mrs. Caruso pulled back.
“Your father used to eat three plates of lasagna every Friday.”
“Why has nobody in my life ever told me anything?”
“Because your father is boring.”
Dad pointed at her.
“Four plates.”
For ten minutes, the mansion felt almost normal.
Then Marco returned.
He placed a folder on Luca’s desk.
“Locker 317 exists.”
“At Union Station?”
“No.”
He slid over a photograph.
A bank.
Chicago Federal Trust.
“The key belongs to a safe-deposit box.”
Luca looked at the brass key.
“Whose?”
Marco hesitated.
“That’s the problem.”
“Whose?”
“The account was opened in 2007.”
He turned the paper around.
The registered owner was:
EMILY REED.
My mother.
I stared at the name.
“That’s impossible.”
Dad sat down hard.
“No.”
I looked at him.
“You knew?”
“No.”
His face said he wasn’t lying.
Luca read the document.
“Your mother died in 2003.”
“Yes.”
“This box was opened four years later.”
Mrs. Caruso crossed herself.
Marco continued.
“The bank changed ownership twice. Most original records are archived. But the signature card still exists.”
He placed a copy on the desk.
I knew my mother’s signature from birthday cards Dad had saved.
The handwriting was close.
Not exact.
Someone had forged it.
Below the signature was a secondary authorized user.
ANTONIO MORETTI.
Luca’s father.
My knees weakened.
“Why would your father open a bank box in my dead mother’s name?”
Luca looked just as confused as I felt.
Dad whispered, “Protection.”
We all turned.
He stared at the signature card.
“Antonio used dead names when he needed something hidden.”
Luca’s expression hardened.
“You know that how?”
“Because once, years ago, I drove him to that bank.”
“When?”
“2007.”
“Did he have the key?”
Dad nodded slowly.
“And a red ledger.”
Luca stopped moving.
“What ledger?”
Dad looked at him.
“I don’t know. But Victor Bellini wanted it.”
Mrs. Caruso inhaled.
“Victor?”
Dad nodded.
“He and Antonio fought about it for months.”
“What was in it?” I asked.
“Names. Payments. Property transfers. Enough to ruin people.”
Luca looked toward Marco.
“When does the bank open?”
“Nine.”
“We’ll be there at eight fifty-five.”
At 8:57 the next morning, we stood inside the private banking lobby.
The manager examined the key and our documents.
Then his expression became uncomfortable.
“I’m afraid there is a problem.”
Luca leaned forward.
“What problem?”
“Box 317 was accessed yesterday.”
My heart stopped.
“By whom?”
The manager typed.
His face changed.
“That can’t be right.”
“Who?”
He turned the monitor.
The access log listed one name.
EMMA REED.
My name.
My identification number.
My forged signature.
And a security photograph showing a woman in a dark coat walking into the vault.
She had my hair.
My height.
My face.
I stared at my own image.
“That isn’t me.”
Luca looked closer.
“No.”
The manager swallowed.
“If that isn’t you, ma’am…”
“It isn’t.”
Marco zoomed in on the photograph.
Then pointed.
“Look at her left hand.”
A diamond ring.
Huge.
Distinctive.
I had seen it less than twelve hours earlier beside Luca Moretti’s dinner plate.
Vanessa’s engagement ring.
And beneath the image, the vault log showed exactly what she had removed.
One red leather ledger.
One sealed envelope.
And one small cassette tape labeled:
May you like
ANTONIO — IF MATTEO RETURNS.
The bank manager wanted us to wait for federal investigators, but Luca refused to leave without copies of the access log. While Daniel from security prepared them, I studied the image of Vanessa pretending to be me. She had copied details I did not realize anyone noticed: the way I tied my hair low when I worked, the cheap black tote I carried, even the white sneakers I wore on errands. It felt more invasive than theft. Luca noticed where I was looking. “She studied you,” he said. “Or someone did.” That possibility stayed with me. Vanessa had barely spoken to me before the engagement. Someone else could have supplied the details. Marco checked mansion camera archives and found a disturbing pattern. During the previous month, an unknown delivery van had parked across from my bus stop on four mornings. The plates belonged to a landscaping company that had closed two years earlier. Dad swore he had never seen it. I remembered nothing unusual, which was probably the point. Luca wanted me moved immediately to a secure apartment. I refused until he reminded me that Dad was already a target. “You don’t have to trust me,” he said. “Trust the evidence.” I hated when rich men made reasonable arguments. Back at the mansion, Mrs. Caruso had converted one guest suite into what she called “a proper sickroom” for Dad even though he was not sick. She had also made enough soup for a small army. Dad took one look at the guards and muttered that Antonio would have found the whole situation funny. Luca did not. He asked Dad what his father had feared most in 2007. Dad answered without hesitation: “A war between his sons.” That surprised Luca. He had always believed Antonio expected him to inherit peacefully after Matteo’s death. Dad said Antonio had never believed peace came naturally to Morettis. He believed it had to be purchased, protected, or forced. Then Dad remembered something else about the red ledger. The night he drove Antonio to Chicago Federal Trust, Antonio had said, “If Matteo ever comes home, the girl becomes the lock.” At the time Dad thought he meant some unknown witness. Now every eye turned toward me. I was beginning to understand that my mother had left me more than unanswered questions. She had left me standing in the middle of a plan designed by dead men, and somewhere out there Matteo already knew exactly what part I was supposed to play.
