Chapter 3 - ST. AGNES
By midnight, Luca Moretti’s engagement dinner had ended without a toast, without dessert and without an engagement.
He did not announce that last part to the guests.
He did not have to.
Vanessa’s ring remained on her finger, but she was no longer sitting beside him when Gino quietly directed drivers to bring cars around to the front entrance.
No one complained about being asked to leave.
People who had arrived expecting champagne and photographs departed with the strained politeness of witnesses who had seen too much.
Viktor Petrov remained in the library with Maria and a cup of tea he barely touched.
Vanessa was escorted upstairs to the guest suite.
Not the bridal suite.
The change was small.
In that house, it was enormous.
I should have gone home.
Instead, at twelve fifteen, I found myself standing in Luca’s study while Gino connected a laptop to the large screen mounted between two bookcases.
Luca had changed out of his soaked suit. He wore a dark sweater and black trousers. The sleeves were pushed to his forearms.
On the desk lay Elena’s journal, the old cashier’s check stub, the bank receipt, and the three-page letter she had written to her son.
“St. Agnes,” Luca said. “Find it.”
Gino typed.
“There are several.”
“Start with anything operating twenty-six years ago.”
A church appeared first.
Then a parish school.
Then an old women’s hospital that had closed nineteen years earlier.
St. Agnes Maternity and Women’s Clinic.
Luca looked at the screen.
Viktor, standing behind me, made a sound under his breath.
“You know it?” Luca asked.
The old man nodded slowly.
“Elena went there once.”
Luca turned.
“When?”
“Near the end.”
“The end of what?”
“Her illness.”
Luca’s expression tightened.
“My mother was treated at Northwestern.”
“For her heart, yes.”
“Then why would she go to a maternity clinic?”
Viktor looked uncomfortable.
“I drove her. I did not ask.”
“That is becoming a pattern.”
The words were harsher than Luca probably intended.
Viktor accepted them anyway.
Gino clicked through archived information.
“The clinic closed after a records scandal,” he said. “Patient files were mishandled when the property changed ownership. Some were destroyed. Some were transferred to a private storage company.”
“Who bought the property?”
Gino typed again.
His face changed.
“Bellini Development.”
The room went still.
Luca stared at the screen.
“What year?”
“Two years after your mother died.”
Viktor sat down.
I looked at Elena’s journal.
There were dozens of names. Dates. Financial entries. Notes about deliveries, doctors, accounts and meetings.
One name appeared more often than the others near the final pages.
SISTER MARGARET.
I pointed.
“Mr. Moretti.”
Luca followed my finger.
“Who is that?”
Viktor leaned closer.
“I remember a nun.”
“At St. Agnes?”
“I think so. Elena once asked me to wait in the car while she spoke to someone wearing a gray habit.”
Gino searched.
A retired nurse named Margaret Hale had worked at St. Agnes during the correct period. She had later joined a religious order for several years, then left active ministry and moved to Wisconsin.
There was an address.
Luca grabbed his coat.
Gino stood. “Boss, it’s after midnight.”
“She is ninety-one.”
“That is my point.”
“It is exactly mine.”
They stared at each other.
Then Gino sighed.
“I’ll get the car.”
Luca looked at me.
“You’re going home.”
I blinked.
“Sir?”
“It’s midnight.”
“So?”
His mouth almost moved.
Almost a smile.
“You have no obligation to keep participating in this.”
I looked at Elena’s letter.
Then at Viktor.
“With respect, sir, your fiancée ordered me to throw away the cake that contained the key you needed to open your mother’s evidence box.”
He said nothing.
“If Mrs. Bellini was watching the staff closely enough to worry about that cake, I think the staff is already involved.”
Viktor looked amused.
Luca was not.
But he did not argue.
“Fine. You ride with Maria.”
At one in the morning, five of us drove north through the rain.
Luca and Gino were in the first SUV. Maria drove her old sedan behind them because, as she explained, she did not trust luxury vehicles that needed computers to tell you the tires were low. Viktor sat in the passenger seat. I sat in back with Elena’s journal inside a canvas tote.
The city lights thinned behind us.
For almost an hour, nobody spoke.
Then Viktor said, “Emma.”
“Yes?”
“You were right to bring me to dinner.”
Maria glanced at him.
“She’s usually right when rich people tell her she’s wrong.”
“Maria.”
“What? It’s a gift.”
Viktor smiled.
Then he looked out at the dark road.
“Elena had that gift.”
I touched the tote bag beside me.
“What was she like?”
“Difficult.”
Maria laughed.
Viktor continued. “Kind, but not soft. She remembered birthdays. She also remembered lies. If you lied once, she might forgive you. If you lied twice, she stopped giving you opportunities.”
“Did she trust Carlo Bellini?”
“Until she didn’t.”
