Chapter 3 - THE PAWN TICKET IN THE BLUE COAT
Grace didn't look at Luca. She couldn't.
Beside me, the woman whose quiet dignity had made me risk my job suddenly looked fragile enough to shatter.
"Grace?" Luca's voice wasn't angry anymore. It was hollow, stripped of the iron control that made half of Chicago fear him. "Look at me. Did you take that money?"
From behind the closed altar doors at the far end of the hall, a heavy fist pounded against the wood.
"Luca!" a young man's muffled voice called out. "What the hell is going on in there? The priest is waiting!"
It was Daniel.
Luca didn't even glance toward the altar door. He took two slow steps until he was standing directly in front of the woman he had been married to for twenty-six years.
"Answer me, Grace," he said quietly. "Twenty-six years. We lived in a walk-up apartment over a bakery when Lily was born. You never took a dime that wasn't yours. Why would you steal two hundred thousand dollars from me on the night you left?"
Selena let out a short, bitter laugh from the end of the row, though she kept her distance. "Careful, Luca. Your saintly wife has been lying to all of us since October."
"Shut up, Selena," Luca snapped without turning around. "If you speak again before I ask you a question, Marco won't escort you to the garden—he'll escort you off the property with nothing but that dress."
Selena bit her lip and looked away, folding her arms tightly across her stomach.
Grace slowly opened her eyes. When she spoke, she looked at Lily first, her expression filled with a mother's quiet heartbreak.
"I didn't know Daniel had the wire receipts, sweetheart," Grace whispered. "Oh, God, Lily... you let them force you into a marriage to protect me?"
"He said Daddy would never forgive a betrayal inside the house," Lily sobbed, clutching the silver rosary to her chest. "He said even if Daddy didn't hurt you, he would destroy whoever you gave the money to, and it would break your heart."
"Who did you give it to, Grace?" Luca asked, his voice dropping dangerously low.
I saw the muscles in his jaw flexing. In his world, a wife secretly funneling two hundred thousand dollars to an unknown person at three in the morning meant only one thing: another man.
"Did you leave me for someone else?" Luca asked, the raw jealousy in his eyes unmistakable despite the year they had spent apart. "Did you use my own money to pay off some bastard's debts while blaming me for bringing Selena into this house?"
"Excuse me, sir," I spoke up, my heart thumping against my apron.
Luca glared at me. "Not now, Emily."
"No, sir, you need to see something," I said quickly, before my nerve failed me.
When Grace had arrived through the service alley forty minutes ago, soaking from the light October drizzle, I had taken her threadbare navy wool coat and hung it on my rolling housekeeping rack just inside the side vestibule. Because the pocket was torn along the seam, something had slipped halfway out while I was hanging it up.
I hurried three steps to the side door, reached into the alcove, and grabbed the old navy coat. I brought it back and held it out to Grace.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Moretti," I said gently. "This fell out of the lining when I hung it up earlier. I went to tuck it back in, and I saw the date."
I held out a faded yellow slip of heavy cardstock, creased at the corners, along with a small laminated hospital visitor badge clipped to the back of it.
Luca reached out and took the yellow slip from my fingers before Grace could stop him.
He stared at it under the chandelier light.
It was a pawn ticket from a shop on South Halsted. Dated five months after Grace had supposedly stolen two hundred thousand dollars.
"One ladies' eighteen-karat gold Patek Philippe wristwatch," Luca read aloud, his voice suddenly thick. "Inscribed: To Grace, on our tenth anniversary. Forever, L."
He looked up from the ticket to his wife's bare left wrist. "You pawned your anniversary watch for four thousand dollars?"
"My rent went up in March," Grace said quietly, lifting her chin just a fraction so her tears wouldn't fall. "And the bakery where I work cut my hours after the holidays."
Luca looked stunned. "You work in a bakery? If you took two hundred thousand dollars from my safe in October, why the hell were you pawning your jewelry to make rent in March?"
"Because I didn't keep a single penny of it!" Grace finally cried out, twenty-six years of swallowed grief pouring into the room. "And I didn't take two hundred thousand from your safe, Luca! I only took fifty!"
Wait.
Everyone in the room went completely still.
Even Selena's head whipped around, her dark eyes widening in genuine shock. "What?"
"There was only fifty thousand in that envelope when I opened the safe," Grace said, turning fiercely on Luca. "Wait—you said two hundred thousand was missing?"
Luca slowly looked from Grace to Selena.
"The ledger showed two hundred thousand in cash prepared for the St. Jude diocesan gala," Luca said, his mind clearly racing through the math like the ruthless businessman he was. "If Grace only took fifty..."
"Then somebody else came into the office after she left and took the other hundred and fifty," I whispered.
Selena backed right up against the white satin ribbon tied to the end of the front pew. "Don't look at me! Why would I steal from a house I already lived in? Luca gave me black cards with no limit!"
"Credit cards leave a paper trail," Luca said coldly, taking a step toward Selena. "Cash doesn't. You found Grace's rosary by the safe after she left at midnight. You realized she had opened it, so you emptied the rest of the cash, altered the security log time, and blamed the entire two hundred grand on my wife."
Selena's chest heaved. "Daniel's company was going to be seized by creditors that week! If his trucks were repossessed, my sister's whole family would have been on the street!"
"So you framed my mother!" Lily shouted, stepping forward in her wedding gown. "And then you used her own fifty-thousand-dollar wire transfer to blackmail me into marrying Daniel so you could get Daddy's shipping contracts to cover the rest of his debts!"
"Your mother wasn't innocent!" Selena screamed back, losing every trace of her polished society voice. She pointed a shaking, manicured finger at Grace. "Tell them, Grace! Tell Luca why you broke into his safe at midnight and wired fifty thousand dollars to St. Anthony's Memorial Hospital under a fake name! Tell him who was in Room 412!"
Luca turned back to Grace. He flipped the pawn ticket over in his large hand and looked at the laminated visitor badge clipped to the back of it.
His thumb brushed over the faded ink: PEDIATRIC INTENSIVE CARE — VISITOR.
Luca's breathing stopped.
"Grace," he whispered, looking at his forty-nine-year-old wife as if the floor were giving way beneath his Italian leather shoes. "Lily is twenty-four. Who was in the pediatric ward at St. Anthony's?"
May you like
Grace looked straight past Luca, her eyes locking onto mine with a terrifying, silent plea.
And in that fraction of a second, my blood turned to ice as I remembered the four-year-old boy with the asthma inhaler sitting in my mother's apartment across town—the little boy Grace paid me three hundred dollars a month to help hide.
