Chapter 4
“I know that part,” I said. “I want the part you’re avoiding.”
“Your father used it to pay people. Off the books. People who did things he needed done and never wanted traced back to the Moretti name.”
“What kind of things?”
She hesitated.
“Protection,” she finally said. “For someone he cared about. Someone outside the family.”
Claire’s hand found the edge of the table.
“My father worked for a mafia family,” she said, not quite a question, testing how the words sat in her mouth. “That’s what you’re telling me.”
“He worked for both families,” my mother said. “Yours and the Kovacs. An informant, a go-between, whatever your father needed calling it that year.” Her voice thinned. “He got greedy toward the end. Started threatening to talk if the money stopped.”
“And?” I asked, though something in my chest already knew where this was going.
My mother didn’t look at either of us.
“And your father made a decision to protect the operation.”
The room went very quiet.
“Say it,” I said.
“He ordered it handled,” my mother said. “I don’t know more than that. I was your father’s wife, not his partner in these things.”
Claire’s breathing had gone shallow, controlled, the way it does when someone is holding themselves together through sheer force of will.
“Handled,” she repeated. “You mean killed.”
Nobody answered her, which was answer enough.
She pulled out the chair beside me and sat down slowly, like her legs had made the decision without asking her.
“Robbery gone wrong,” she said quietly. “That’s what they told me when I was eleven. A social worker in a gray blazer told me my father died in a robbery gone wrong.”
“Claire—”
I reached for her hand.
She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t hold on either.
“There’s more,” Marco said from the doorway.
Everyone turned. He’d been standing there long enough to hear the parts that mattered, his tablet already open, his face doing the careful, controlled thing it does when he’s about to say something he wishes he wasn’t the one saying.
“How much more?” I asked.
“Six months after Daniel Bennett died,” Marco said, “your father set up a trust. Anonymous. Untraceable back to the Morettis unless you knew exactly where to look, which I did, an hour ago, because you asked me to look.”
“A trust for what?”
“For her.” Marco nodded toward Claire, not unkindly, just factually, the way he delivers information that’s about to detonate a room. “School fees. Emergency housing whenever the foster system failed her. Even that diner job on Fullerton Avenue — the trust had a standing arrangement with the owner. Guaranteed shifts. Guaranteed pay, subsidized quietly so the owner never had to explain why a seventeen-year-old with no experience kept her job through three no-call no-shows.”
Claire went very still.
May you like
“That job,” she said slowly, “was the first thing I ever got on my own. I used to tell people that. I used to be proud of that.”
“Claire.”
