Chapter 8 - THE IRON FRYING PAN AND THE TORN VEIL
Daniel's eyes flickered toward the cell phone on the chair for less than half a second.
That half-second was all the Moretti women needed.
Before Luca could even lunge forward, Selena—standing just three feet to Daniel's left—didn't run away. With a ragged scream of four years' worth of betrayed fury, she grabbed the heavy brass base of the knocked-over unity candlestick with both hands and swung it with everything she had right into the side of Daniel's wrist.
CRACK.
The bone in Daniel's forearm snapped cleanly. The small black pistol went flying across the polished marble floor and skidded underneath the third row of white chairs.
At the exact same instant, Lily remembered what I had spent forty minutes sewing into her hair that morning.
When Grace had repaired the torn lace of Lily's antique veil in the servants' kitchen last night, she had given me a heavy, six-inch heirloom pearl hatpin that had belonged to Luca's grandmother to anchor the veil into Lily's updo.
Lily reached up, yanked the pearl hatpin out of her hair, and drove the blunt silver end straight down into the top of Daniel's collarbone while stomping her three-inch satin wedding heel onto his instep.
Daniel howled in agony, his grip loosening around Lily's waist.
Then Luca reached him.
Luca caught Lily with his left arm, swinging her safely back into Grace's waiting arms, and buried his right fist straight into Daniel's jaw with the force of a wrecking ball.
Daniel didn't even yell. His eyes rolled back, his knees folded, and he hit the marble floor completely unconscious, his broken wrist twisted beneath his chest.
Nobody looked at him.
Grace, Lily, and I all scrambled for the cell phone on the white chair at the exact same time, while Luca yanked the side door open to shout at Marco.
"Mom!" I cried, snatching the phone up with both hands. "Mom, are you okay?! Who is in the apartment?!"
"We're fine, Emily!" my mother's voice rang out, shaky with adrenaline yet fiercely proud over the speaker. "Remember how you told me never to hide in a room without a window exit unless Sergeant Miller from 3B was home? Before I took Leo into the bathroom, I knocked on Frank's door across the hall! When that thug climbed up the fire escape and tried to pry open the kitchen window, Frank and I were waiting right behind the refrigerator with my twelve-inch Lodge cast-iron skillet!"
In the background, I heard the wail of approaching sirens and the deep rumble of four heavy black Suburbans screeching to a halt on the street below our apartment building.
Then, another little voice piped up right beside the phone microphone.
"Nana Grace!" Leo said, his four-year-old voice no longer wheezing, sounding utterly amazed. "Grandma Carter hit the bad man on the head! Boom! And Mr. Frank sat on his tummy! Can I have a cookie now?"
Grace dropped her forehead onto my shoulder and sobbed—not the quiet, broken tears she had cried when Selena humiliated her before the ceremony, and not the terrified tears of the last twenty minutes, but a deep, cleansing wave of pure relief.
"Yes, my darling," Grace laughed through her tears into the phone. "You can have the whole box of cookies. Nana Grace is coming to get you right now."
Luca stood just two steps behind us.
He had let Marco and two security guards drag the unconscious Daniel out through the service basement to hold him for the police. Now, the feared head of the Moretti family stood completely still in the empty ceremony hall, listening to the sound of a four-year-old boy—his dead daughter's child, his own flesh and blood—asking for a cookie over a housemaid's cracked cell phone.
Luca's hand came up slowly to cover his mouth. His dark eyes were shining with unshed tears.
"What does he look like?" Luca asked quietly when I clicked the speaker off so my mother could talk to the arriving guards. He was looking at Grace, his voice as tentative and humble as a boy asking for a blessing he knew he didn't deserve. "Grace... does he look like Clara?"
Grace wiped her cheeks with the back of her wrist. She looked at the man who had broken her heart, the man who had let another woman move into their home, the man who had doubted her after twenty-six years of marriage.
Her expression softened just enough to let the truth through, though the hurt in her eyes didn't magically vanish.
"He has Clara's nose and her curls," Grace said quietly. "And when he gets stubborn and crosses his arms instead of apologizing... he looks exactly like you, Luca."
A broken breath escaped Luca's chest. He nodded slowly, looking down at the floor.
Across the aisle, a quiet rustling sound made us turn.
Selena was standing beside the overturned brass candlestick. Her red silk gown was torn at the hem where Daniel had stepped on it, and her dark hair had come loose from its pins. She wasn't trying to fix her makeup. She wasn't reaching for Luca's arm anymore.
Slowly, Selena reached behind her neck, unclasped the heavy diamond necklace Luca had given her for Christmas, and laid it on the seat of the front-row chair.
"I didn't know about your daughter, Grace," Selena said, her voice hollow and completely defeated. "And I swear before God, I didn't know who was in that car on Lake Shore Drive. If I had known a child was hurt, I would have stopped."
She looked at Luca once—not with anger, and not with begging, just the quiet exhaustion of a woman waking up from a lie she had built around herself.
"I'll go upstairs and pack my things," Selena said softly. "You don't need to have Marco watch me. I don't want anything from this house anymore. I'm going down to the precinct to give a statement against Daniel for Victor's murder."
Luca watched her walk past him toward the main doors.
"Selena," he said quietly before she reached the handle.
She paused without turning around.
"When you struck your nephew with that candlestick," Luca said evenly, "you saved Lily's life. My lawyers will make sure the district attorney knows you had no part in the warehouse fire or the kidnapping attempt. After today, I never want to see your face in Chicago again."
Selena nodded once, opened the side door, and walked out of our lives forever.
Lily let out a long breath, leaning against her mother's shoulder. The torn piece of white lace Grace had repaired the night before was still resting on the seat of the front-row chair where Luca had dropped it.
"Well," Lily whispered with a shaky, tearful half-smile, looking down at her ruined wedding heels and the pearls scattered across the floor. "There are still two hundred people drinking champagne in the garden tent waiting for a wedding."
Grace brushed a lock of hair back from Lily's cheek. "Then let's send them home, sweetheart. You don't have a groom anymore."
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Luca suddenly stepped forward. His eyes moved from Grace's worn pale-blue graduation dress to me, standing awkwardly in my black maid's apron holding the phone.
"No," Luca said, his voice ringing with a sudden, fierce clarity that made all three of us look at him. "Nobody is leaving that tent yet. Because before a single guest walks out of my gates, the entire city of Chicago is going to hear the truth from my own mouth—and there is one thing we are going to do in that garden before sunset."