“Did Antonio?”
Viktor looked at the road.
“Antonio believed men could be separated from the worst thing they had ever done. Elena believed some men used forgiveness as a business model.”
That sounded like the beginning of every disaster I had seen in wealthy families.
At two twelve, we reached a small assisted-living residence outside Kenosha.
Gino had called ahead. A night administrator met us at the locked entrance wearing slippers beneath a cardigan.
She was deeply unimpressed by Luca’s name.
“Mrs. Hale is asleep.”
Luca nodded. “Then we wait.”
She blinked.
“You drove from Chicago at two in the morning to wait?”
“Yes.”
The administrator studied him, then the eighty-year-old gardener beside him, then me and Maria.
Finally she opened the door.
We waited in a sitting room that smelled of tea and furniture polish.
At six thirty, Sister Margaret Hale woke.
She no longer wore a habit. She was tiny, sharp-eyed and wrapped in a pale blue robe.
The moment she saw Viktor, she stopped walking.
“Good Lord.”
Viktor stood.
“Margaret.”
She crossed the room and slapped him.
The sound was astonishingly loud.
Then she hugged him.
“You stupid old man,” she whispered.
Viktor laughed into her shoulder.
Luca watched them with stunned impatience.
Sister Margaret eventually released Viktor and looked at Luca.
Her expression changed.
“Elena’s boy.”
Luca swallowed.
“Yes.”
“You look like Antonio when you are angry.”
“I am angry.”
“Then you definitely look like him.”
She sat down.
Luca placed Elena’s letter on the coffee table.
“My mother told me to ask about October third.”
Margaret’s hands stopped.
The room changed.
Not dramatically.
Just enough.
“What year?” she asked.
Luca told her.
Margaret closed her eyes.
“I wondered if that day would ever find you.”
Luca leaned forward.
“What happened?”
Margaret looked at Viktor.
“You never told him?”
“I did not know all of it.”
“You knew enough.”
Viktor lowered his head.
Margaret took a breath.
“Your mother came to St. Agnes because a young woman had given birth under a false name.”
Luca frowned.
“What does that have to do with my family?”
“The father of the child was Carlo Bellini.”
The sentence was unexpected but not shocking.
Carlo had been young. Affairs happened. Secrets happened.
Then Margaret continued.
“The mother was not his wife.”
Luca’s expression stayed cold.
“Who was she?”
Margaret looked at him.
“Your aunt.”
Luca stopped moving.
“My mother had no sister.”
“Not by blood. By marriage. Your father’s younger sister, Sofia Moretti.”
Viktor whispered, “No.”
Margaret nodded.
“Sofia was twenty-one. Carlo was married. Antonio forbade the relationship. Sofia disappeared for almost a year. The family told everyone she had gone to Italy.”
Luca stood.
“My aunt died in Europe.”
“That is what you were told.”
“Where is she?”
Margaret’s eyes filled.
“She did die. But not in Europe.”
Luca’s face hardened.
“When?”
“Three days after she gave birth.”
No one spoke.
I heard Maria inhale beside me.
Margaret reached beneath the table and opened a small drawer.
She removed an envelope already addressed in old handwriting.
LUCA MORETTI.
Another letter.
Another message from the dead.
Luca stared at it.
“What happened to the baby?”
Margaret did not answer immediately.
She looked toward the window, where dawn had begun turning the sky gray.
“Carlo wanted the child erased from the Moretti family. Elena refused.”
Luca’s voice dropped.
“Where is the child?”
Margaret looked back at him.
“The child was a girl.”
She slid the envelope across the table.
“And according to Elena, Carlo Bellini spent the next twenty-six years making sure you never knew she existed.”
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Sister Margaret also remembered Elena arriving at St. Agnes with a green ribbon tied around a small bundle of documents. Green, she explained, had been Sofia’s favorite color. The detail seemed meaningless until Luca took the greenhouse key from his pocket and placed it beside the old photograph of four-year-old Grace. The ribbon shades were nearly identical. Elena had used color as a private thread through decades of secrecy. Emma wondered how many ordinary objects in the mansion had once served as markers to people who knew what to see. Luca wondered aloud whether his mother had expected him to remember the ribbons from childhood. He did not. That realization hurt him more than Emma expected. Grief often punished people for details they had no reason to preserve.
Before the group left Wisconsin, Margaret made Luca promise something. If he found Grace, he was not to arrive with lawyers first. “You Moretti men enter rooms with solutions,” she told him. “Sometimes a person needs the truth before they need a solution.” Luca almost argued, then stopped. He promised. Emma saw Viktor smile at that. It was a small promise compared with the history surrounding them, but it shaped everything that followed. Luca would still use lawyers, security and money. Those were tools he understood. But for the first time, someone had asked him to arrive as a relative before he arrived as a Moretti.
